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Military history of the Soviet Union

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Military History and War

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   Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov depicted saluting a military
   parade in Red Square above the message "Long Live the Worker-Peasant
   Red Army— a Dependable Sentinel of the Soviet Borders!"
   Enlarge
   Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov depicted saluting a military
   parade in Red Square above the message "Long Live the Worker-Peasant
   Red Army— a Dependable Sentinel of the Soviet Borders!"

   The military history of the Soviet Union began in the days following
   the 1917 October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. The
   new government formed the Red Army to fight various enemies in the
   Russian Civil War. In the late 1930s, the Red Army invaded Finland;
   fought a brief undeclared border war (together with its ally Mongolia)
   with Japan and its client state Manchukuo; and, was deployed when the
   Soviet Union, in agreement with Nazi Germany, took part in the
   partition of Poland, annexed the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern
   Bukovina (from Romania). In World War II, the Red Army was the major
   military force in the defeat of Nazi Germany. After the war, it
   occupied part of Germany and many nations in central and eastern
   Europe, which became satellite states in the Soviet bloc.

   The Soviet Union became the sole superpower rival to the United States.
   The Cold War between the two nations led to military buildups, the arms
   race, and the Space Race. By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces
   had more troops and nuclear weapons than any other nation. The Soviet
   Union fell in 1991, thanks not to military defeat but economic and
   political factors (see history of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)).

   The Soviet military consisted of five armed services. 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), subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, and
   the Border Troops, subordinated to the KGB.

Tsarist and revolutionary background

   Members of the Red Army gather around Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky
   in Petrograd.
   Enlarge
   Members of the Red Army gather around Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky
   in Petrograd.

   The February Revolution replaced the Tsar with the Russian Provisional
   Government, 1917 which was itself overthrown by the Bolshevik
   Revolution of 1917. The Russian army, exhausted by its participation in
   World War I, was in the final stages of disintegration and collapse.
   Even though Bolshevik influence in the ranks was strong, the officer
   corps was staffed with many who violently opposed communism. The
   Bolsheviks perceived the Tsarist army to be one of the foundations of
   the hated old regime, and decided to abolish it in favour of
   establishing a new military loyal to the Marxist cause. Thus the core
   of the Tsarist army became the core of the Russian Provisional
   Government army which became the core of the White Army, which in
   intermittent collaboration with interventionist forces from outside
   Russia (Japanese, British, French, American) battled the Red Army
   during the Russian Civil War.

   On January 28, 1918 the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin decreed the
   establishment of the Red Army, officially merging the 20,000 Red Guards
   with 200,000 Baltic Fleet sailors and a handful of sympathetic
   Petrograd garrison soldiers. Leon Trotsky served as their 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 now 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 civil war, the Bolsheviks fought counterrevolutionary groups
   that became known as the White armies as well as armies sponsored by
   Russia's former allies such as the Britain and France, which saw a need
   to overthrow the Bolshevik government. The Red Army enjoyed a series of
   initial victories over their opponents, and in a surge of optimism
   Lenin ordered the Soviet Western Army to advance West in the vacuum
   created by the German forces retreating from the Ober-Ost ares. This
   operation swept the newly formed Ukrainian People's Republic and
   Belarusian People's Republic and eventually lead to the Soviet invasion
   of Second Polish Republic, a newly independent state of the former
   Russian Empire. By invading Poland and initiating the Polish-Soviet War
   the Bolsheviks expressed their belief that they would eventually
   triumph over opposing capitalist forces both at home and abroad.

   The overwhelming majority of professional officers in the Russian army
   were of nobility ( dvoryanstvo); moreover, most of them had joined the
   White armies. Therefore the Workers' and Peasants' Army initially faced
   a shortage of experienced military leaders. To remedy this, 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 and loyalty of professional
   commanders, formally termed as "military specialists" (voyenspets, for
   voyenny spetsialist). 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 began to face setbacks in Poland.

   Polish forces managed to break a long streak of Bolshevik victories by
   launching a bold counteroffensive at the Battle of Warsaw in August of
   1920. At Warsaw the Red Army suffered a defeat so great and so
   unexpected that it turned the course of the entire war and eventually
   forced the Soviets to accept the unfavorable conditions offered by the
   Treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921. It was the biggest defeat of
   the Red Army in history.

   After the civil war, the Red Army became an increasingly professional
   military organization. With most of its five 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 Soviet power. In an
   effort to increase the prestige of the military profession, the party
   reestablished formal military ranks, downgraded political commissars,
   and eventually established the principle of one-man command.

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

   CAPTION: Military of the Soviet Union


                  Components
   Strategic Rocket Forces
   Army
   Anti-Air Defense
   Air Force
   Navy
         Ranks of the Soviet Military
   Ranks and insignia of the Soviet military
        History of the Soviet Military
   Military history of the Soviet Union

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, and was thus subject to
   Party discipline. Second, the top military leaders had 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. Following World War II the
   zampolit lost all command authority but retained 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% of all armed forces personnel were party members or
   Komsomol members. Over 90% of all officers in the armed forces were
   party or Komsomol members.

Military counterintelligence

   Throughout the history of the Soviet Army, the Soviet secret police
   (known variously as the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, among many others) maintained
   control over the counterintelligence Special Departments (Особый отдел)
   that existed at all larger military formations. The best known 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.

Political doctrine

   Under the direction of Lenin and Trotsky, the Red Army claimed to
   adhere to Karl Marx's proclamation that the bourgeoisie could be
   overcome only by a worldwide revolt of the proletariat, and to this end
   early Soviet military doctrine focused on spreading the revolution
   abroad and expanding Soviet influence throughout the world. Lenin
   provided an early experiment of Marx's theory when he invaded Poland in
   hopes of generating a communist uprising in neighboring Germany.
   Lenin's Polish expedition only complemented his March 1919
   establishment of the Comintern, an organization whose sole purpose was
   to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the
   overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an
   international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete
   abolition of the State."

   In keeping with the Comintern philosophy, the Red Army forcibly
   suppressed the anti-Soviet Basmachi Revolt in Central Asia in order to
   keep Turkestan in the Soviet alliance system. In 1921, a Red Army
   occupation of the Democratic Republic of Georgia overthrew the
   representative Georgian government and replaced it with a Soviet
   Republic. Georgia was then forcibly merged with Armenia and Azerbaijan
   in order to form the Transcaucasian SFSR, a member state of the Soviet
   Union.

   These ideas of world communism were generally not successful due to the
   distration of the Russian Civil War, and world communism was not
   attempted again until World War 2.

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.
   Joseph Stalin implemented a nationwide industrialization drive which
   provided significantly to the Soviet military complex, only to later
   deprive the Red Army of its most experienced commanders during the
   Great Purge.
   Joseph Stalin implemented a nationwide industrialization drive which
   provided significantly to the Soviet military complex, only to later
   deprive the Red Army of its most experienced commanders during the
   Great Purge.

   In 1937, however, Stalin purged the Red Army of its best military
   leaders. Fearing that the military posed a threat to his rule, Stalin
   jailed or executed many Red Army officers, estimated in thousands,
   including three of five marshals. These actions were to severely impair
   the Red Army's capabilities in the Soviet-Finnish War (Winter War) of
   1939–1940 and in World War II.

   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 autumn of
   1957. 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 as he provided ample resources to the armed forces. In 1973
   the minister of defense 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 armed forces.

   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.

   Mikhail 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.

Military doctrine

   Throughout the 1930s, the Red Army concentrated its efforts on
   developing a highly mechanized, mobile war machine. Pictured here, a
   Soviet T-26 tank performs operations during the Spanish Civil War.
   Enlarge
   Throughout the 1930s, the Red Army concentrated its efforts on
   developing a highly mechanized, mobile war machine. Pictured here, a
   Soviet T-26 tank performs operations during the Spanish Civil War.

   The Russian army was defeated in the First World War, a fact which
   strongly shaped the early stages of Red Army development. While the
   armies of Britain and France were content to retain strategies which
   had made them victorious, the Red Army proceeded to experiment and
   develop new tactics and concepts, developing parallel to the reborn
   German armed forces. The Soviets viewed themselves as a nation unique
   to human history and thus felt no loyalty to previous military
   tradition, an ideology which allowed for and prioritized innovation.

   From its conception, the Red Army committed itself to emphasizing
   highly mobile warfare. This decision was influenced by the formative
   wars of its history, namely the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet
   War. Both of these conflicts had little in common with the static
   trench warfare of the First World War. Instead, they featured long
   range mobile operations, often by small but highly motivated forces, as
   well as rapid advances of hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days.

   Under Lenin's New Economic Policy, the Soviet Union had few resources
   to devote to the Red Army during its formative years in the 1920s. This
   changed only when Stalin began the industrialisation drive in 1929, a
   policy created in part to allow for unprecedented funds to be dedicated
   to the military.
   Type Soviet Tank Corps and Tank Army of 1942 and 1943 using symbols.
   Enlarge
   Type Soviet Tank Corps and Tank Army of 1942 and 1943 using symbols.

   Using these new resources, the Red Army of the 1930s developed a highly
   sophisticated concept of mobile warfare which relied on huge formations
   of tanks, aircraft, and airborne troops designed to break through the
   enemy's line and carry the battle deep to the enemy's rear. Soviet
   industry responded, supplying tanks, aircraft and other equipment in
   sufficient numbers to make such operations practical. To avoid
   overestimating the power of the Soviet army it should be noted,
   however, that while before 1941 Soviet formations of a given level were
   at least equal to and often stronger than equivalent formations of
   other armies, huge wartime losses and reorganisation based on war
   experience reversed the trend during the later war years. Thus, for
   example, the Soviet Tank Corps was equivalent in armored vehicle power
   to an American armored division, and a Soviet rifle (infantry)
   division, unless specifically reinforced, was often equivalent to an
   American infantry regiment.

   Soviets did not follow the Germans in assuming that the next war would
   be decided so quickly as to rely principally on equipment produced
   before the start of the war. Instead, they developed their armament
   factories under the assumption that during the war they would have to
   rebuild the whole equipment of the ground and air forces many times
   over. This assumption was indeed proven correct during the
   four-year-long war.

   The Red Army's focus on mobile operations in the early 1930s was
   gravely disrupted by Stalin's purge of the military's leadership. Since
   the new doctrines were associated with officers who had been declared
   enemies of the state, the support for them declined. Many large
   mechanised formations were disbanded, with the tanks distributed to
   support the infantry. After the German blitzkrieg proved its potency in
   Poland and France, the Red Army started a frantic effort to rebuild the
   large mechanised corps, but the task was only partly finished when the
   Wehrmacht attacked in 1941. The huge tank forces, powerful only on
   paper, were mostly annihilated by the Germans in the first months of
   Operation Barbarossa. Another factor contributing to the initial defeat
   was that the Soviet rearmament effort was started too early, and in
   1941 the majority of Soviet equipment was obsolete and inferior to that
   of the Wehrmacht.

   In the initial period of the war, in the face of catastrophic losses,
   the Red Army drastically scaled down its armored formations, with the
   tank brigade becoming the largest commonly deployed armored unit, and
   reverted to a simpler mode of operations. Nevertheless, the
   revolutionary doctrines of the 1930s, modified by combat experience,
   were eventually successfully used at the front starting in 1943 after
   the Red Army regained the initiative.

Practical deployment of the Soviet military

Interwar period

   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." Thanks to his control over and support from the Party and
   state bureaucracy, Stalin prevailed and Trotsky was removed as war
   commissar in 1925, resulting in a turn away from the policy of
   spreading the revolution abroad in favour of focusing on domestic
   issues and defending the country against the possibility of foreign
   invasion.

   Eager to dispose of Trotsky's political and military supporters, Stalin
   directed the execution of eight high-ranking generals between 1935 and
   1938. Primary among these was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, leader of
   the Soviet invasion of Poland and generally considered one of the most
   talented strategists in the Soviet military.

   Despite Stalin's isolationist policies, and even though the Soviet
   Union's borders would remain static for fifteen years following Lenin's
   death, the Soviets continued to involve themselves in international
   affairs, and the Comintern was instrumental in establishing the
   Communist parties of China in 1921 and Indochina in 1930. Additionally,
   the Red Army played a crucial role in the Spanish Civil War, supplying
   over 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, 300 armored
   cars, hundreds of thousands of small arms and 30,000 tons of ammunition
   to the Republican cause.

   Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War was greatly influenced by
   the growing tension between Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi
   Germany and an avid supporter of the fascist forces of Francisco
   Franco. Nazi-Soviet relations were tempered by Hitler's personal hatred
   of the people of East Europe and by the longstanding ideological feud
   between fascism and communism. Direct armed conflict between Germany
   and the Soviet Union was delayed by the signing of the
   Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, which essentially divided
   the nations of Eastern Europe into two spheres of interest, one
   belonging to the Soviets and the other to the Nazis. As a result of
   this pact the Red Army would launch an invasion of Poland and
   Bessarabia in the opening months of World War II.

   Stalin continued to fear Nazi aggression and on November 30, 1939
   announced the invasion of Finland in an effort to use Finnish territory
   as a buffer-zone between Germany and the heart of industrial Russia.
   The resulting Winter War proved disastrous for the Soviet military. The
   Red Army, which was still feeling the sting of Stalin's purges and
   finding itself starved of industrial and intellectual resources,
   suffered a series of embarrassing defeats before accepting armistice on
   March 13, 1940. As a direct result of the Soviet aggression the Soviet
   Union was expelled from the League of Nations on December 14, 1939.

World War II

   Soviet ski troops advancing the front line during the siege of
   Leningrad.
   Enlarge
   Soviet ski troops advancing the front line during the siege of
   Leningrad.
   Marking the Soviet Union's victory, a soldier raises the Soviet flag
   over the German Reichstag in the Nazi capital of Berlin.
   Enlarge
   Marking the Soviet Union's victory, a soldier raises the Soviet flag
   over the German Reichstag in the Nazi capital of Berlin.

   The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 established a non-aggression
   agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and a secret
   protocol described how Poland and the Baltic countries would be divided
   between them. In the Invasion of Poland of 1939 the two powers invaded
   and partitioned Poland, and in June 1940 the Soviet Union occupied
   Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

   The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies
   before Nazi Germany swept across the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, in
   the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet's poor
   performance in the Winter War against Finland encouraged Hitler to
   ignore the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and take the Red Army
   by surprise. During the initial stages of the war, the Soviet military
   was forced to retreat and also forced to stay and be killed or
   captured, trading territory for time while suffering a staggering
   number of casualties.

   The United States program of lend lease was extended to the Soviet
   Union in September 1941, supplying planes, tanks and other war
   materials. Eventually the Soviets managed to slow the Wehrmacht's
   blitzkrieg, halting the Nazi offensive in December 1941 outside the
   gates of Moscow. The Red Army then launched a powerful winter
   counteroffensive which pushed the enemy away from the capital. At the
   start of 1942, the weakened Axis armies abandoned their march on Moscow
   and advanced south towards the Caucasus and Volga river. This
   offensive, in turn, ran out of steam in autumn 1942, allowing the
   Soviet forces to stage a devastating 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. There were enormous losses to
   the troops on both sides during this stage of the campaign, but
   especially for the USSR with millions of casualties in the battles for
   Moscow and Stalingrad.
   Soviet sailors on the Victory Parade in 1945
   Enlarge
   Soviet sailors on the Victory Parade in 1945

   In the summer of 1943, following the Battle of Kursk, the Red Army
   seized the strategic initiative for the remainder of the war. All
   Soviet territory was liberated from German occupation in 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 World War II in Europe (see V-E Day). Much of Germany and even
   parts of the USSR were devastated by the advancing Red Army troops as a
   result of an aggressive policy of " scorched earth" ^^. Once Germany
   was defeated, the Red Army joined the war against Japan, and in summer
   1945 carried out an offensive against the Japanese forces stationed in
   northern Manchuria. The Red Army emerged from the war as the most
   powerful land army in history with five million soldiers, and more
   tanks and more artillery than all other countries taken together. Its
   name was changed to the Soviet Army.

   The defeat of the Wehrmacht had come, however, at the cost of seven
   million soldiers and perhaps twenty-seven million civilians dead, by
   far the highest losses of any country during the war. This is believed
   to be one of the highest human death tolls from any military conflict
   ^.

The Cold War and conventional forces

   The RPK light machine gun is typical of the Red Army's influence in the
   post-war world. It is based on the AK-47 assault rifle, which would
   ultimately effect change in both future rifle design and in the methods
   of modern warfare.
   Enlarge
   The RPK light machine gun is typical of the Red Army's influence in the
   post-war world. It is based on the AK-47 assault rifle, which would
   ultimately effect change in both future rifle design and in the methods
   of modern warfare.

   By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had a standing army of 10
   to 13 million men. Undoubtedly, during the Cold War, the Red Army was
   by far more powerful than any other country. Immediately following
   Germany's surrender, this number was reduced to five million; this
   decline was indicative not of diminishing interest in the Soviet
   military but rather of a growing interest in establishing more modern
   and mobile armed forces. This policy resulted in the 1951 introduction
   of the AK-47, designed four years earlier as an improvement on the
   submachine gun which supplied Soviet infantry with a rugged and
   reliable source of short-range firepower. Also important was the 1967
   introduction of the BMP-1, the first infantry fighting vehicle
   commissioned by any armed force in the world. These innovations would
   help direct the course of Soviet military operations throughout the
   Cold War.

   Many of the Soviet forces who fought to liberate the countries of
   Eastern Europe from Nazi control remained in the region even after
   Germany's surrender in 1945. Mindful of the Soviet Union's
   vulnerability to western invasion, Stalin used this military occupation
   to establish satellite states, creating a buffer zone between Germany
   and the Soviet Union. The Soviets quickly became an enormous political
   and economic influence in the region and the Soviet Union actively
   assisted local communist parties in coming to power. By 1948, seven
   eastern European countries had communist governments.

   In this setting, the Cold War emerged out of a conflict between Stalin
   and U.S. President Harry S. Truman over the future of Eastern Europe
   during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. Truman charged that Stalin had
   betrayed the agreement made at the Yalta Conference. With Eastern
   Europe under Red Army occupation, the Soviet Union remained adamant in
   the face Truman's attempt to stop Communist expansion, and in 1955
   Moscow introduced the Warsaw Pact to counterbalance the Western NATO
   alliance.

   Conventional military power showed its continued influence when the
   Soviet Union used its troops to invade Hungary in 1956 and
   Czechoslovakia in 1968 to suppress the democratic aspirations of their
   peoples and keep these countries within the Soviet alliance system. The
   Soviet Union and the western forces, led by the US, faced a number of
   standoffs that threatened to turn into live conflicts, such as the
   Berlin Blockade of 1948-1949 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,
   which saw "hawks" on both sides push the respective rivals closer
   towards war due to policies of brinksmanship. This attitude was
   tempered by fears of a nuclear conflict and desires among moderates for
   détente.

   Under Khrushchev's leadership, Soviet relations with Josip Broz Tito's
   Yugoslavia were finally repaired with the 1956 dissolution of the
   Cominform. This decision generated a further rift between the Soviet
   Union and the People's Republic of China, a neighboring communist state
   which felt the Soviets were turning their back on the fundamental
   Marxist-Leninist struggle for the worldwide triumph of communism. This
   Sino-Soviet split erupted in 1967 when the Red Guard besieged the
   Soviet embassy in Beijing. Additional conflicts along the Sino-Soviet
   border followed in 1969.

   Tension between the political forces in Moscow and Beijing would
   greatly influence Asian politics during the 1960s and 1970s, and a
   microcosm of the Sino-Soviet split emerged when the by-then late-Ho Chi
   Minh's Soviet-aligned Vietnam invaded Pol Pot's pro-Chinese Cambodia in
   1978. The Soviets had ensured the loyalty of Vietnam and Laos through
   an aggressive campaign of political, economic and military aid – the
   same tactic which allowed the Soviet Union to compete with the United
   States in a race to establish themselves as neocolonial rulers of newly
   independent states in Africa and the Middle East. Extensive arms sales
   made weapons like the AK-47 and the T-55 tank icons of the contemporary
   wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

   Also significant was the 1968 declaration of the Brezhnev Doctrine
   which officially asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene in
   other nation's internal affairs in order to secure socialism from
   opposing capitalist forces. This doctrine was used to justify the
   Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In Afghanistan the Soviet
   forces met a fierce resistance from a mujahideen composed of
   sympathetic muslims and supported by the CIA. Battling an opposition
   that relied on guerrilla tactics and asymmetric warfare, the massive
   Soviet war machine proved incapable of achieving decisive victories and
   the entire campaign quickly devolved into a quagmire not unlike that
   which the U.S. faced a decade earlier in the Vietnam War. After ten
   years of fighting at the cost of approximately 20 billion dollars a
   year (in 1986, US dollars)^ and 15,000 Soviet casualties, Gorbachev
   surrendered to public opinion and ordered troops to withdraw in early
   1989.

The Cold War and nuclear weapons

   The Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb codenamed " First
   Lightning" on 29 August 1949, only four years after the atomic bombings
   of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surprising many Western commentators who had
   expected the U.S. monopoly to last for some time longer. It soon came
   out that the Soviet atomic bomb project had received a considerable
   amount of espionage information about the wartime Manhattan Project,
   and that its first bomb was largely a purposeful copy of the U.S. " Fat
   Man" model. 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.
   This, the Soviet's fifth atomic bomb test (dubbed "Joe 4" by the West)
   was detonated on August 12, 1953 in Kazakhstan.
   Enlarge
   This, the Soviet's fifth atomic bomb test (dubbed " Joe 4" by the West)
   was detonated on August 12, 1953 in Kazakhstan.

   Though the Soviet Union had proposed various nuclear disarmament plans
   after the U.S. development of atomic weapons in the Second World War,
   the Cold War saw the Soviets in the process of developing and deploying
   nuclear weapons in full force. It would not be until the 1960s that the
   United States and the Soviet Union finally agreed to ban weapon
   buildups in 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, 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 45,000 warheads ^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 ICBMs. These weapons were considered both offensive and
   defensive in nature.

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, which 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%) ^. 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 was engaged in military activities, whether active
   duty, military production, or civilian military training.

Collapse of the Soviet Union and the military

   The political and economic chaos of the late 1980s and early 1990s soon
   erupted into the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of
   the Soviet Union. The political chaos and rapid economic liberalization
   in Russia had an enormously negative impact on the strength and funding
   of the military. In 1985, the Soviet military had about 5.3 million
   men; by 1990 the number declined to about four million. At the time the
   Soviet Union dissolved, the residual forces belonging to the Russian
   Federation were 2.7 million strong. Almost all of this drop occurred in
   a three-year period between 1989 and 1991.

   The first contribution to this was a large unilateral reduction which
   began with an announcement by Gorbachev in December 1988; these
   reductions continued as a result of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and
   in accordance with CFE treaties. The second reason for the decline was
   the widespread resistance to conscription which developed as the policy
   of glasnost revealed to the public the true conditions inside the
   Soviet army and the widespread abuse of conscript soldiers.

   As the Soviet Union moved towards disintegration in 1991, the huge
   Soviet military played a surprisingly feeble and ineffective role in
   propping up the dying Soviet system. The military got involved in
   trying to suppress conflicts and unrest in the Caucasus and central
   Asia, but it often proved incapable of restoring peace and order. On
   April 9, 1989, the army, together with MVD units, massacred about 190
   demonstrators in Tbilisi in Georgia. The next major crisis occurred in
   Azerbaijan, when the Soviet army forcibly entered Baku on January
   19-20, 1990, removing the rebellious republic government and allegedly
   killing hundreds of civilians in the process. On January 13, 1991
   Soviet forces stormed the State Radio and Television Building and the
   television retranslation tower in Vilnius, Lithuania, both under
   opposition control, killing 14 people and injuring 700. This action was
   perceived by many as heavy-handed and achieved little.

   At the crucial moments of the August Coup, arguably the last attempt by
   the Soviet hardliners to prevent the breakup of the state, some
   military units did enter Moscow to act against Boris Yeltsin but
   ultimately refused to crush the protesters surrounding the Russian
   parliament building. In effect, the leadership of the Soviet military
   decided to side with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and thus finally doomed the
   old order.

   As the Soviet Union officially dissolved on December 31, 1991, the
   Soviet military was left in limbo. For the next year and a half various
   attempts to keep its unity and transform it into the military of the
   Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) failed. Steadily, the units
   stationed in Ukraine and some other breakaway republics swore loyalty
   to their new national governments, while a series of treaties between
   the newly independent states divided up the military's assets. In
   mid-March 1992, 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 still left of the
   military. The last vestiges of the old Soviet command structure were
   finally dissolved in June 1993.

   In the next few years, Russian forces withdrew from central and eastern
   Europe, as well as from some newly independent post-Soviet republics.
   While in most places the withdrawal took place without any problems,
   the Russian army remained in some disputed areas such as the Sevastopol
   naval base in the Crimea as well as in Abkhazia and Transnistria.

   The loss of recruits and industrial capacity in breakaway republics, as
   well as the breakdown of the Russian economy, caused a devastating
   decline in the capacity of post-Soviet Russian armed forces in the
   decade following 1992.

   Most of the nuclear stockpile was inherited by Russia. Additional
   weapons were acquired by Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Amid fears of
   nuclear proliferation, these were all certified as transferred to
   Russia by 1996. Uzbekistan is another former Soviet republic where
   nuclear weapons may once have been stationed, but they are now signers
   of the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Timeline

   Date Conflict Location Outcome
   1918- 1920 Russian Civil War Russian SFSR The nascent Red Army defeats
   the White movement and their foreign allies.
   1919- 1921 Polish-Soviet War Belarus, Poland, Ukraine The Soviets are
   defeated and concede substantial territory to Poland.
   1921 Red Army invasion of Georgia Democratic Republic of Georgia Soviet
   rule established in Georgia
   1921 Kronstadt rebellion Russian SFSR Last major uprising against
   Bolsheviks. Put down by Red Army.
   1922- 1931 Basmachi Revolt Central Asia The Red Army forcibly
   suppresses anti-Soviet revolts in central Asia.
   1924 August Uprising in Georgia Georgian SSR Last major rebellion
   against Bolsheviks in Georgia. Put down by Red Army.
   1938 Soviet-Japanese border incident (1938) Korea-USSR border The
   Soviets repel the Japanese incursion
   1939 Soviet-Japanese border incident (1939) Manchuria-Mongolia border
   The Soviets defeat the Japanese Kwantung Army and retain their existing
   border with Manchukuo.
   1939 Invasion of Poland and Bessarabia Poland, Belarus, Romania Nazi
   Germany and the Soviet Union divide up Eastern Europe according to the
   terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
   1939- 1940 Winter War Finland The Soviet Union is expelled from the
   League of Nations and gains some Finnish territory.
   1941- 1945 Great Patriotic War (WW2) Soviet Union, Eastern Europe In a
   titanic struggle with Nazi Germany, the Red Army defeats the Wehrmacht
   and becomes an occupying force in Eastern Europe.
   1941- 1944 Continuation War Finland Soviet forces defeat Finland,
   procuring additional territory and ending the Nazi-Finnish alliance.
   1945 Pacific War (WW2) Manchuria The Red Army launches a short and
   successful campaign to evict the Japanese from mainland Asia. Soviets
   become occupying force in Manchuria, North Korea and the Kuril Islands.
   1947- 1991 Cold War Worldwide, opposing the United States and the West
   Nuclear war is frequently threatened, but never realized. In 1955, the
   Soviet Union establishes the Warsaw Pact in response to the West's 1948
   creation of NATO.
   1948- 1949 Berlin Blockade Berlin The first of many Cold War standoffs
   as the Soviet Union seals Berlin from outside access. The West responds
   with the Berlin Airlift and the blockade is eventually called off.
   1956 Hungarian Revolution Hungary The Red Army forcibly suppresses a
   Hungarian anti-Soviet revolt. Thousands of casualties—both civilian and
   military—are the result.
   1962 Cuban Missile Crisis Cuba Another Cold War standoff over Soviet
   deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. The Soviets agreed to withdraw
   the missiles after a U.S. naval blockade of the island nation, and a
   U.S. guarantee not to invade Cuba and to withdraw nuclear missiles from
   Turkey.
   1968 Invasion of Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia An invasion by the
   Warsaw Pact quiets a national movement for a more liberal Czech
   government ( Prague Spring).
   1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict The Sino-Soviet border A longstanding
   ideological feud between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of
   China erupts into several occasions of inconclusive armed conflicts.
   1979- 1989 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Afghanistan The Soviet's
   launch of a "preemptive" invasion of Afghanistan quickly devolves into
   a quagmire. Troops are recalled after ten years of an indecisive
   "shooting war", in which the U.S. fund and arm the Afghan Mujahideen.

Foreign military aid

   In addition to explicit wars, the Soviet military took part in a number
   of internal conflicts in various countries, as well as proxy wars
   between third countries as a means of advancing their strategic
   interests while avoiding direct conflict between the superpowers in the
   nuclear age (or, in the case of the Spanish Civil War, avoiding a
   direct conflict with Nazi Germany at a time when neither side was
   prepared for such a war). In many cases, involvement was in the form of
   military advisors^ as well as the sale or provision of weapons.
              Date             Benefactor
   1936- 39                   Spain
   1939                       Mongolia
   1945- 49, 1950- 53         China
   1950- 53                   North Korea
   1961- 74                   North Vietnam
   1962- 64                   Algiers
   1962- 63, 1967- 75         Egypt
   1962- 63, 1969- 76         Yemen
   1967, 1970, 1972- 73, 1982 Syria
   1975- 79                   Angola
   1967- 69, 1975- 79         Mozambique
   1977- 79                   Ethiopia
   1960- 70                   Laos
   1980- 91                   Iraq
   1982                       Lebanon

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