Red Army

:This article is about the armed forces of the Soviet Union. See Red Army Faction for the German militant group; Japanese Red Army for the Japanese militant group; and People's Liberation Army for the Chinese Red Army.

The Cold War

After the end of the Second World War, the numbers of the Soviet Army dropped from around 13 million to approximately 5 million. The size of the Army throughout the Cold War remained between 3-5 million, depending on Western estimates. This was due to Soviet law, which required all able-body males of age to serve a minimum of 2 years. As a result, the Soviet Army was the largest active army in the world from 1945 to 1991. Soviet Army units which had liberated the countries of Eastern Europe from German rule remained in some of them to secure the régimes in what became satellite states of the Soviet Union and to deter and to fend off NATO forces. The greatest Soviet military presence based itself in East Germany, in the so-called Western Group of the Armed Forces.

Related Topics:
Second World War - Satellite states - Soviet Union - NATO - East Germany - Western Group of the Armed Forces

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The trauma of the devastating German invasion influenced the Soviet cold-war military doctrine of fighting enemies on their own territory, or in a buffer zone under Soviet hegemony, but in any case preventing any war from reaching Soviet soil. In order to secure these Soviet interests in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Army moved in to quell anti-Soviet uprisings in the German Democratic Republic, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s.

Related Topics:
German Democratic Republic - Hungary - Czechoslovakia

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The confrontation with the US and NATO during the Cold War mainly took the form of mutual deterrence with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union invested heavily in the Army's nuclear capacity, especially in the production of ballistic missiles and of nuclear submarines to deliver them. Open hostilities took the form of wars by proxy, with the Soviet Union and the US supporting loyal client régimes or rebel movements in Third World countries.

Related Topics:
US - NATO - Cold War - Nuclear weapons - Third World

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In 1979, however, the Soviet Army intervened in a civil war raging in Afghanistan. The Soviet Army came to back a Soviet-friendly secular government threatened by Muslim fundamentalist guerillas (including Osama bin Laden) equipped and financed by the United States. In spite of technical superiority, the Soviets could not establish control over the country and suffered heavy losses in guerilla attacks and ambushes, which led Gorbachev finally to withdraw the Soviet forces from the country. The blow to the Army's pride suffered in the debacle of Afghanistan parallels the American trauma over the lost war in Vietnam. The débacle of Afghanistan, moreover, drained away military resources at a time when the Soviet Union had to strain to keep pace with the West. The enormous cost to maintain a 5 million-man peacetime army, as well as wage a 10 year war with Afghanistan would prove to be a major factor that contributed to the decay of the Soviet economy and the Soviet Union as a whole.

Related Topics:
1979 - Intervened in a civil war - Afghanistan - Osama bin Laden - Gorbachev - Vietnam

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