Soviet Army
The Soviet Ground Forces was the land warfare service branch of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1946 to 1992. It was preceded by the Red Army.
After the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991, the Ground Forces remained under the command of the Commonwealth of Independent States until it was formally abolished on 14 February 1992. The Soviet Ground Forces were principally succeeded by the Russian Ground Forces in Russian territory. Outside of Russia, many units and formations were taken over by the post-Soviet states; some were withdrawn to Russia, and some dissolved amid conflict, notably in the Caucasus.
In Soviet military parlance the term armiya referred to the combined land and air components of the Soviet Armed Forces, encompassing the Ground Forces as well as the Strategic Rocket Forces, the Air Defence Forces, and the Air Forces.
After World War II
At the end of World War II the Red Army had over 500 rifle divisions and about a tenth that number of tank formations. Their war experience gave the Soviets such faith in tank forces that the infantry force was cut significantly. A total of 130 rifle divisions were disbanded in the Groups of Forces in Eastern Europe in summer 1945, as well as 2nd Guards Airborne Division, and by the end of 1946, another 193 rifle divisions ceased to exist. Five or more rifle divisions disbanded contributed to the formation of NKVD convoy divisions, some used for escorting Japanese prisoners of war. The Tank Corps of the late war period were converted to tank divisions, and from 1957 the rifle divisions were converted to motor rifle divisions. MRDs had three motorized rifle regiments and a tank regiment, for a total of ten motor rifle battalions and six tank battalions; tank divisions had the proportions reversed.The Land Forces Main Command was created for the first time in March 1946. Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov became Chief of the Soviet Ground Forces in March 1946, but was quickly succeeded by Ivan Konev in July 1946. By September 1946, the army decreased from 5 million soldiers to 2.7 million in the Soviet Union and from 2 million to 1.5 million in Europe. Four years later the Main Command was disbanded, an organisational gap that "probably was associated in some manner with the Korean War". The Main Command was reformed in 1955. On 24 February 1964, the Defense Council of the Soviet Union decided to disband the Ground Forces Main Command, with almost the same wording as in 1950. Its functions were transferred to the General Staff, while the chiefs of the combat arms and specialised forces came under the direct command of the minister of defence. The Main Command was then recreated again in November 1967. Army General Ivan Pavlovsky was appointed Commander-in-Chief of Ground Forces with effect from 5 November 1967.
From 1945 to 1948, the Soviet Armed Forces were reduced from about 11.3 million to about 2.8 million men, a demobilisation controlled first, by increasing the number of military districts to 33, then reduced to 21 in 1946. The personnel strength of the Ground Forces was reduced from 9.8 million to 2.4 million.
To establish and secure the USSR's eastern European geopolitical interests, Red Army troops who liberated eastern Europe from Nazi rule in 1945 remained in place to secure pro-Soviet régimes in Eastern Europe and to protect against attack from Europe. Elsewhere, they may have assisted the NKVD in suppressing anti-Soviet resistance in Western Ukraine and the Forest Brothers in the three Baltic states. Soviet troops, including the 39th Army, remained at Port Arthur and Dalian on the northeast Chinese coast until 1955. Control was then handed over to the new Chinese communist government.
Within the Soviet Union, the troops and formations of the Ground Forces were divided among the military districts. There were 32 of them in 1945. Sixteen districts remained from the mid-1970s to the end of the USSR. Yet, the greatest Soviet Army concentration was in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, which suppressed the anti-Soviet Uprising of 1953 in East Germany. East European Groups of Forces were the Northern Group of Forces in Poland, and the Southern Group of Forces in Hungary, which put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In 1958, Soviet troops were withdrawn from Romania. The Central Group of Forces in Czechoslovakia was established after Warsaw Pact intervention against the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1969, in the far east of the Soviet Union, the Sino-Soviet border conflict prompted establishment of a 16th military district, the Central Asian Military District, at Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.
Cold War
From 1947 to 1989, Western intelligence agencies estimated that the Soviet Ground Forces' strength remained c. 2.8 million to c. 5.3 million men. In 1989 the Ground Forces had two million men. To maintain those numbers, Soviet law required a three-year military service obligation from every able man of military age, until 1967, when the Ground Forces reduced it to a two-year draft obligation. By the 1970s, the change to a two-year system seems to have created the hazing practice known as dedovshchina, "rule of the grandfathers", which destroyed the status of most NCOs. Instead the Soviet system relied very heavily on junior officers. Soviet Armed Forces life could be "grim and dangerous": a Western researcher talking to former Soviet officers was told, in effect that this was because they did not "value human life".By the middle of the 1980s, the Ground Forces contained about 210 divisions. About three-quarters were motor rifle divisions and the remainder tank divisions. There were also a large number of artillery divisions, separate artillery brigades, engineer formations, and other combat support formations. However, only relatively few formations were fully war ready. By 1983, Soviet divisions were divided into either "Ready" or "Not Ready" categories, each with three subcategories. The internal military districts usually contained only one or two fully Ready divisions, with the remainder lower strength formations. The Soviet system anticipated a war preparation period which would bring the strength of the Ground Forces up to about three million.
Soviet planning for most of the Cold War period would have seen Armies of four to five divisions operating in Fronts made up of around four armies. On 8 February 1979, the first of the new High Commands, for the Far East, was created at Ulan-Ude in Buryatia under Army General Vasily Petrov. In September 1984, three more were established to control multi-Front operations in Europe and at Baku to supervise three southern military districts. Western analysts expected these new headquarters to control multiple Fronts in time of war, and usually a Soviet Navy Fleet.
From the 1950s to the 1980s the branches of the Ground Forces included the Motor Rifle Troops; the Soviet Airborne Forces, from April 1956 to March 1964; Air Assault Troops ; the Tank Troops; the Rocket Forces and Artillery ; Army Aviation, until December 1990; Signals Troops; the Engineer Troops; the Air Defence Troops of the Ground Forces; the Chemical Troops of the USSR; and the Rear of the Ground Forces.
In 1955, the Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact with its Eastern European socialist allies, solidifying military coordination between Soviet forces and their socialist counterparts. The Ground Forces created and directed the Eastern European armies in its image for the remainder of the Cold War, shaping them for a potential confrontation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. After 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, General Secretary of the Communist Party, reduced the Ground Forces to build up the Strategic Rocket Forces, emphasizing the armed forces' nuclear capabilities. He removed Marshal Georgy Zhukov from the Politburo in 1957 for opposing these reductions in the Ground Forces. Nonetheless, Soviet forces possessed too few theater-level nuclear weapons to fulfill war-plan requirements until the mid-1980s. The General Staff maintained plans to invade Western Europe whose massive scale was only made publicly available after researchers gained access to Eastern Bloc files following the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Korean War
The Red Army advanced into northern Korea in 1945 after the end of World War II, with the intention of aiding in the process of rebuilding the country. Marshals Kirill Meretskov and Terentii Shtykov explained to Joseph Stalin the necessity of Soviet help in building infrastructure and industry in northern Korea. Additionally, the Soviets aided in the creation of the North Korean People's Army and Korean People's Air Force. The Soviets believed it would be strategic to the Soviet Union to support Korea's growth directly. When northern Korea eventually wished to invade South Korea in 1950, Kim Il Sung traveled to Moscow to gain approval from Stalin. It was granted with full support, leading to the full-scale invasion of South Korea on 25 June.Vietnam War
The Soviet Union supplied North Vietnam with medical supplies, arms, tanks, planes, helicopters, artillery, anti-aircraft missiles and other military equipment. Soviet crews fired Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles at U.S. F-4 Phantoms, which were shot down over Thanh Hóa in 1965. Over a dozen Soviet soldiers lost their lives in this conflict. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian Federation officials acknowledged that the Soviet Union had stationed up to 3,000 troops in Vietnam during the war.Some Russian sources give more specific numbers. Between 1953 and 1991, the hardware donated by the Soviet Union included 2,000 tanks, 1,700 APCs, 7,000 artillery guns, over 5,000 anti-aircraft guns, 158 surface-to-air missile launchers, and 120 helicopters. During the war, the Soviets sent North Vietnam annual arms shipments worth $450 million.
From July 1965 to the end of 1974, fighting in Vietnam was observed by some 6,500 officers and generals, as well as more than 4,500 soldiers and sergeants of the Soviet Armed Forces. In addition, Soviet military schools and academies began training Vietnamese soldiers—in all more than 10,000 military personnel.
The KGB had also helped develop the signals intelligence capabilities of the North Vietnamese, through an operation known as Vostok. The Vostok program was a counterintelligence and espionage program. These programs were pivotal in detecting and defeating CIA and South Vietnamese commando teams sent into North Vietnam, as they were detected and captured. The Soviets helped the Ministry of Public Security recruit foreigners within high-level diplomatic circles among the Western-allies of the US, under a clandestine program known as "B12,MM" which produced thousands of high-level documents for nearly a decade, including targets of B-52 strikes. In 1975, the SIGINT services had broken information from Western US-allies in Saigon, determining that the US would not intervene to save South Vietnam from collapse.