Military history of the Soviet Union

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Soviet military history begins in the early days following the 1917 October Revolution and the creation of Soviet Russia which joined with other former provinces of the Russian Empire to become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces were the world's largest by every measure—in number of weapons, in manpower, and in size of their military-industrial base. In the end, the Soviet Union fell in 1991 due to economic and political factors rather than due to military defeat. The armed forces of the late Soviet Union had five armed services rather than the standard army, navy, and air force organizations found in most of the world's armed forces. In their official order of importance, the Soviet armed services were the Strategic Rocket Forces, Ground Forces, Air Forces, Air Defense Forces, and Naval Forces. The two other Soviet militarized forces were the Internal Troops (MVD Troops) and the Border Troops, both subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior.

Tsarist and revolutionary background

At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Tsarist army, exhausted by its disastrous participation in the First World War, was in the final stages of disintegration and collapse. Even though the Bolshevik influence in the ranks was strong, the army still contained many opponents of the Bolsheviks, especially among the officer corps. Thus the Bolsheviks, who perceived the Tsarist army as one of the foundations of the hated old regime, decided to abolish it and create in its place a new military. They recognized the importance of building an army under their control; without a loyal army, the Bolshevik organization itself would have been unable to hold the power it had seized. Members of the [[Red Army gather around Lenin and Trotsky in Petrograd.]] Immediately after coming to power, the Bolsheviks merged their 20,000-man army, the Red Guards, with 200,000 Baltic Fleet sailors and Petrograd garrison soldiers who supported the Bolsheviks. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin decreed the establishment of the Red Army on January 28, 1918, and Leon Trotsky was then first commissar for war. The early Red Army was egalitarian but poorly disciplined. The Bolsheviks considered military ranks and saluting to be bourgeois customs and abolished them. Soldiers elected their own leaders and voted on which orders to follow. This arrangement was abolished, however, under pressure of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), and ranks were reinstated. During the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks fought counterrevolutionary groups that became known as the White armies as well as several of Russia's former allies such as the United States, Britain and France, which invaded the Soviet Union in an attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik government. It also fought wars with countries and national groups which attempted to gain their independence following the collapse of the Russian Empire, most notably against Poland in the Polish-Soviet War. Because most professional officers had joined the White armies, the Red Army initially faced a shortage of experienced military leaders. To remedy this situation, the Bolsheviks recruited 50,000 former Imperial Army officers to command the Red Army. At the same time, they attached political commissars to Red Army units to monitor the actions of professional commanders and their allegiance to the Russian Communist Party, which the Bolseviks became known as after 1918. By 1921 the Red Army had defeated four White armies and held off five armed, foreign contingents that had intervened in the civil war, but it had suffered a defeat in the Polish-Soviet War, which ended with the Treaty of Riga in April 1921. After the civil war, the Red Army became an increasingly professional military organization. With most of its 5 million soldiers demobilized, the Red Army was transformed into a small regular force, and territorial militias were created for wartime mobilization. Soviet military schools, established during the civil war, began to graduate large numbers of trained officers loyal to the party. In an effort to increase the prestige of the military profession, the party downgraded political commissars, established the principle of one-man command, and reestablished formal military ranks.

Development of the structure, ideology, and doctrine of the Soviet military

Party control

The Communist Party had a number of mechanisms of control over the country's armed forces. First, starting from a certain rank, only a Party member could be a military commander, hence subject to Party discipline. Second, the top military leaders have been systematically integrated into the highest echelons of the party. Third, the party placed a network of political officers throughout the armed forces to influence the activities of the military. A deputy political commander (''zampolit'') served as a political commissar of the armed forces. A zampolit supervised party organizations and conducted party political work within a military unit. He lectured troops on Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet view of international affairs, and the party's tasks for the armed forces. Since World War II, the zampolit has lost all command authority, although retaining the power to report to the next highest political officer or organization on the political attitudes and performance of the unit's commander. In 1989 over 20 percent of all armed forces personnel were party members or Komsomol members. Over 90 percent of all officers in the armed forces were party or Komsomol members.

Military counterintelligence

Main article : Military counterintelligence of Soviet Army Throughout the history of Soviet Army, the Soviet secret police (Cheka, GPU, NKVD, ...) had departments (names vary over the time) that controlled counterintelligence departments known as Special Departments (Особый отдел) that existed at all larger military formations. The best known one was SMERSH (1943-1946) created during the Great Patriotic War. While the staff of a Special Department of a regiment was generally known, it controlled a network of secret informants, both chekists and recruited ordinary military.

Military-party relations

During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's five-year plans and industrialization drive built the productive base necessary to modernize the Red Army. As the likelihood of war in Europe increased later in the decade, the Soviet Union tripled its military expenditures and doubled the size of its regular forces to match the power of its potential enemies. In 1937, however, Stalin purged the Red Army and deprived it of its best military leaders during the Great Purges. Fearing that the military posed a threat to his rule, Stalin jailed or executed an estimated thousands of Red Army officers, including three of five marshals. These actions were to severely impair the Red Army's capabilities in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-1940 and in the Second World War. Fearing the immense popularity of the armed forces after World War II, Stalin demoted war hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov and took personal credit for having saved the country. After Stalin's death in 1953, Zhukov reemerged as a strong supporter of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev rewarded Zhukov by making him minister of defense and a full Politburo member. Concern that the Soviet army might become too powerful in politics, however, led to Zhukov's abrupt dismissal in the fall of 1957. But Khrushchev later alienated the armed forces by cutting defense expenditures on conventional forces in order to carry out his plans for economic reform. Leonid Brezhnev's years in power marked the height of party-military cooperation because he provided ample resources to the armed forces. In 1973 the minister of defense again became a full Politburo member for the first time since 1957. Yet Brezhnev evidently felt threatened by the professional military, and he sought to create an aura of military leadership around himself in an effort to establish his authority over the military. In the early 1980s, party-military relations became strained over the issue of resource allocations to the armed forces. Despite a downturn in economic growth, the armed forces argued, often to no avail, for more resources to develop advanced conventional weapons. Gorbachev downgraded the role of the military in state ceremonies, including moving military representatives to the end of the leadership line-up atop Lenin's Mausoleum during the annual Red Square military parade commemorating the October Revolution. Instead, Gorbachev emphasized civilian economic priorities and reasonable sufficiency in defense over the professional military's perceived requirements.

National security

Interwar era

Following the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union was enmeshed in a struggle for succession that pitted Trotsky and his policy of "world revolution" against Stalin and his policy of "socialism in one country." Stalin prevailed and Trotsky was removed as war commisar in 1925 resulting in a turn away from the policy of spreading the revoloution abroad in faour of one of focussing within the borders of the Soviet Union and defending the country against the possibility of foreign invasion.

World War II

Marking the Soviet Union's victory, a soldier raises the Soviet flag over the German Reichstag in the Nazi capital, Berlin Despite Stalin's efforts to stay out of a war against Germany with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939, Nazi Germany declared war on the Soviet Union and swept across the border on June 22, 1941 (''see'' Operation Barbarossa). The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies before Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. At the beginning of the war, the Red Army was forced to retreat, trading territory for time while suffering staggering losses. Still, it managed to slow down the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg and eventually halt it in December 1941 at the gates of Moscow. It then launched a powerful winter counteroffensive which pushed the enemy away from the capital. At the start of the year 1942, the armies of Germany and its allies were too weak to stage an offensive along the entire front, but were able to advance in southern Russia towards Caucasus and the Volga river. This offensive in turn ran out of steam in the fall of 1942, allowing the Soviet forces to stage a devasting counteroffensive on the overextended enemy. The Red Army encircled and destroyed significant German forces at the Battle of Stalingrad, which ended in February 1943 and reversed the tide of the entire war. In the summer of 1943, the Red Army seized the strategic initiative, and it liberated all Soviet territory from German occupation during 1944. After having driven the German army out of Eastern Europe, in May 1945 the Red Army launched the final assault on Berlin that effectively ended the Second World War in Europe. Once Germany was defeated, the Red Army joined the war against Japan, and in the summer of 1945 carried out a brilliant offensive which destroyed the Japanese forces in northern China (Manchuria). The Red Army emerged from the war as the most powerful land army in history and became known as the Soviet Army thereafter. The defeat of the Wehrmacht had come, however, at the cost of 7 million military dead and perhas 27 million dead among the total Soviet population, by far the highest losses of an any country during the war. This is believed to be one of the highest human death tolls from any conflict.http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Second

The Cold War and conventional forces

In the postwar period, the Soviet Union converted its military occupation of the countries of Eastern Europe into political and economic influence over Eastern Europe. Mindful of the numerous invasions of Russia and the Soviet Union from the West throughout history, Stalin sought to create a buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union made up of friendly Eastern European countries, most of which the Red Army had occupied in the course of the war. (Russia had suffered three devastating Western onslaughts in the previous 150 years: Napoleon's invasion of Russia, the First World War, and the Second World War.) Taking advantage of its military occupation of these countries, the Soviet Union actively assisted local communist parties in coming to power. By 1948 seven East European countries had communist governments. In this setting, the Cold War emerged out of a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in the summer of 1945. An aggressive Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the Yalta agreement. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, the Soviet Union remained adamant in the face of Truman's attempt to use the U.S. atomic monopoly to coerce the Soviets into making concessions. Conventional military power showed its continued influence after the liberation of Eastern Europe, when the Soviet Union used its troops to invade Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep these countries within the Soviet alliance system. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union began to modernize its conventional warfare and power projection capabilities. At the same time, it became more involved in regional conflicts or local wars than ever before. The Soviet Union supplied arms and sent military advisers to a variety of Third World allies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Soviet troops, however, saw little combat action until the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. They fought a counterinsurgency against the Afghan rebels. An estimated 15,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed and 35,000 wounded in the conflict by the time Soviet forces began to withdraw from Afghanistan in May 1988.

The Cold War and nuclear weapons

From the late 1940s, the Soviet armed forces focused on adapting to the Cold War in the era of nuclear arms by achieving parity with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union proposed various nuclear disarmament plans since the development of nuclear weapons during World War II. The Cold War did not permit the Soviet Union to seriously contemplate nuclear disarmament or arms reductions while it was in the process of developing and deploying nuclear weapons in the 1940s, 1950s, and most of the 1960s. During the early to mid-1960s, however, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to ban nuclear and other weapons from Antarctica and nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union had reached a rough parity with the United States in some categories of strategic weaponry and at that time offered to negotiate limits on strategic nuclear weapons deployments. The Soviet Union wished to constrain U.S. deployment of an antiballistic missile (ABM) system and retain the ability to place multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). The Soviet-American Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) began in November 1969 in Helsinki. The interim agreement signed in Moscow in May 1972 froze existing levels of deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and regulated the growth of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). As part of the SALT process, the ABM Treaty was also signed. The SALT agreements were generally considered in the West as having codified the concept of Mutually assured destruction (MAD), or deterrence. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union recognized their mutual vulnerability to massive destruction, no matter which state launched nuclear weapons first. A second SALT agreement, SALT II, was signed in June 1979 in Vienna. Among other provisions, it placed an aggregate ceiling on ICBM and SLBM launchers. The second SALT agreement was never ratified by the United States Senate, however, in large part because of the breakdown of détente in the late 1970s and early 1980s. At one time, the Soviet Union maintained the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. According to estimates by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the peak of approximately 45,000http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Russia/ was reached in 1986. Roughly 20,000 of these were believed to be tactical nuclear weapons, reflecting the Red Army doctrine that favored the use of these weapons if war came in Europe. The remainder (approximately 25,000) were strategic, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). These weapons were considered both offensive and defensive in nature. Gorbachev era... (Stay on focus here keeping in mind that there is also a section on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the military below.) Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most of the nuclear wapons were inherited by Russia, with the others inherited by the Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Amid fears of nuclear proliferation, these were all certified as transfered to Russia by 1996. Uzbekistan is another former Soviet Republic where nuclear weapons may once have been stationed, but they a now signators on the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists http://www.thebulletin.org/ has maintained the Doomsday clock, which metaphorically describes how close humanity is to bringing about a nuclear holcaust.

Military-industrial complex and the economy

With the notable exceptions of Khrushchev and possibly Gorbachev, Soviet leaders since the late 1920s have emphasized military production over investment in the civilian economy. The high priority given to military production has traditionally enabled military-industrial enterprises to commandeer the best managers, labor, and materials from civilian plants. As a result, the Soviet Union has produced some of the world's most advanced armaments. In the late 1980s, however, Gorbachev transferred some leading defense industry officials to the civilian sector of the economy in an effort to make it as efficient as its military counterpart. The integration of the party, government, and military in the Soviet Union was most evident in the area of defense-related industrial production.Gosplan, the state planning committee, had an important role in directing necessary supplies and resources to military industries. The Defense Council made decisions on the development and production of major weapons systems. The Defense Industry Department of the Central Committee supervised all military industries as the executive agent of the Defense Council. Within the government, the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers headed the Military Industrial Commission. The Military Industrial Commission coordinated the activities of many industrial ministries, state committees, research and development organizations, and factories and enterprises that designed and produced arms and equipment for the armed forces. In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union devoted a quarter of its gross economic output to the defense sector (at the time most Western analysts believed that this figure was 15 percent). ¹ At the time, the military-industrial complex employed at least one of every five adults in the Soviet Union. In some regions of Russia, at least half of the workforce was employed in defense plants. (The comparable U.S. figures were roughly one-sixteenth of gross national product and about one of every sixteen in the workforce.) In 1989, one fourth of the entire Soviet population in 1989 was engaged in military activities, whether active duty, military production, or civilian military training.

Collapse of the Soviet Union and the military

Timeline

1918-1920 Russian Civil War
1919-1921 Red Army in Mongolia
1919-1921 Polish-Soviet War
Power struggle between the First and the Second Cavalry armies
1935-1939 Destruction of the Red Army's leadership during the Great Purges of the 1930s
Soviet doctrine of the deep battle/operation
1936-1939 Soviet role in the Spanish Civil War
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the subsequent invasion of Poland
War with Finland.
1939 Invasion of Bessarabia in Romania
1939 Battle of Halhin Gol
1939-1940 Continuation War against Finland
1941 Operation Barbarossa, military unpreparedness
Siege of the hero cities Stalingrad and Leningrad
1943 Regularizaiton of military, reintroduction of ensignia etc.
1945 Defeat of Germany, occupation of Eastern Europe
1945 Summer campaign against Kwantung Army and Guomindang
1945 Occupation of North Korea
Expansionism or desire for "buffer states" to deter future invasion?
1949 Creation of NATO; 1955 Soviet response with Warsaw Pact
Nuclearization of Red Army, nuclear arms race, scenarios for invasion of Western Europe
1950-1953 Soviet role in Korean War
1956 Invasion of Hungary
1957-1975 Soviet role in Vietnam War
1968 Invasion of Czechoslovakia
1969, 1971, 1976 Sino-Soviet border conflicts
1979 Invasion of Afghanistan

Notes

¹ Anders Åslund, "How small is the Soviet National Income?" in Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., eds., The Impoverished Superpower: Perestroika and the Soviet Military Burden (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990), p. 49.

References

- Soviet Union

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