Red Army

Red Army, the army of the former Soviet Union, which was officially born on January 28, 1918 out of the old Imperial Russian Army. Its purpose at the outset was to defend the Soviet Union's frontiers and protect the Revolution from its enemies. Recruitment was originally meant to be voluntary, in keeping with Communist ideals, but within months compulsory conscription was introduced. As the product of the Bolshevik Revolution the Red Army had no saluting and indeed no properly defined system of rank until 1935; but in the years that followed it was rendered far more conventional, and soldiers were provided with better pay and amenities.

Prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led to its own fragmentation on the lines of the new nationalities, the Red Army was involved in three major wars—the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), World War II (1939-1945), and the war in Afghanistan of 1979-1989. At the height of the titanic struggle between Stalin and Hitler, the Red Army had a peak strength of 12.5 million men under arms on its north-western, western, and south-western fronts. It suffered appalling losses in 1942 at the decisive battles of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, but ultimately succeeded in turning the tide of the war in favour of the Allies at Kursk in 1943. Kursk has been called the greatest battle in human history, directly involving over two million men. After World War II and the development of nuclear weapons, the Red Army's function changed: it now became an occupying presence in the satellite nations of the Warsaw Pact, crushing uprisings against Communism in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Throughout the 1970s, the Red Army built up its strength in the expectation that it might have to fight and win a conventional war in Europe; at the same time, the Kremlin used it to project Soviet power across the world in opposition to the United States. With the late 1980s came the era of Perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to an end of the Cold War, and the Red Army's final retreat from Afghanistan proved a mortal blow to the system it had faithfully supported for seven decades.