The land forces of imperial Russia before 1917 and of the new state of Russia after 1992 were known as the Russian army; from 1918 to 1946 the land forces of Soviet Russia and (from January 1924) the USSR were officially the ‘Workers' and Peasants' Red Army’ (RKKA), usually abbreviated to the ‘Red Army’, and from 1946 until the dissolution of the Union in December 1991, the ‘Soviet army’. Because of the strong element of continuity throughout the period, this entry covers them all. Although always variable in quality and at times cursed by poor leadership, rigid tactics, lack of initiative, and occasionally indiscipline which led to atrocities, the Russian and Soviet armies often surprised their critics, and those who underestimated them—including Napoleon and Hitler—paid a terrible price. They have also made remarkable contributions to the development or adaptation of military technology, of tactics, operational concepts, and the military art throughout the last three centuries. As the German general and military theorist Hugo von Freytag-Loringhoven said of the imperial army on its exit from WW I, it remained, ‘to the end a redoubtable adversary’. Winston Churchill, no Russophile, paid his great ally the highest compliment: ‘The guts of the German army’, he said in 1944, ‘have been largely torn out by Russian valour and generalship’.
The Russian army was born under the ‘Tartar yoke’, the two-and-a-half centuries of Mongol suzerainty in Russia from 1240 to 1480. Under the command of Genghis Khan's grandson, Batu, with Subedei as COS, the Mongols seized the heart of what is now European Russia in two swift campaigns (1237-8 and 1240), deliberately choosing to attack in winter because the rivers and ground would be frozen. The Mongols exercised power through Russian princes, who were responsible for raising troops. Russian princes were therefore part of the Mongol military system and could hardly fail to be impressed by it. In 1380 Prince Dmitry of the Don defeated the Tartar Khan Mamay at Kulikovo field, with an army raised on the Mongol conscription system and using Mongol tactics. In 1382 the Mongols retaliated, capturing and burning Moscow which was defended, for the first time in Russia, by artillery. The Mongol influence persisted after the end of the Tartar yoke. Giles Fletcher, Elizabeth I's ambassador to Russia in 1588-9, wrote that the Russians were at war with ‘the Tartars’ nearly every year and that they were the neighbours ‘with whom they have greatest dealings and intercourse, both in peace and war’. The Mongol legacy can be traced to this century, for example, in the lava—a Cossack formation, an open-order cavalry attack. Lava is from the Mongol word lau, which expresses the idea of convergence. It was employed against the French in 1812 and in 1912 was adopted as the standard formation for Russian cavalry, and was widely used in the Russian civil war. So a Mongol formation with a Mongol name survived for 700 years, right into the Soviet period.
The Russians' great emphasis on artillery, in which the Russian army has always had a tradition of excellence, may also date back to fighting the Mongols. Russian writers commented that artillery was the one thing that really frightened the Mongols, and it was the only weapons system that gave the Russians the crucial advantage of range over their powerful composite bows.
The Asiatic component of the Russian army and its experience of campaigns in the Caucasus and central Asia, combined with its schizophrenic position on the edge of Europe, sometimes playing a European role, sometimes not, gave it many characteristics which it shares with the British army.
Under Ivan ‘the Terrible’ professional units of gunners (pushkary) and musketeers (streltsy) were formed, although the Russian army remained a predominantly cavalry force on the oriental model until the 17th century. Then Russia began to look to the west, a process which began in earnest under Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich in 1645-76. After the Thirty Years War and the British civil wars there were plenty of mercenaries for whom Russia offered both safety from reprisals and opportunity, including Scotsmen like Gen Patrick Gordon, who entered Russian service in 1661.
Russia exerted a fascination on western intellectuals which has continued to this day. John Milton and Daniel Defoe both wrote about it. Milton noted that the Russians fought ‘without order, nor willingly give battail but by stealth or ambush; of cold and hard Diet marvellously patient’, an assessment with which the Wehrmacht in 1941-5 would probably have agreed. An early 18th-century assessment of the Russian fleet similarly stressed Russian cunning and their expertise at ‘a handsome defence, ever a Russian's masterpiece’.
The process of westernization accelerated under Peter ‘the Great’, who created a regular army on the western model, based on a system of conscription. The Russians learned by their mistakes, losing to the Swedes at Narva in 1700 but winning at Poltava in 1709. The army regulations (Ustav voinskiy) of 1716 established a regular army of 112, 000 men, comprising 70, 000 infantry, 38, 000 cavalry, and 4, 000 artillerymen.
By the mid-18th century the Russian army had expanded to 331, 000, ready for Russia's appearance as a major player in European politics in the Seven Years War. At the battle of Kunersdorf on 12 August 1759 a Russian-Austrian army under Russian Gen Saltykov defeated Frederick ‘the Great’, and the following year a Russian cavalry raid reached Berlin. The Russians introduced excellent new artillery including the ‘unicorn’ howitzer and at the battle of Paltsig (modern Pałcł in Poland) used a form of indirect fire. Russia was now a great European power, and would remain so. In 1763 the Russian general staff was formed. During this period the main European powers had moved towards characteristic uniform colours, though with many exceptions, and the Russians adopted a very practical dark green.
Russia's double-headed eagle continued to face east—or south—as well as west, however. There were a total of nine Russo-Turkish wars (1676-81, 1686-1700, 1710-13, 1735-9, 1768-74, 1787-91, 1806-12, 1828-9, and 1877-8), not counting the Crimean war and WW I, the first of which began against Turkey and the second of which included large-scale action against Turkey on the Caucasus front. The fifth and sixth Russo-Turkish wars provided a hard school for many 18th- and early 19th-century Russian commanders, including Rumyantsev, Suvorov, and Kutuzov.
A key figure in the development of the Russian army was Potemkin, who established a Russian trend for practical, comfortable, but stylish uniforms. Potemkin's easygoing uniforms were discarded under mad Tsar Paul, who ruled 1796-1801 and ordered a return to Prussian-style drill and uniforms and pigtails. The Russian army which goose-stepped into battle at Austerlitz in 1805 was still run on the lines laid down by Paul. After the defeat at Austerlitz the Russians discarded the Prussian system and began training their troops to conduct aimed fire and make use of natural cover. In 1809 a new 0.7 inch musket was introduced. The war ministry had also been founded in 1802 (from 1802-12 it was called the ‘Ministry of Land Forces’) and officers began undertaking field training and staff rides. As a result, the Russian army was much better schooled and equipped to take the field against Napoleon in 1812.
During the ‘long peace’ which followed the Napoleonic wars the European Russian army ossified, reflecting the backward state of the economy. However, in the Caucasus the Russians were fighting a vicious war against local tribes (1817-64) including the great guerrilla leader Shamyl, an experience similar to that of the British in India or the US army in the west at the same time. Furthermore the 1848 revolutions gave the Russian army an opportunity to deploy the first force ever sent on operations (as opposed to on exercises) by railway. The ‘Eastern war’, as the Crimean war was known in Russia, showed the backwardness of the Russian army, still equipped with smooth-bore muskets, compared with the French and British who had the new Minié rifle. Their inferiority was even more apparent at sea, where the Russian wooden fleet declined to give battle to the iron-framed, steam-powered vessels of Britain and France. However, for the Russians the Crimean peninsula (where Turks and Piedmontese were also employed) was a minor theatre: the main potential theatre was in central Europe and they also fought a war with the Turks in the Caucasus with Shamyl at their back.
It was obvious that what would later be called a ‘revolution in military affairs’ was taking place, and the Russians determined to do something about it. The liberal war minister Gen Dmitry Milyutin set in train a series of military reforms between 1860 and 1870. Most remarkable was the invention of the system of Military Districts (MDs), from 1863, which survived into the Soviet period. Russia was so vast—it stretched from Poland more than halfway round the world to Alaska, which was not sold to the USA until 1867—that the only way to defend it was to make each MD able to fight a war on its own. This happened twice in the Soviet period, though in both cases a single MD was not quite up to it. The Leningrad MD fought the war with Finland in 1939-40 and the Turkestan MD was responsible for the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Milyutin's reforms included examination of the movement of troops by rail and water (1864) and of Russia's strategic railways (1866). Both were chaired by Gen Mikhail Ivanin, a veteran of the central Asian expedition to Khiva in 1839-40 and an expert on the Mongols. In 1874 Russia also introduced a modern system of universal short service conscription, to replace the older system where certain peasants had been called up for long periods of service.
In 1877 Russia was drawn into war with Turkey in support of her Orthodox and Slavic kinsmen in Serbia and Bulgaria. Volunteers had been going to the Balkans for some years before. The Russian army, reformed by Milyutin, performed brilliantly. In the battle of Avliyar-Aladja, they used the telegraph to co-ordinate an attack on a wide front, and pushed Lt Gen Yuri Gurko's forward detachment through the little-used Khainkoi Pass through the Balkans to take the main Shipka Pass in the rear, and then to cut Turkish communications. It was the prototype of the Great Patriotic war ‘forward detachment’ and ‘mobile group’, and of the ‘operational manoeuvre group’ which caused NATO analysts such alarm in the 1980s. The Russian army stopped, in part to avoid clashing with the British who did not want them to seize Istanbul.
It was also in the 1870s that the Russian army began its extraordinarily rigorous and academic exploration of the likely character of future war. More than the other great European powers, they took the lessons of the American civil war seriously, particularly with regard to cavalry ‘raids’, known as Americanskiy reyd.
The Russian army which went to war in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 was, in spite of the common impression, a good one. The Russians were well equipped, especially with artillery, and fought well. There were two problems: Gen Kuropatkin, the former war minister, tried to bring about a single decisive battle, in an era when battlefronts had extended to make this impossible, and the Russian army had to be supplied along an incomplete single-track railway over about 4, 000 miles (6, 436 km). In spite of that, Kuropatkin was optimistic that the Russians could win, until the 1905 revolution in European Russia forced the government to end the war.
The Russians were similarly unlucky in 1914. Between 1908 and 1915 the Russian army was reorganized under the CGS, then war minister, Vladimir Sukhomlinov. He responded correctly to the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war, but his reforms were not complete when war started. During this period a group of bright young officers, who would later join the Red Army, including Aleksandr Neznamov, began working on a unified military doctrine. The Russians mobilized faster than the Germans expected, and won their first battle, at Gumbinen. They had prepared for a short, sharp, mobile war—the wrong war. As in the west, they rapidly experienced a shell shortage. A number of western journalists were with the Russian army and their reports indicate they were generally impressed. Despite defeat at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the Russians held the Germans and regularly bested the Austrians. The Brusilov offensive in June 1916, timed to coincide with the British Somme offensive, was brilliantly planned and came close to achieving a breakthrough. The Russians attempted a final great offensive, the ‘Kerensky offensive’ of summer 1917, but it failed. Contrary to Lenin's statement that the Russian army ‘voted for peace with its feet’, the evidence indicates that many Russian units stood their ground until the November revolution (see Russian Revolutions). Freytag-Loringhoven was right. The imperial Russian army remained, to the end, a redoubtable adversary.
Some officers, including the brilliant Gen Mikhail Alekseyev, joined the ‘White’ forces, opposed to the revolution, in the Russian civil war that followed. But some 50, 000 imperial officers—often those from Moscow or Petrograd—joined the new Red Army, founded by a decree of 28 January 1918 since it became obvious that the revolution would have to defend itself. By the end of April 1918 the Red Army was 196, 000 strong. By autumn 1920, at the end of the main phase of the civil war, it was 5.5 million. Although led at the highest level by Trotsky, the mechanics of fighting were left to ex-imperial Russian army officers under political supervision—the origin of the commissar system—while imperial army NCOs formed the next generation of senior officers. Very senior officers like Brusilov, the CGS during WW I, Nikolay Mikhnevich, and Maj Gen Aleksandr Svechin moved into teaching positions; more junior officers like Tukhachevskiy and Boris Shaposhnikov rapidly assumed senior command and staff positions. It was the latter officers who were mainly killed in the great purge of 1937, allowing the tsarist NCOs like Zhukov and Konstantin Rokossovskiy to take command and become marshals during the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 1941-5. Shaposhnikov, a tsarist cavalry officer who had completed the General Staff Academy in 1910, survived, uniquely, to be CGS at the beginning of the 1941-5 war and a Deputy People's Commissar of Defence. Stalin said it was because Shaposhnikov did everything he was told.
The continuity between the imperial army and the Red Army was underplayed, though acknowledged, in the Soviet period. Neznamov, who had worked on military doctrine before WW I, now began publishing and during the 1920s the Red Army developed its understanding of the operational level of war. An enormous effort went into military education, to provide new working-class commanders with the knowledge and education needed to handle large military formations, and to enlist them into the communist party.
During 1924-5 the Frunze military reforms took place, leading to the creation of a ‘mixed’ system with a small professional army at the core of a territorial militia which could be called up in war. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Red Army was responsible for some of the most original and far-reaching developments in military theory on the conduct of total war and the development of deep battle, especially the work of Aleksandr Svechin, Triandafillov, and Tukhachevskiy. By 1935 it was clear that technological advances made it essential to have a ‘high quality mass army’—an ambition the USSR struggled to achieve, probably bankrupting itself in the process.
In 1937 the Soviet armed forces, including the army, were devastated by Stalin's great purge. The army lost 3 out of 5 marshals, 3 out of 5 ‘army commanders first class’ (generals), all ten second class, 50 out of 57 corps commanders, 154 out of 186 divisional commanders, and 401 out of 456 colonels. Although these figures were not published until 1987, foreign observers at the time knew enough of what had happened to believe the Red Army had been decapitated and would prove easy meat in a future war. The way the Red Army looked in the invasions of eastern Poland in 1939, the Baltic States in 1940, and its performance in the 1939-40 Russo-Finnish war suggested they might be right. By this time the Red Army was receiving some remarkable new equipment but appeared unable to use it.
BARBAROSSA, the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941 that began the war on the eastern front, was the most devastating attack in the entire history of war. The Red Army, supported and sometimes disciplined by the troops of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), fought stubbornly, and inflicted the first great defeats on the German armies at Moscow and Stalingrad. The conceptual studies of the inter-war years bore fruit in vast operations of staggering scale and scope. The old tsarist badges and insignia were reintroduced, and victory over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan brought glory to Russian arms. Although it was very variable in quality, sometimes guilty of atrocities, and maintained in battle by a combination of patriotism, courage, and coercion, the Red Army's reputation soared. In 1946 it was renamed the Soviet Army.
The ‘revolution in military affairs’ brought about by the nuclear weapon and the ballistic missile to carry it led to the creation of a new armed service in 1959—the Strategic Missile Forces (RVSN), avoiding the awkward problem which faced western governments in deciding whether to give the new weapons to the army, navy, air force, or all three. A strategic air defence force (PVO) had been created in 1941, operating both aircraft and anti-aircraft guns and missiles, creating a structure with five armed services rather than the traditional three. The army was last in the queue for recruits—the best went to the high-tech services. We will never know how it would have performed against NATO but it would have been formidable. The Soviets made mistakes in Afghanistan in 1979-89, but learned from experience. The lack of a tradition of doctrine for operations short of major war—it had focused totally on large-scale armoured and nuclear warfare—proved a major disadvantage.
On 8 December 1991 the USSR broke up and shortly afterwards the new Russian army was formed. Its uniforms, badges, and insignia were little changed apart from the reintroduction of the double-headed eagle, facing east and west. The financial crisis of the 1990s meant that soldiers and officers went unpaid, and it was difficult to attract recruits. In 1996 President Yeltsin announced to intention to end conscription by 2000—this was hastily pushed back to 2005 and then 2015. At the time of publication, Russia cannot afford professional armed forces, though it would like them. The army's performance in Chechnya was variable, but it was ultimately successful. Its most professional troops—the airborne forces—have performed very creditably in Bosnia. The Russian army will no doubt rise from its present crisis as it has before. It will always be a ‘redoubtable adversary’. Or, preferably, as it was to America and Britain in much of two world wars, a mighty ally and friend.
Bibliography
- Bellamy, Christopher, ‘Seventy Years On: Similarities between the Modern Soviet Army and its Tsarist Predecessor’, RUSI Journal (Sept. 1979).
- —— ‘Heirs of Genghis Khan’, RUSI (Mar. 1983).
- —— ‘Antecedents of the Modern Soviet Operational Manoeuvre Group’, RUSI (Sept. 1984).
- Duffy, Christopher, Russia's Military Way to the West (London, 1981).
- Erickson, John, The Soviet High Command, 1917-1941 (London, 1967).
- —— The Road to Stalingrad (London, 1975).
- —— The Road to Berlin (London, 1982).
- Milton, John, A Brief History of Moscovia and other Countries Lying Eastward of Russia as far as Cathay (1682; repub. London, 1929).
- Sovetskaya voyennaya entsiklopediya (Soviet Military Encyclopedia), vol.
7 (Moscow, 1979)
— Christopher Bellamy
