Military history of the Soviet Union
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. More important from the perspective of the speed of the Soviet program, the Soviets had developed more uranium reserves than specialists in the American military had thought possible. 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.
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.
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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.
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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 Conventional Forces in Europe (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, 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.
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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. |
| 1945-1974 | Partisan wars in the Baltic states | Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania | Thousands of Baltic "forest brothers" wage a war of resistance against Soviet occupation. Major fighting ends in the late forties and early fifties. The last partisan, an Estonian, killed in 1974. |
| 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 war in Afghanistan | Afghanistan | The Soviet's launch of a military intervention in 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. |
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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 |
| 1937-39 | Republic of China |
| 1939 | Mongolia |
| 1945-49, 1950-53 | People's Republic of China |
| 1950-53 | North Korea |
| 1961-74 | North Vietnam |
| 1962-64 | Algeria |
| 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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See also
- List of military aircraft of the Soviet Union and the CIS
- Missiles of Russia and the USSR
- List of Soviet tanks
- Soviet Navy
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Notes
- ^ Red Army troops raped even Russian women as they freed them from camps, Daniel Johnson, The Telegraph, 2002-01-24, based on the work of Anthony Beevor, verified 2005-04-02
- ^ Silesian Inferno: War Crimes of the Red Army on its March into Silesia in 1945, Friedrich Grau, ISBN 1-880881-09-8, verified 2005-04-02
- ^ Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm, Matthew White, 1999-2005, Last updated Feb. 2005, verified 2005-04-02
- ^ Grau, Lester W and Gress, Michael A.: The Soviet-Afgan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost: the Russian General Staff. University Press of Kansas, 2002
- ^ Russia Overview, updated 2004-02, produced by Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, verified 2005-04-02
- ^ Anders Åslund, "How small is the Soviet National Income?" in Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr., eds., The Impoverished Superpower: Perestroika and the Soviet Military Burden (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990), p. 49.
- ^ Some information is taken from the appendix "States, Cities, Territories and Periods of Warfare with Participation of Citizens of the Russian Federation." of the Russian Military Pension Law of 2003.
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References
- This article contains material from the Library of Congress Country Studies, which are United States government publications in the public domain. - Soviet Union
- Crozier, Brian: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. Forum, 1999.
- Koenig, William and Schofield, Peter: Soviet Military Power. Hong Kong: Bison Books, 1983.
- Odom, William E.: The Collapse of the Soviet Military. New Haven & London:Yale University Press, 1998.
- Stone, David R.: A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya. Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006.
- Malone, Richard: The Russian Revolution. Cambridge Press 2004
- Blackett, P.M.S.: Fear, War, and the Bomb, Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy New York: Whittlesey House 1949.
- Alperovitz, Gar: Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam, New York, Simon and Shuster 1965
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