HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN MILITARY
In the Soviet era, the armed forces were the most stable institution in the nation, exercising strong influence over general national security policy as well as over specific issues of military doctrine. However, the last regime of the Soviet Union, that of Mikhail S. Gorbachev (in office 1985-91), saw unprecedented debate over military issues, including a movement away from the primarily offensive concerns (which always had been cloaked in declarations of their necessity for an effective national defense) to a more defensive position in military doctrine. It is now known that discussion of such a change began in the Soviet Union as early as the 1970s but only became manifest between 1987 and 1989. Ultimately, the change was dictated by policy makers' recognition of grave shortcomings in the Soviet Union's political, economic, and technological positions versus the West. After long discussion, in 1993 Russia finally produced a military doctrine that nominally reflected the new military thinking. But that doctrine was only the first step in a long and painful process of reassessing the needs and capabilities of Russia's armed forces under a completely new set of global and domestic circumstances. [Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, the former Russian Republic, henceforth known as the Russian Federation, inherited about 85 percent of the union's overall military establishment, including manpower, defense industries, and equipment. However, Russia inherited only about 60 percent of the union's economic capacity — the resources needed for future support of that military machine. Moreover, the military power that remained was a fragmentary mixture of elements from the former Soviet military structure rather than an organized whole. Many of the priorities in the Soviet Union's national security doctrine — such as the capability to launch amphibious invasions in support of client states on the other side of the world — had no logical priority in the new Russian state. Requiring substantial reshaping of their capabilities according to economic resources, the Russian armed forces in the 1990s have received budget allocations sufficient to maintain a force numbering less than half the 1.5 million personnel on duty in mid-1996. Beginning in 1994, the campaign fought in Chechnya illustrated clearly that Russian forces were poorly coordinated and not combat ready. *
The decline of the Russian armed forces — and the shocking shrinkage of the territory they had occupied until the beginning of the 1990s — was a blow to national pride. Nationalist politicians urged a new military buildup that would return Russia to the superpower status of the Cold War years. Particularly in the election year of 1996, national security policy became entwined in political rhetoric, and, as with other urgent issues in Russia, constructive solutions were delayed until the nature of the next presidential regime could be clarified. In the mid-1990s, individual steps such as arms agreements and an apparent shift of strategic emphasis from the West toward China continued, but overall public and state support for the armed forces languished. *
At the same time, the Russian military retained a strong role in the formation of a new national foreign policy, especially policy relating to the recently independent former Soviet states, referred to in Russia as the "near abroad." Military occupation under various guises continued in the Caucasus, Moldova, and Central Asia, as well as the separatist Republic of Chechnya, and in 1996 strong nationalist factions exerted pressure to increase the Russian presence in order to tighten Russia's links with the other former republics of the Soviet Union. *
Military in the Tsarist Era
Modern Russian military history begins with Peter the Great, who established the Imperial Russian Army (see Peter the Great Under History). That force, conceived by Peter along the Western lines that he had studied, won its first great battle against the Swedish army of Charles XII at Poltava in 1709. The first great Russian naval victory, at the Hango Peninsula on the Baltic Sea in 1714, also came at the expense of the Swedes; Peter had modernized the Russian navy with the same diligence he applied to the army. The victories over Sweden made Russia the dominant power in the Baltic region.[Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
For the first time, under Peter the armed forces were staffed by recruits from the peasantry, whose twenty-five-year obligation made them professional soldiers and sailors devoted to service because they had been liberated from serfdom — together with all their offspring — in the bargain. Officers were nobles called to an equally rigorous lifetime service. Under Peter, Russia had the largest standing army in Europe, and elements of the military system he introduced lasted until 1917. *
Under Catherine II (the Great; r. 1762-96), the Russian Empire expanded to the west, the south, and the east, and wars were fought with the Ottoman Empire (1768-74 and 1787-92) and Poland (1794-95). The greatest Russian military leader of Catherine's time was Aleksandr Suvorov, who fought in the second Russo-Turkish War and the Polish campaign, then led a Russian and Austrian army against the revolutionary French in northern Italy in 1799. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Russian armies continued a long series of wars against the Ottoman Empire. They also met Napoleon's French forces at several points in Europe; the most famous encounter was the legendary defeat of Napoleon's 1812 invasion force by the Russians under Mikhail Kutuzov. That victory established the pattern of scorched-earth retreat that left Napoleon and succeeding invaders without material support, and it brought a Russian army to Paris in triumphant occupation. *
Under Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825- 55), Russia became known as the "gendarme of Europe," an archconservative defender of monarchies against the forces of liberation that had begun to sweep Europe in the previous century. In 1831 Nicholas quelled a Polish rebellion against his own empire, and in 1849 Russia sent 100,000 troops to suppress an uprising by Hungarian patriots against the Austrian Empire. The Crimean War (1853-56), the fruit of Europe's complex system of alliances and a series of diplomatic misunderstandings, centered on the British and French siege of the Russian port of Sevastopol', which was well defended for nearly a year before surrendering. However, the Russian defeat in that campaign revealed that Russian command and supply systems had fallen behind those of Western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. *
Russian Military in the Revolutionary Period
In the second half of the century, Russia waged a series of military campaigns to conquer the khanates of Central Asia, extending the empire and providing a domestic supply of cotton. With relatively little military resistance, the entire region had been incorporated into the empire by 1885. Russia's next military campaign, however, was not so reassuring. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 brought stunning defeats on land and at sea, capped by the naval Battle of Tsushima in which the Russian Baltic Fleet was decimated (see the Russo-Japanese War). Like the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War was a signal that Russia's war machine was not keeping pace with the modern world. Ten years later, World War I would confirm that evaluation, as an inept defense administration and poorly equipped troops suffered heavy losses to the Germans. [Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
Despite those failures, it was growing dissatisfaction on the home front that ultimately undermined Russia's military effort in World War I. Under the direct command of the tsar, the army actually performed quite well in 1916, but by 1917 the war effort had crippled civilian society and readied Russia for the overthrow of the tsar. As the home front faltered in its moral and material support of the military, the results of 1916 were reversed. The Provisional Government that followed the tsar in 1917 was determined to continue the war; that policy was a major factor in the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in toppling the Provisional Government only eight months after it took power. *
The imperial army and navy disintegrated after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Although the Bolsheviks quickly signed a peace treaty with Germany, there was soon a need for a military force to defend the new state against the anticommunist Whites in what became a bloody, three-year civil war. In April 1918, the Red Army was established when the Soviet government announced compulsory military service for peasants and workers. The army's chief organizer was Leon Trotsky, the new nation's first commissar of war (1918-24); Trotsky's initial officer cadre was made up of about 50,000 former tsarist officers. Trotsky was able to mold his peasant and worker recruits into an effective force that eventually prevailed over five separate White armies, with the benefit of access to Russia's industrial heartland and concentrated lines of supply and communications. Under Trotsky, political officers were attached to all military units to ensure the loyalty of all individuals — a practice that persisted throughout the Soviet era. *
Military in the Early Soviet Era
When the Civil War ended in 1921, General Mikhail Tukhachevskiy led an extensive program of reorganization and equipment modernization; he also established several military schools. In the first fifteen years of the Red Army, communist party membership increased rapidly among the enlisted ranks and, especially, among the officer corps. By the mid-1930s, training schools and academies had turned out a generation of young officers and noncommissioned officers with strong political indoctrination, thus ensuring the ideological loyalty of the entire armed forces. Beginning in 1931, Tukhachevskiy began a large-scale rearmament program based on the industrial development of the five-year plans, and the armed forces and their supplies of equipment were enlarged greatly as the shadow of war began falling over Europe in the mid-1930s. [Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
In 1937 the purges instigated by Joseph V. Stalin (in office 1927-53) reached the army. Tukhachevskiy, now first deputy commissar of war, was executed for treason together with seven top generals. As many as 30,000 other officers were imprisoned or dismissed, leaving the Red Army without experienced commanders at the end of the 1930s. The first campaign that revealed this weakness was the so-called Winter War against Finland (1939-40), in which an estimated 100,000 troops of the Red Army died while defeating a small Finnish army. *
Soviet Military in World War II
Although the Nazi invasion of 1941 drove far into the Russian interior to threaten Leningrad and Moscow, a new generation of officers gradually asserted themselves as the Germans were driven from Russian territory in 1943 and 1944 after the climactic Battle of Stalingrad. A crucial event in that turnaround was Stalin's removal of political officers having parallel command authority, allowing his top officers to exercise military judgment independent of ideological concerns. [Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
The most important Russian military leader of World War II was Marshal Georgiy Zhukov, who was instrumental at four key points of Soviet resistance: the siege of Leningrad; the defense of Moscow, the first point at which the German advance was stopped; the Battle of Stalingrad (February 1943); and the Battle of Kursk (July 1943), in which the last strong German counteroffensive was defeated. Zhukov also commanded the final push against the German armies across Belorussia, Ukraine, and Poland. In April 1945, Zhukov led the Red Army's final assault on Berlin that ended what Russians called the Great Patriotic War. *
Soviet Military After World War II
The Soviet military earned society's gratitude by its performance in the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is commonly called in Russia), a costly but unified and heroic defense of the homeland against invading Nazi armies. In the postwar era, the Soviet military maintained its positive image and budgetary support in good part because of incessant government propaganda about the need to defend the country against the capitalist West. [Source: Glenn E. Curtis, Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
By the end of World War II, the Soviet armed forces had swelled to about 11.4 million officers and soldiers, and the military had suffered about 7 million deaths. At that point, this force was recognized as the most powerful military in the world. In 1946 the Red Army was redesignated as the Soviet army, and by 1950 demobilization had reduced the total active armed forces to about 3 million troops. From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, the Soviet armed forces focused on adapting to the changed nature of warfare in the era of nuclear arms and on achieving parity with the United States in strategic nuclear weapons. Conventional military power showed its continued importance, however, when the Soviet Union used its troops to invade Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep those 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 than ever before in regional conflicts and local wars. The Soviet Union sent arms and military advisers to a variety of Third World allies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Soviet generals planned military operations against rebels in Angola and Ethiopia. However, Soviet troops saw little combat in such assignments until the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. There, they fought a counterinsurgency campaign against Afghan rebels for nearly eight and one-half years. 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. By early 1989, all of the roughly 110,000 Soviet troops who had been deployed had left Afghanistan. *
After incurring the heavy blow of failure in the Afghanistan campaign, the Soviet armed forces faced an even larger, albeit nonviolent setback as the Soviet sphere of influence in Europe began to crumble in 1989. It disappeared entirely by 1991, when the Warsaw Pact alliance dissolved. As a result, by 1994 all Soviet/Russian troops had been withdrawn from territory west of Ukraine and Belarus, as well as from the three Baltic states, which achieved independence in 1991. Together with the end of the Soviet Union as a state, the events of that period set the military on a bewildering search for a new identity and a new doctrine. *
Impact of the Soviet Union Break-Up on the Soviet Military
The demise of the Soviet Union also ended much of the threat of military confrontation between Russia and the West that had characterized the Cold War. Already in the mid-1980s, however, Soviet military doctrine had begun shifting to a more defensive posture in recognition of the country's economic limitations, even as Soviet occupation of the Warsaw Pact nations and of Afghanistan continued. Beginning in 1988, the Soviet military establishment suffered a series of major blows. The military operation in Afghanistan, which had little success against fervid guerrilla forces, was declared a failure in 1988, and Soviet forces withdrew after nearly ten years of combat. In 1989 the Warsaw Pact alliance began to disintegrate as all the East European member nations rejected their communist governments; the alliance dissolved in 1991, and by 1994 all Russian forces had left Eastern Europe.
In 1992 the Russian Federation inherited the bulk of the Soviet Union's armed forces as well as all of their problems. Within a few years, both the geopolitical and the budgetary conditions of Russia's military had changed dramatically without appropriate adjustments in military doctrine. Although the size of the military was reduced between 1992 and 1996 from about 2.8 million personnel to about 1.5 million, reductions were disproportionately high in the enlisted ranks, leaving a bloated officer corps. In 1996 both the military doctrine (which was updated fragmentarily in 1993) and military equipment still reflected the Soviet-era priority of large-scale mechanized land war and/or nuclear war to be fought on the continent of Europe.*
In 1996 elements of a new military doctrine appeared, but fundamental conflict remained between reformers and hard-liners in the policy-making establishment. The strong positions taken by the opposing sides suggested that enacting a comprehensive new doctrine would involve a long struggle. Despite the diminished capability of Russia's economy to support the military, hard-liners insisted that major reductions would damage national security. As budgetary support of routine military readiness has shrunk drastically in the mid-1990s, calls for large-scale reform have intensified. Among the main reform elements cited are downsizing the armed forces, shifting their emphasis to mobile warfare, eliminating much of the corrupt and flabby corps of senior officers, relying more heavily on contract volunteers rather than conscripts, and discarding the concept of military parity with the United States.*
A rise in oil prices and oil tax revenues allowed the government to earmark more money for the military. In the early 2000s, Putin reduced the size of the armed forces and increased pay but failed to give the military the kind of serious overhaul that it desperately needs. Experts at the time said the military could be trimmed down to 500,000 troops and their training and strategy needed to be radically changed. The Russian military was supposed to begin a gradual transition to a professional service in 2005. The plan called for the spending of billions of dollars and gradually replacing conscripted soldiers with professional ones.
Decline of Russian Military
In the early 1990s, there were new ramifications of the morale and command problems that had surfaced earlier. In a new social environment of permissiveness and diversification, increasing numbers of Russia's youth rejected military service as a patriotic duty, many top individuals in the junior officer corps resigned because of poor pay and housing, and the incidence of crime increased significantly. At the same time, corruption and politicization destroyed the unity that had characterized the senior officer corps during the Soviet era. These changes all occurred as the need for a new set of national security guidelines became increasingly evident.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, The Russian military was overmanned and underfunded. It had five times as many generals as the U.S. army and security forces lacked pride, morale and a sense of mission. Many soldiers were drunk. Generals sat at empty desks with nothing to do. Those that worked remain locked in the Cold War, devising ways to defeat NATO as former Soviet republics were preparing to join the organization. The Russian army was humiliated in Chechnya. Russian ground forces were unable to defeat Chechen rebels in 1994-96.
The Chechnya conflict, the first post-Soviet test of those forces, revealed shocking insufficiencies even in elite units. In August 1996, the sudden loss of the Chechen capital of Groznyy, from which Russian forces had driven the Chechen guerrillas in 1995, forced the withdrawal of Russian forces under the terms of the cease-fire that followed. In the second draft call of 1996, an estimated 37,000 men out of a target number of 215,000 conscripts failed to report. This was the largest recorded episode of draft dodging since the establishment of the Soviet Union. In the last months of 1996 the pay arrears of the Ministry of Defense mounted steadily, and there were rumors that military strike committees had been formed. Already in August, an estimated US$2.8 billion was owed to Russia's military personnel. Meanwhile, accusations of corruption and incompetence in the military establishment continued. [Source: Glenn E. Curtis, Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
Trucks broke down all the time. The Russian army radar surveillance network was temporally shut down over an unpaid electric bill. Foreign journalist were often surprised to see empty beer cans and spare parts lying on the floors of military helicopters running combat missions. The military failure in Chechnya was the most obvious indication of a grave overall decline in post-Soviet Russia's military establishment.
Miliary spending shrunk from around $380 billion (16 percent of GNP) in 1985 to around $30 billion (5 percent of GNP) in 2000. In 2001, the military was only at about 80 percent of its authorized strength as result of draft dodging and desertions. Poorly-trained, low-paid soldiers were deployed to work on submarines, planes and missiles that carried nuclear weapons.
Russian Troops Leave the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
The end of the Soviet Union itself, required withdrawal of troops stationed in the other fourteen republics; in this process, much equipment and weaponry was left behind and claimed by the newly independent states. The return of large numbers of troops into Russia caused an enormous logistical problem for the military; furthermore, the morale of the institution was seriously eroded by withdrawals of unprecedented magnitude from regions assumed to be permanent parts of the Soviet domain. At the same time, serious examples of corruption were exposed at the highest command levels of the armed forces. [Source: Glenn E. Curtis, Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
Russia initially kept troops on eight former Soviet countries. In the early 1990s, Russian soldiers left the Baltics. The Soviet presence in the Baltics was larger than the security forces of the Scandinavian countries combined: perhaps 300,000 soldiers, hundreds of airplanes and a work force that rivaled that of the civilian economy. The Estonians were happy to see them go. More than 91,000 acres of land in north central Estonia, an area once called the Estonian Switzerland for its beauty, was turned to wasteland by bombing practice. Jet routinely dump fuel before landing.
According to the Ministry of Defense, between 1991 and 1995 the Soviet Union and then Russia withdrew about 730,000 troops from eleven countries: Azerbaijan, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, and Slovakia. Including military families, about 1.2 million people were involved in this shift. Besides the troops, all the paraphernalia of fifteen army directorates, forty-nine combined-arms divisions, seventy brigades, seventy-two aviation regiments, and twenty-four helicopter regiments also were moved from foreign posts. [Source: Library of Congress, July 1996 *]
The last 2,000 Russian troops left Berlin on August 31, 1994. One of the last things the Soviet soldiers did before they left was was apply a fresh coat of gold paint to the Cyrillic names of Russian soldiers who died during World War II. When one soldiers was asked what he knew about the graves. "Nothing," he said.↗
One of the biggest problems is what to do with all the Russian soldiers when they got back. Soldiers in the Soviet Army had been stationed in Poland for four decades. In Poland they led a pretty grim life and were treated with indifference by the Poles. But what awaited them in Russia was even worse.: slim prospects of employment and housing set up in abandoned factories.↗
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Last updated May 2016