Soviet Army

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This article is about the Soviet Army between 1946 and 1991. For the Soviet Army from 1918 to 1946, see Red Army.

Soviet Army
Советская армия
Land warfare
Size
  • 3,668,075 active (1991), peak 14,332,483 in 1945)
  • 4,129,506 reserve (1991), peak 17,383,291 in 1945
Nickname(s)"Red Army"
Motto(s)За нашу Советскую Родину!
Za nashu Sovetskuyu Rodinu!
"For our Soviet Motherland!"
ColorsRed and yellow
Equipment
  • About 55,000 tanks (1991)[1]
  • Over 70,000 armored personnel carriers[1]
  • 24,000 infantry fighting vehicles
  • 33,000 towed artillery pieces
  • 9,000 self-propelled howitzers
    • Engagements
    Commanders
    Notable
    commanders    		Georgy Zhukov

    The Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union (Russian: сухопутные войска,

    service branch of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1946 to 1992. In English it was often referred to as the Soviet Army.[a]

    Until 25 February 1946, it was known as the

    Air Defence Forces, third, the Air Forces, fourth, and the Soviet Navy, fifth, among the branches of the Soviet Armed Forces as a whole.[4]

    After the

    Russian Federation in Russian territory; beyond, many units and formations were taken over by the post-Soviet states; some were withdrawn to Russia, and some dissolved amid conflict, notably in the Caucasus
    .

    After World War II

    At

    Tank Corps of the late war period were converted to tank divisions, and from 1957 the rifle divisions were converted to motor rifle divisions (MRDs). MRDs had three motorized rifle regiments and a tank regiment, for a total of ten motor rifle battalions
    and six tank battalions; tank divisions had the proportions reversed.

    The Land Forces Main Command was created for the first time in March 1946.

    Ivan Pavlovsky was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Ground Forces with effect from 5 November 1967.[7]

    From 1945 to 1948, the Soviet Armed Forces were reduced from about 11.3 million to about 2.8 million men,[12] a demobilisation controlled first, by increasing the number of military districts to 33, then reduced to 21 in 1946.[13] The personnel strength of the Ground Forces was reduced from 9.8 million to 2.4 million.[14][verification needed]

    To establish and secure the USSR's eastern European geopolitical interests, Red Army troops who liberated

    Port Arthur and Dalian
    on the northeast Chinese coast until 1955. Control was then handed over to the new Chinese communist government.

    Within the Soviet Union, the troops and formations of the Ground Forces were divided among the military districts. There were 32 of them in 1945. Sixteen districts remained from the mid-1970s to the end of the USSR (see table). Yet, the greatest Soviet Army concentration was in the

    Uprising of 1953 in East Germany. East European Groups of Forces were the Northern Group of Forces in Poland, and the Southern Group of Forces in Hungary, which put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In 1958, Soviet troops were withdrawn from Romania. The Central Group of Forces in Czechoslovakia was established after Warsaw Pact intervention against the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1969, in the far east of the Soviet Union, the Sino-Soviet border conflict (1969) prompted establishment of a 16th military district, the Central Asian Military District, at Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.[13]

    Cold War

    US tanks and Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie, October 1961

    From 1947–1989, Western intelligence agencies estimated that the Soviet Ground Forces' strength remained c. 2.8 million to c. 5.3 million men.[12] In 1989 the Ground Forces had two million men.[16] To maintain those numbers, Soviet law required a three-year military service obligation from every able man of military age, until 1967, when the Ground Forces reduced it to a two-year draft obligation.[17] By the 1970s, the change to a two-year system seems to have created the hazing practice known as dedovshchina, "rule of the grandfathers", which destroyed the status of most NCOs.[18] Instead the Soviet system relied very heavily on junior officers.[19] Soviet Armed Forces life could be "grim and dangerous": a Western researcher talking to former Soviet officers was told, in effect that this was because they did not "value human life".[20]

    By the middle of the 1980s, the Ground Forces contained

    about 210 divisions. About three-quarters were motor rifle divisions and the remainder tank divisions.[21] There were also a large number of artillery divisions, separate artillery brigades, engineer formations, and other combat support formations. However, only relatively few formations were fully war ready. By 1983, Soviet divisions were divided into either "Ready" or "Not Ready" categories, each with three subcategories.[22] The internal military districts usually contained only one or two fully Ready divisions, with the remainder lower strength formations. The Soviet system anticipated a war preparation period which would bring the strength of the Ground Forces up to about three million.[23]

    Soviet planning for most of the

    Army Groups). On 8 February 1979, the first of the new High Commands, for the Far East, was created at Ulan-Ude in Buryatia under Army General Vasily Petrov.[24][25] In September 1984, three more were established to control multi-Front operations in Europe (the Western and South-Western Strategic Directions) and at Baku to supervise three southern military districts.[26]
    Western analysts expected these new headquarters to control multiple Fronts in time of war, and usually a Soviet Navy Fleet.

    From the 1950s to the 1980s the branches ("rods") of the Ground Forces included the Motor Rifle Troops; the

    Signals Troops; the Engineer Troops; the Air Defence Troops of the Ground Forces; the Chemical Troops; and the Rear of the Ground Forces.[27]

    In 1955, the Soviet Union established the

    North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). After 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party, reduced the Ground Forces to build up the Strategic Rocket Forces, emphasizing the armed forces' nuclear capabilities. He removed Marshal Georgy Zhukov from the Politburo in 1957 for opposing these reductions in the Ground Forces.[28] Nonetheless, Soviet forces possessed too few theater-level nuclear weapons to fulfill war-plan requirements until the mid-1980s.[29] The General Staff maintained plans to invade Western Europe whose massive scale was only made publicly available after German researchers gained access to files of the East German National People's Army following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.[30][31]

    Korean War

    The Red Army advanced into

    Korean People's Air Force. The Soviets believed it would be strategic to the Soviet Union to support Korea's growth directly. When northern Korea eventually wished to invade South Korea in 1950, Kim Il Sung traveled to Moscow to gain approval from Stalin. It was granted with full support, leading to the full-scale invasion of South Korea on June 25.[34]

    Vietnam War

    leader
    during the Vietnam War.

    Soviet ships in the South China Sea gave vital early warnings to PAVN/VC forces in South Vietnam. The Soviet intelligence ships would pick up American B-52 bombers flying from Okinawa and Guam. Their airspeed and direction would be noted and then relayed to the Central Office for South Vietnam, North Vietnam's southern headquarters. Using airspeed and direction, COSVN analysts would calculate the bombing target and tell any assets to move "perpendicularly to the attack trajectory." These advance warnings gave them time to move out of the way of the bombers, and, while the bombing runs caused extensive damage, because of the early warnings from 1968 to 1970 they did not kill a single military or civilian leader in the headquarters complexes.[35]

    The

    F-4 Phantoms, which were shot down over Thanh Hóa in 1965. Over a dozen Soviet soldiers lost their lives in this conflict. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian Federation officials acknowledged that the Soviet Union had stationed up to 3,000 troops in Vietnam during the war.[36]

    Soviet anti-air instructors and North Vietnamese crewmen in the spring of 1965 at an anti-aircraft training center in Vietnam

    Some Russian sources give more specific numbers: Between 1953 and 1991, the hardware donated by the Soviet Union included 2,000 tanks, 1,700 APCs, 7,000 artillery guns, over 5,000 anti-aircraft guns, 158 surface-to-air missile launchers, and 120 helicopters. During the war, the Soviets sent North Vietnam annual arms shipments worth $450 million.[37]: 364–371  From July 1965 to the end of 1974, fighting in Vietnam was observed by some 6,500 officers and generals, as well as more than 4,500 soldiers and sergeants of the Soviet Armed Forces. In addition, Soviet military schools and academies began training Vietnamese soldiers—in all more than 10,000 military personnel.[38]

    The KGB had also helped develop the signals intelligence (SIGINT) capabilities of the North Vietnamese, through an operation known as Vostok (also known as Phương Đông, meaning "Orient" and named after the Vostok 1).[39] The Vostok program was a counterintelligence and espionage program. These programs were pivotal in detecting and defeating CIA and South Vietnamese commando teams sent into North Vietnam, as they were detected and captured.[39] The Soviets helped the Ministry of Public Security recruit foreigners within high-level diplomatic circles among the Western-allies of the US, under a clandestine program known as "B12,MM" which produced thousands of high-level documents for nearly a decade, including targets of B-52 strikes.[39] In 1975, the SIGINT services had broken information from Western US-allies in Saigon, determining that the US would not intervene to save South Vietnam from collapse.[39]

    Soviet-Afghan War

    In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to prop up its puppet government, provoking a 10-year Afghan mujahideen guerrilla resistance.[40] Between 850,000 and 1.5 million civilians were killed[41][42] and millions of Afghans fled the country as refugees, mostly to Pakistan and Iran.

    Prior to the arrival of Soviet troops, the pro-Soviet

    coup,[46] killing the president Hafizullah Amin, and installing a rival socialist Babrak Karmal, who was viewed as more moderate and fit to lead the nation.[44]

    While the Soviet government initially hoped to secure Afghanistan's towns and road networks, stabilize the communist regime, and withdraw from the region within the span of one year, they experienced major difficulties in the region, due to rough terrain and fierce guerrilla resistance. Soviet presence would reach near 115,000 troops by the mid-1980s, and the complications of the war increased, causing a high amount of military, economic, and political cost.[47] After Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev realized the economic, diplomatic, and human toll the war was placing on the Soviet Union, he announced the withdrawal of six regiment of troops (about 7,000 men) on 28 July 1986.[48] In January 1988 Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze announced that it was hoped that "1988 would be the last year of the Soviet troops stay"; the forces pulled out in the bitter winter cold of January–February 1989.

    Military costs

    The cost for the military due to the war is estimated to have been roughly 15 billion rubles in 1989. The combat casualties estimates at 30,000–35,000. During 1984–1985, more than 300 aircraft were lost, and thus a significant military cost of the war is attributed to air operations. Since the first year, the government spend roughly 2.5–3.0% of the yearly military budget on funding the war in Afghanistan, increasing steadily in cost until its peak in 1986.[49]

    The Soviet Army also suffered from deep losses in morale and public approval due to the conflict and its failure. Many injured and disabled veterans of the war returned to the Soviet Union facing public scrutiny and difficulty re-entering civilian society, creating a new social group known as "

    Afgantsy". These men would become influential in popular culture and politics of the time.[50]

    Military districts

    The extent military districts in 1990 were:[51]

    Dissolution of the Soviet Union

    Soviet Armed Forces
    Components
    Ranks of the Soviet Military
    History of the Soviet Military
    2nd Guards Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division in Moscow, January 1992, a few weeks after the dissolution of the USSR. He is wearing the Soviet winter Afghanka
    uniform.

    From 1985 to 1991, General Secretary Gorbachev attempted to reduce the strain the Soviet Armed Forces placed on the USSR's economy.

    Gorbachev slowly reduced the size of the Armed Forces, including through a unilateral force reduction announcement of 500,000 in December 1988.

    Conventional Forces in Europe treaty began to create more disruption. The withdrawals became extremely chaotic; there was significant hardship for officers and their families, and "large numbers of weapons and vast stocks of equipment simply disappeared through theft, misappropriation and the black market."[53]

    In February 1989, Defence Minister

    Izvestiya, the Soviet official newspaper of record.[54]
    First, the combined arms formations, divisions and armies, would be reorganised, and as a result division numbers would be reduced almost by half; second, tank regiments would be removed from all the motor rifle (mechanised infantry) divisions in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and tank divisions would also lose a tank regiment; air assault and river crossing units would be removed from both Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia; fourth, defensive systems and units would rise in number under the new divisional organisation; and finally the troop level in the European part of the USSR would drop by 200,000, and by 60,000 in the southern part of the country. A number of motor-rifle formations would be converted into machine gun and artillery forces intended for defensive purposes only. Three-quarters of the troops in Mongolia would be withdrawn and disbanded, including all the air force units there.

    The Armed Forces were extensively involved in the 19–21 August

    1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt to depose President Gorbachev.[55] Commanders despatched tanks into Moscow, yet the coup failed. On 8 December 1991, the presidents of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine formally dissolved the USSR, and then constituted the Commonwealth of Independent States
    (CIS). Soviet President Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991; the next day, the Supreme Soviet dissolved itself, officially dissolving the USSR on 26 December 1991. During the next 18 months, inter-republican political efforts to transform the Army of the Soviet Union into the CIS Armed Forces failed; eventually, the forces stationed in the republics formally became the militaries of the respective republican governments.

    After the

    list of Soviet Army divisions
    sketches some of the fates of the individual parts of the Ground Forces.

    In mid-March 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin appointed himself as the new Russian minister of defence, marking a crucial step in the creation of the new Russian Armed Forces, comprising the bulk of what was left of the Soviet Armed Forces. The last vestiges of the old Soviet command structure were finally dissolved in June 1993, when the paper Commonwealth of Independent States Military Headquarters was reorganized as a staff for facilitating CIS military cooperation.[57]

    In the next few years, the former Soviet Ground Forces withdrew from central and Eastern Europe (including the

    Georgia and Transnistria (in Moldova
    ).

    Post-dissolution influence

    After the

    terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda.[58] A 1999 book argued that the greatest opportunity for terrorist organizations to procure weapons was in the former Soviet Union.[59]

    In 2007, the

    Kalashnikov family, and 75 million were AKMs.[60] However, only about 5 million of these were manufactured in the former USSR.[61]

    Equipment

    A U.S. assessment of the seven most important items of Soviet combat equipment in 1981
    Soviet Army T-72A tanks during the 1983 October Revolution celebration in Moscow
    Further information:
    list of tanks of the Soviet Union

    In 1990 and 1991, the Soviet Ground Forces were estimated to possess the following equipment. The 1991 estimates are drawn from the

    Conventional Forces in Europe
    data exchange which revealed figures of November 1990.

    The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported in 1992 that the USSR had previously had over 20,000 tanks, 30,000 armoured combat vehicles, at least 13,000 artillery pieces, and just under 1,500 helicopters.[63]

    Commanders-in-Chief of the Soviet Ground Forces

    CPSU), #4 Year of entering the Komsomol
    , #5 Education, #6 Main specialty, #7 Marital status. (Document number and the name are removed)
    Main article: Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Ground Forces

    See also

    Notes

    1. ^ Russian: Советская армия, tr. Sovetskaya armiya

    References

    1. ^ a b c d e f g h i International Institute for Strategic Studies 1991, p. 37.
    2. ISBN 978-1-84908-635-6
      .
    3. ^ Established by decree on 15 (28) January 1918 "to protect the population, territorial integrity and civil liberties in the territory of the Soviet state."
    4. ^ Suvorov 1982, p. 51.
    5. ^ Urban 1985.
    6. ^ Feskov et al 2013, pp. 146, 147.
    7. ^ a b c Feskov et al 2013, p. 119.
    8. JSTOR 1888505
      .
    9. ^ Scott & Scott 1979, p. 142.
    10. ^ Kormiltsev, Nikolai (2005). "The main command of the Ground Forces: history and modernity". Military History. No. 7. pp. 3–8.
    11. ^ Tsouras 1994, pp. 121, 172.
    12. ^ a b Odom 1998, p. 39.
    13. ^ a b Scott & Scott 1979, p. 176.
    14. ^ Armed Forces of the Russian Federation – Land Forces, Agency Voeninform of the Defence Ministry of the Russian Federation (2007) p. 14
    15. ^ Feskov et al 2013, p. 99.
    16. ^ Zickel & Keefe 1991, p. 705.
    17. ^ Scott & Scott 1979, p. 305.
    18. ^ Odom 1998, pp. 47–48, 286–289.
    19. ^ Odom 1998, pp. 290–291.
    20. ^ Odom 1998, p. 48.
    21. ^ Orr 2003, p. 1.
    22. ^ Defense Intelligence Agency (6 September 1983). "Warsaw Pact: Division Categorization DIA IAPPR 102-83". United States: Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 26 September 2022.
    23. ^ International Institute for Strategic Studies 1987, p. 34.
    24. ^ Feskov et al 2013, p. 90.
    25. ^ Holm, Michael (1 January 2015). "High Command of the Far East". Soviet Armed Forces 1945-1991: Organisation and Order of Battle. Retrieved 18 August 2023.
    26. ^ Feskov et al 2013, pp. 91–93.
    27. ^ Feskov et al 2004, p. 21.
    28. ^ Suvorov 1982, p. 36.
    29. ^ Odom 1998, p. 69.
    30. ^ Odom 1998, p. 72–80.
    31. ^ Parallel History Project, and the documentation on the associated Polish exercise, Seven Days to the River Rhine, 1979.[full citation needed] See also Heuser, Beatrice, "Warsaw Pact Military Doctrines in the 1970s and 1980s: Findings in the East German Archives", Comparative Strategy, October–December 1993, pp. 437–457
    32. OCLC 605327300
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    33. ^ "Cable No. 121973, Meretskov and Shytkov to Cde. Stalin". Retrieved 20 April 2023 – via Wilson Center Digital Archive.
    34. ^ "Ciphered Telegram No. 9849, Gromyko to the Soviet Ambassador, Pyongyang". Retrieved 20 April 2023 – via Wilson Center Digital Archive.
    35. ISBN 978-0-15-193636-6
      .
    36. ^ "Soviet Involvement in the Vietnam War". historicaltextarchive.com. Associated Press.
    37. ISBN 978-0-89141-421-6
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    38. ^ "Soviet rocketeer: After our arrival in Vietnam, American pilots refused to fly" (in Russian). rus.ruvr. Archived from the original on 17 January 2013. Retrieved 26 May 2010.
    39. ^ a b c d Pribbenow, Merle (December 2014). "The Soviet-Vietnamese Intelligence Relationship during the Vietnam War: Cooperation and Conflict" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 April 2019. Retrieved 1 June 2018.
    40. OCLC 1258040790
      .
    41. PMID 12317412
      .
    42. ISBN 978-2-7384-3525-5
      .
    43. ^ Bennett, Andrew (1999). "A bitter harvest: Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and its effects on Afghan political movements" (PDF). Penn State University. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 June 2007. Retrieved 4 February 2007.
    44. ^
      ISBN 9781845112578
      . Retrieved 14 July 2015.
    45. ^ "Timeline: Soviet war in Afghanistan". BBC News. 17 February 2009. Retrieved 22 March 2009.
    46. ^ "How Soviet troops stormed Kabul palace". BBC News. 27 December 2009. Retrieved 1 July 2013.
    47. ISSN 0882-7729
      . Retrieved 20 April 2023.
    48. OCLC 28798156
      .
    49. ^ "The Costs of Soviet Involvement in Afghanistan" (PDF). United States: Central Intelligence Agency.
    50. ^ Konovalov, Valerii. "Afghan Veterans in Siberia". Radio Liberty Report on the USSR. 1 (#21).
    51. ^ Schofield 1991, pp. 236–237.
    52. ^ Odom 1998, pp. 273–278.
    53. ^ Odom 1998, p. 278.
    54. ^ Odom 1998, p. 161.
    55. ^ Odom 1998, pp. 305–346.
    56. ^ International Institute for Strategic Studies 1992, pp. 72, 86, 96.
    57. ^ Matlock 1995.
    58. ^ a b c Hamm 2011.
    59. ^ Lee, Rensselaer (1999) Smuggling Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in the Former Soviet Union and Europe. New York: St. Martin's Press, cited in Hamm, Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups, 2011, p8.
    60. ^ Killicoat, Phillip (April 2007). "Post-Conflict Transitions Working Paper No. 10.: Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles" (PDF). World Bank. Oxford University. p. 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 July 2016. Retrieved 3 April 2010.
    61. ISBN 978-1-58160-069-8
    62. ^ Zickel & Keefe 1991, p. 708.
    63. SIPRI (December 1992). "Post Cold War Security in and for Europe"
      (PDF). Retrieved 25 August 2020.

    Bibliography

    Further reading

    External links

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