
[[Image:Rkka.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov salute a military parade in Red Square above the message "Long Live the Worker-Peasant Red Army—Loyal Sentinel of the Soviet Borders!"]] The military history of the Soviet Union began in the days following the 1917 October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. The new government formed the Red Army to fight various foes in the Russian Civil War. In the late 1930s, the Red Army Winter War; fought a brief Battle of Halhin Gol (together with its ally Mongolia) with Japan and its client state Manchukuo; and, was deployed when the Soviet Union, in Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, took part in the partition of Second Polish Republic, annexed the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (from Romania). In World War II, the Red Army was the major military force in the defeat of Nazi Germany. After the war, it military occupation part of Germany and many nations in central and eastern Europe, which became satellite states in the Eastern bloc. The Soviet Union became the sole superpower rival to the United States. The Cold War between the two nations led to military buildups, the nuclear arms race, and the Space Race. By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces had more troops and nuclear weapons than any other nation. The Soviet Union fell in 1991, thanks not to military defeat but economic and political factors (see history of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)). The Soviet military consisted of five armed services. In their official order of importance, the Soviet armed services were the Strategic Rocket Forces, Soviet Army, Soviet Air Force, Soviet Anti-Air Defense, and Soviet Navy. The two other Soviet militarized forces were the Internal Troops (MVD Troops), subordinated to the MVD, and the Soviet Border Troops, subordinated to the KGB.
==Tsarist and revolutionary background== [[Image:LeninTrotskyAndRedArmy.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Members of the Red Army gather around Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Saint Petersburg.]] The February Revolution replaced the Tsar with the Russian Provisional Government, 1917 which was itself overthrown by the October Revolution of 1917. The Russian army, exhausted by its Eastern Front (World War I) in World War I, was in the final stages of disintegration and collapse. Even though Bolshevik influence in the ranks was strong, the officer corps was staffed with many who violently opposed communism. The Bolsheviks perceived the Tsarist army to be one of the foundations of the hated old regime, and decided to abolish it in favor of establishing a new military loyal to the Marxism cause. Thus the core of the Tsarist army became the core of the Russian Provisional Government, 1917 army which became the core of the White movement, which in intermittent collaboration with Allied Intervention in Russia forces from outside Russia (Japanese, Britain, France, United States) battled the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. On January 28, 1918 the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin decreed the establishment of the Red Army, officially merging the 20,000 Red Guards (Russia) with 200,000 Baltic Fleet sailors and a handful of sympathetic Saint Petersburg garrison soldiers. Leon Trotsky served as their first commissar for war. The early Red Army was egalitarian but poorly disciplined. The Bolsheviks considered military ranks and saluting to be bourgeois customs and abolished them; soldiers now elected their own leaders and voted on which orders to follow. This arrangement was abolished, however, under pressure of the Russian Civil War (1918–1921), and ranks were reinstated. During the civil war, the Bolsheviks fought counterrevolutionary groups that became known as the White movement as well as armies sponsored by Russia's former allies such as the United Kingdom and France, which saw a need to overthrow the Bolshevik government. The Red Army enjoyed a series of initial victories over their opponents, and in a surge of optimism Lenin ordered the Soviet Western Army (Russia) Russian westward offensive of 1918-1919 retreating from the ''Ober-Ost'' ares. This operation swept the newly formed Ukrainian People's Republic and Belarusian National Republic and eventually lead to the Soviet invasion of Second Polish Republic, a newly independent state of the former Imperial Russia. By invading Poland and initiating the Polish-Soviet War the Bolsheviks expressed their belief that they would eventually triumph over opposing capitalism forces both at home and abroad. The overwhelming majority of professional officers in Russian army were of nobility (dvoryanstvo); moreover, most of them had joined the White armies. Therefore the Workers' and Peasants' Army initially faced a shortage of experienced military leaders. To remedy this, the Bolsheviks recruited 50,000 former Imperial Army officers to command the Red Army. At the same time, they attached political commissars to Red Army units to monitor the actions and loyalty of professional commanders, formally termed as "military specialists" (''voyenspets'', for ''voyenny spetsialist''). By 1921 the Red Army had defeated four White armies and held off five armed, foreign contingents that had intervened in the civil war, but began to face setbacks in Poland. Polish forces managed to break a long streak of Bolshevik victories by launching a bold counteroffensive at the Battle of Warsaw (1920) in August of 1920. At Warsaw the Red Army suffered a defeat so great and so unexpected that it turned the course of the entire war and eventually forced the Soviets to accept the unfavorable conditions offered by the Treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921. It was the biggest defeat of the Red Army in history. After the civil war, the Red Army became an increasingly professional military organization. With most of its five million soldiers Military discharge, the Red Army was transformed into a small regular force, and territorial militias were created for wartime mobilization. Soviet military schools, established during the civil war, began to graduate large numbers of trained officers loyal to the Soviet power. In an effort to increase the prestige of the military profession, the party reestablished formal military ranks, downgraded political commissars, and eventually established the principle of one-man command. ==Development of the structure, ideology, and doctrine of the Soviet military== ===Party control=== The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had a number of mechanisms of control over the country's armed forces. First, starting from a certain rank, only a Party member could be a military commander, and was thus subject to Party discipline. Second, the top military leaders had been systematically integrated into the highest echelons of the party. Third, the party placed a network of political commissar throughout the armed forces to influence the activities of the military. A deputy political commander (''zampolit'') served as a political commissar of the armed forces. A ''zampolit'' supervised party organizations and conducted party political work within a military unit. He lectured troops on Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet view of international affairs, and the party's tasks for the armed forces. Following World War II the zampolit lost all command authority but retained the power to report to the next highest political officer or organization on the political attitudes and performance of the unit's commander. In 1989 over 20 percent of all armed forces personnel were party members or Komsomol members. Over 90 percent of all officers in the armed forces were party or Komsomol members. ===Military counterintelligence=== ''Main article: Military counterintelligence of Soviet Army'' Throughout the history of the Soviet Army, the Soviet secret police (known variously as the Cheka, State Political Directorate, NKVD, among many others) maintained control over the counterintelligence ''Special Departments'' (Особый отдел) that existed at all larger military formations. The best known was SMERSH (1943-1946) created during the Great Patriotic War. While the staff of a Special Department of a regiment was generally known, it controlled a network of secret informants, both chekists and recruited ordinary military. ===Political doctrine=== Under the direction of Lenin and Trotsky, the Red Army adhered closely to Karl Marx's proclamation that the bourgeoisie could be overcome only by a worldwide revolt of the proletariat, and to this end early Soviet military doctrine focused on spreading the revolution abroad and expanding Soviet influence throughout the world. Lenin provided an early experiment of Marx's theory when he invaded Poland in hopes of generating a communist German Revolution. Lenin's Polish expedition only complemented his March 1919 establishment of the Comintern, an organization whose sole purpose was to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State." In keeping with the Comintern philosophy, the Red Army forcibly suppressed the anti-Soviet Basmachi Revolt in Central Asia in order to keep Turkestan in the Soviet alliance system. In 1921, a Red Army occupation of the Democratic Republic of Georgia overthrew the representative Georgian government and replaced it with a Soviet Republic. Georgia was then forcibly merged with Armenia and Azerbaijan in order to form the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, a member state of the Soviet Union. ===Military-party relations=== During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's five-year plans and History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)#Stalinist development built the productive base necessary to modernize the Red Army. As the likelihood of war in Europe increased later in the decade, the Soviet Union tripled its military expenditures and doubled the size of its regular forces to match the power of its potential enemies. [[Image:Stalin 02.jpg|right|frame|Joseph Stalin implemented a nationwide industrialization drive which provided significantly to the Soviet military complex, only to later deprive the Red Army of its most experienced commanders during the Great Purge.]] In 1937, however, Stalin Great Purge the Red Army of its best military leaders. Fearing that the military posed a threat to his rule, Stalin jailed or executed many Red Army officers, estimated in thousands, including three of five marshals. These actions were to severely impair the Red Army's capabilities in the Winter War (Winter War) of 1939–1940 and in World War II. Fearing the immense popularity of the armed forces after World War II, Stalin demoted war hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov and took personal credit for having saved the country. After Stalin's death in 1953, Zhukov reemerged as a strong supporter of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev rewarded Zhukov by making him minister of defense and a full Politburo member. Concern that the Soviet army might become too powerful in politics, however, led to Zhukov's abrupt dismissal in the fall of 1957. Khrushchev later alienated the armed forces by cutting defense expenditures on conventional forces in order to carry out his plans for economic reform. Leonid Brezhnev's years in power marked the height of party-military cooperation as he provided ample resources to the armed forces. In 1973 the minister of defense became a full Politburo member for the first time since 1957. Yet Brezhnev evidently felt threatened by the professional military, and he sought to create an aura of military leadership around himself in an effort to establish his authority over the armed forces. In the early 1980s, party-military relations became strained over the issue of resource allocations to the armed forces. Despite a downturn in economic growth, the armed forces argued, often to no avail, for more resources to develop advanced conventional weapons. Mikhail Gorbachev downgraded the role of the military in state ceremonies, including moving military representatives to the end of the leadership line-up atop Lenin's Mausoleum during the annual Red Square military parade commemorating the October Revolution. Instead, Gorbachev emphasized civilian economic priorities and reasonable sufficiency in defense over the professional military's perceived requirements. ===Military doctrine=== [[Image:T-26tankinSpain.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Throughout the 1930s, the Red Army concentrated its efforts on developing a highly mechanized, mobile war machine. Pictured here, a Soviet T-26 tank performs operations during the Spanish Civil War.]] The Russian army was defeated in the World War I, a fact which strongly shaped the early stages of Red Army development. While the armies of Britain and France were content to retain strategies which had made them victorious, the Red Army proceeded to experiment and develop new tactics and concepts, developing parallel to the reborn Wehrmacht. The Soviets viewed themselves as a nation unique to human history and thus felt no loyalty to previous military tradition, an ideology which allowed for and prioritized innovation. From its conception, the Red Army committed itself to emphasizing highly mobile warfare. This decision was influenced by the formative wars of its history, namely the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War. Both of these conflicts had little in common with the static trench warfare of the First World War. Instead, they featured long range mobile operations, often by small but highly motivated forces, as well as rapid advances of hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days. Under Lenin's New Economic Policy, the Soviet Union had few resources to devote to the Red Army during its formative years in the 1920s. This changed only when Stalin began the industrialisation drive in 1929, a policy created in part to allow for unprecedented funds to be dedicated to the military. APP-6a.">Image:1942SovietTankCorpsArmy.png|thumb|right|250px|Type Soviet Tank Corps and Tank Army of 1942 and 1943 using APP-6a. Using these new resources, the Red Army of the 1930s developed a highly sophisticated concept of mobile warfare which relied on huge formations of tanks, aircraft, and airborne troops designed to break through the enemy's line and carry the battle deep to the enemy's rear. Soviet industry responded, supplying tanks, aircraft and other equipment in sufficient numbers to make such operations practical. To avoid overestimating the power of the Soviet army it should be noted, however, that while before 1941 Soviet formations of a given level were at least equal to and often stronger than equivalent formations of other armies, huge wartime losses and reorganisation based on war experience reversed the trend during the later war years. Thus, for example, the Soviet Tank Corps was equivalent in armored vehicle power to an American armored division, and a Soviet rifle (infantry) division, unless specifically reinforced, was often equivalent to an American infantry regiment. Soviets did not follow the Germans in assuming that the next war would be decided so quickly as to rely principally on equipment produced before the start of the war. Instead, they developed their armament factories under the assumption that during the war they would have to rebuild the whole equipment of the ground and air forces many times over. This assumption was indeed proven correct during the four-year-long war. The Red Army's focus on mobile operations in the early 1930s was gravely disrupted by Stalin's Great Purge. Since the new doctrines were associated with officers who had been declared enemies of the state, the support for them declined. Many large mechanised formations were disbanded, with the tanks distributed to support the infantry. After the German blitzkrieg proved its potency in Poland and France, the Red Army started a frantic effort to rebuild the large mechanised corps, but the task was only partly finished when the Wehrmacht attacked in 1941. The huge tank forces, powerful only on paper, were mostly annihilated by the Germans in the first months of Operation Barbarossa. Another factor contributing to the initial defeat was that the Soviet rearmament effort was started too early, and in 1941 the majority of Soviet equipment was obsolete and inferior to that of the Wehrmacht. These doctrines were eventually successfully used at the front starting in 1943 after the Red Army regained the initiative. ==Practical deployment of the Soviet military== ===Interwar period=== ''See also: Interwar period'' Following the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union was enmeshed in a struggle for succession that pitted Trotsky and his policy of "world revolution" against Stalin and his policy of "socialism in one country." Stalin prevailed and Trotsky was removed as war commissar in 1925, resulting in a turn away from the policy of spreading the revolution abroad in favour of focusing on domestic issues and defending the country against the possibility of foreign invasion. Eager to dispose of Trotsky's political and military supporters, Stalin directed the execution of eight high-ranking generals between 1935 and 1938. Primary among these was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, leader of the Soviet invasion of Poland and generally considered one of the most talented strategists in the Soviet military. Despite Stalin's isolationist policies, and even though USSR's borders would remain static for fifteen years following Lenin's death, the Soviets continued to involve themselves in international affairs, and the Comintern was instrumental in establishing the Communist parties of Republic of China in 1921 and French Indochina in 1930. Additionally, the Red Army played a crucial role in the Spanish Civil War, supplying over 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, 300 armored cars, hundreds of thousands of small arms and 30,000 tons of ammunition to the Second Spanish Republic cause. Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War was greatly influenced by the growing tension between Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany and an avid supporter of the fascism forces of Francisco Franco. Nazi-Soviet relations were tempered by Hitler's personal hatred of the people of East Europe and by the longstanding ideological feud between fascism and communism. Direct armed conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union was delayed by the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, which essentially divided the nations of Eastern Europe into two spheres of interest, one belonging to the Soviets and the other to the Nazis. As a result of this pact the Red Army would launch an Polish September Campaign#Soviet aggression and Bessarabia in the opening months of World War II. Stalin continued to fear Nazi aggression and on November 30, 1939 announced the invasion of Finland in an effort to use Finnish territory as a buffer-zone between Germany and the heart of industrial Russia. The resulting Winter War proved disastrous for the Soviet military. The Red Army, which was still feeling the sting of Stalin's purges and finding itself starved of industrial and intellectual resources, suffered a series of embarrassing defeats before accepting armistice on March 6, 1940. As a direct result of the Soviet aggression the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations on December 14, 1939. ===World War II=== ''Main article : Eastern Front (WWII) [[Image:Soviet Reichstag.gif|thumb|right|250px|Marking the Soviet Union's victory, a soldier raises the Flag of the Soviet Union over the German Reichstag (building) in the Nazi Germany capital of Berlin.]] The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 established a non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and a secret protocol described how Poland and the Baltic countries would be divided between them. In the Polish September Campaign of 1939 the two powers invaded and partitioned Poland, and in June 1940 the Soviet Union occupation of the Baltic countries. The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies before Nazi Germany swept across the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet's poor performance in the Winter War against Finland encouraged Hitler to ignore the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and take the Red Army by surprise. During the initial stages of the war, the Soviet military was forced to retreat and also forced to stay and be killed or captured, trading territory for time while suffering a staggering number of casualties. The United States program of lend lease was extended to the Soviet Union in September 1941, supplying planes, tanks and other war materials. Eventually the Soviets managed to slow the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg, halting the Nazi offensive in December 1941 outside the gates of Moscow. The Red Army then launched a powerful winter counteroffensive which pushed the enemy away from the capital. At the start of 1942, the weakened Axis armies abandoned their march on Moscow and advanced south towards the Caucasus and Volga river. This offensive, in turn, ran out of steam in autumn 1942, allowing the Soviet forces to stage a devastating counteroffensive on the overextended enemy. The Red Army encircled and destroyed significant German forces at the Battle of Stalingrad, which ended in February 1943 and reversed the tide of the entire war. There were enormous losses to the troops on both sides during this stage of the campaign, but especially for the USSR with millions of casualties in the battles for Moscow and Stalingrad. In the summer of 1943, following the Battle of Kursk, the Red Army seized the strategic initiative for the remainder of the war. All Soviet territory was liberated from German occupation in 1944. After having driven the German army out of Eastern Europe, in May 1945 the Red Army launched the final assault on Battle of Berlin that effectively ended the World War II in Europe (see V-E Day). Much of Germany and even parts of the USSR were devastated by the advancing Red Army troops as a result of an aggressive policy of "scorched earth" . Once Germany was defeated, the Red Army joined the war against Empire of Japan, and in summer 1945 carried out an offensive against the Japanese forces stationed in northern Manchuria. The Red Army emerged from the war as the most powerful land army in history and became known as the Soviet Army thereafter. The defeat of the Wehrmacht had come, however, at the cost of seven million soldiers and perhaps 27 million civilians dead, by far the highest losses List of World War II casualties by country. This is believed to be one of the highest human death tolls from any military conflict . ===The Cold War and conventional forces=== ''See also: Cold War'' [[Image:AK-47.jpg|thumb|right|United States Marine Corps test fire an RPK. This light machine gun is typical of the Red Army's influence in the post-war world. It is based on the AK-47 assault rifle, which would ultimately effect change in both future rifle design and in the methods of modern warfare.]] By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had a standing army of 10 to 13 million men. Immediately following Germany's surrender, this number was reduced to five million; this decline was indicative not of diminishing interest in the Soviet military but rather of a growing interest in establishing more modern and mobile armed forces. This policy resulted in the 1951 introduction of the AK-47, designed four years earlier as an improvement on the submachine gun which supplied Soviet infantry with a rugged and reliable source of short-range firepower. Also important was the 1967 introduction of the BMP-1, the first infantry fighting vehicle commissioned by any armed force in the world. These innovations would help direct the course of Soviet military operations throughout the Cold War. Many of the Soviet forces who fought to liberate the countries of Eastern Europe from Nazi control remained in the region even after Germany's surrender in 1945. Mindful of Russia's vulnerability to western invasion, Stalin used this military occupation to establish satellite states, creating a buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets quickly became an enormous political and economic influence in the region and the Soviet Union actively assisted local communist parties in coming to power. By 1948, seven eastern European countries had communist governments. In this setting, the Cold War emerged out of a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry S. Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. An aggressive Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the agreement made at the Yalta Conference. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, the Soviet Union remained adamant in the face of Truman's attempt to use the U.S. atomic monopoly to coerce the Soviets into making concessions, and in 1955 Moscow introduced the Warsaw Pact to counterbalance the Western NATO alliance. Conventional military power showed its continued influence when the Soviet Union used its troops to 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Czechoslovakia: 1948 - 1968#Warsaw Pact Intervention and the end of Prague spring to suppress the democratic aspirations of their peoples and keep these countries within the Soviet alliance system. The Soviet Union and the western forces, led by the US, faced a number of standoffs that threatened to turn into live conflicts, such as the Berlin Blockade of 1948-1949 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which saw "hawks" on both sides push the respective rivals closer towards war due to policies of brinksmanship. This attitude was tempered by fears of a nuclear conflict and desires among moderates for détente. Under Khrushchev's leadership, Soviet relations with Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were finally repaired with the 1956 dissolution of the Cominform. This decision generated a further rift between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, a neighboring communist state which felt the Soviets were turning their back on the fundamental Marxism-Leninism struggle for the worldwide triumph of communism. This Sino-Soviet split erupted in 1967 when the Red Guards (China) besieged the Soviet embassy in Beijing. Additional conflicts along the Sino-Soviet border followed in 1969. Tension between the political forces in Moscow and Beijing would greatly influence Asian politics during the 1960s and 1970s, and a microcosm of the Sino-Soviet split emerged when Ho Chi Minh's Soviet-aligned North Vietnam invaded Pol Pot's pro-Chinese Cambodia in 1978. The Soviets had ensured the loyalty of Vietnam and Laos through an aggressive campaign of political, economic and military aid – the same tactic which allowed the USSR to compete with America in a race to establish themselves as neocolonial rulers of newly independent states in Africa and the Middle East. Extensive arms sales made weapons like the AK-47 and the T-72 tank icons of the contemporary wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Also significant was the 1968 declaration of the Brezhnev Doctrine which officially asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene in other nation's internal affairs in order to secure socialism from opposing capitalist forces. This doctrine was used to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In Afghanistan the Soviet forces met a fierce resistance from a mujahideen composed of sympathetic muslims and supported by the CIA. Battling an opposition that relied on guerrilla tactics and asymmetric warfare, the massive Soviet war machine proved incapable of achieving decisive victories and the entire campaign quickly devolved into a quagmire not unlike that which America faced a decade earlier in the Vietnam War. After ten years of fighting at the cost of approximately 20 billion dollars a year (in 1986, United States dollar) and 22,000 Soviet casualties, Gorbachev surrendered to public opinion and ordered troops to withdraw in early 1989. ===The Cold War and nuclear weapons=== ''Main article: Nuclear warfare#The Cold War The USSR 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. 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. [[Image:Joe 4.jpg|thumb|left|250px|This, the Soviet's fifth nuclear weapon test (dubbed "Joe 4" by the West) was detonated on August 12, 1953 in Kazakhstan.]] 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 testing 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 (anti-ballistic missile) system and retain the ability to place multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). The SALT I (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 nuclear weapon#Weapons delivery, 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. ==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 of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union supervised all military industries as the executive agent of the Defense Council. Within the government, the deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom 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 percent) . 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. ==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 History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991). 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 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, removing the rebellious republic government and allegedly 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 Military of Russia, 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 Transdnistria. 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. ==Timeline== == 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. == Crimes against civilians == Throughout its history, the Soviet military has been accused of several atrocities and war crimes, many of which were later admitted by the Soviet leadership, or later by the Russian government. Examples include: * Widespread allegations of rape, possibly condoned by senior command, during and following WWII. *Evacuation of East Prussia. * Crimes against civilians during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. ==See also== *List of military aircraft of the Soviet Union and the CIS *List of missiles#Russia or the USSR *List of Soviet tanks *Soviet Navy ==Notes== # [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/01/24/wbeev24.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/01/24/ixworld.html 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 # [http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Second Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm], [http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/maildrop.htm 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 # [http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Russia/ 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. ==References == * - [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sutoc.html 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 *Malone, Richard: ''The Russian Revolution''. Cambridge Press 2004 Soviet history Military of the Soviet Union Military history of the Soviet Union
I hope this article doesn't remain a mere collection of a few sentences. It looks like we really wanted to have this article in Wikipedia, but do not know how to proceed with it. It's kind of a rare phenomenon for a COTW. User:KNewman 12:07, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC) == Move page == This page should be moved back to military history of the Soviet Union since all the other military history articles use that format--User:JiangUser talk:Jiang 06:49, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :I just moved it. User:172 16:28, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :Are you going to exclude the military history of RSFSR before the creation of the SU? User:Mikkalai 21:07, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::Good question. The article should start off with the military history of the Russian SSFSR. Perhaps the title should be the military history of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union? User:172 22:49, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ==Problems with the current outline== I'm a bit troubled by the current outline, which seems a bit more fitting for (say) an article on Soviet foreign relations or Soviet diplomatic history. Instead, an article on this topic should focus on the huge Soviet military-industrial complex, which competed with other sectors of the Soviet economy and society for power and the allocation of resources. First, it should start off tracing the development of the leadership and organization of the Soviet military, its relationship to the Communist Party and the secret police, and how Soviet authorities ensured the political control of the armed forces throughout the Soviet era. Second, the article should trace the role of the defense sector in the Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's commitment to the Cold War was enormous. 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 percent). The Soviet military-industrial complex employed at least one fifth of the workforce. (The comparable U.S. figures were roughly one-sixteenth of gross national product and about one of every sixteen in the workforce.) Toward the end, the article can touch on the economic devastation suffered by main regions of the former Soviet Union with the end of the Cold War and the cutback in military spending, which hit heavy industrial plants very hard and some regions of Russia entirely dependent on the military-industrial complex. I tentatively recommend the following outline: (1) Development of the Soviet party, state, military structure (2) National security-- subsections of which can trace the role of the armed forces in the Second World War, Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and the Cold War. (3) The Soviet military-industrial complex and the economy (4) The armed forces and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first two sources I'd recommend are 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) for a relatively short survey. William E. Odom ''The Collapse of the Soviet Military'' (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998) is a definitive source. User:172 07:16, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) After writing the comments above, I just inserted a new draft outline in the article. Since this is a collaboration of the week, I hope that many other editors will fill it in and/or tweak it. I won't have time to write much of the content, though, in the next couple of weeks. User:172 07:40, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) : I looked at a few other military histories, and they appear to be based on a timeline: British_military_history, Military_history_of_Canada, Military_history_of_the_United_States. I think if we split the article according to the timeline, it would be easier for multiple editors to collaborate on it. What you propose would likely produce a better article, but it would be a lot harder to write. Your proposal requires an understanding of the issue as a whole, as opposed to just learning parts of it. I am not opposed to your proposal. I just think it's more than can be realistically done by a loose group of editors. It's a job for one or two dedicated editors working in close collaboration. --User:Gene s 07:53, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::True, but the goal of the collaboration of the week process is to produce something worthy of featured article status. While I can't write the whole thing, I can help with the research and outlining if the other editors want to write a scholarly piece that goes deeper than an almanac-like chronicle. User:172 08:03, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) My concern is that there doesn't appear to be any section on WWII -- how can we write an article about Soviet Military History and not have substantial content on WWII? --User:Bschorr 07:55, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :::As a subsection of the section on national security. It makes sense to trace the development of how the Soviets structured military, party, and state relations first and then go into the war. User:172 08:03, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::::I put in just the very beginnings of the WWII content. It's getting late here, though, and I'm afraid if I go any further I won't make any sense. Hopefully other collaborators can expand and expound as necessary. --User:Bschorr 09:08, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ==Linking while we work== While we're all working on the article, we should link items sparingly. Since we're working on bits and pieces of at a time, we don't have a very good idea about where the first mention of a item will appear in the article, and we're only supposed to link an item where it first appears in the article. User:172 23:36, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :I will respectfully disagree. In a long article like this one, a single link is nearly impossible to find, if a question arises somewhere down the text. A link per item per major section would be more reasonable (look at it in this way: a major section is a potential separtate article). User:Mikkalai 21:51, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC) :We can always remove multiple links in the same section later. I'd rather accidentally link too much and remove the extra links than accidentally link too little and not even realise that potentially useful links are missing. Just my $(1/50). User:Nvinen 04:40, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Page move II== I thought we moved the page to Soviet military history in order not to exclude the history of Soviet Russia prior to the USSR's creation in 1922. What's the logic behind moving it back?User:AndyL 23:39, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :Oh, okay. Jiang pointed out that this page should be moved back to military history of the Soviet Union since all the other military history articles use that format. I tought about that problem and figured that the page could be moved again to military history of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union, but I guess that'll be too lengthy and confusing for some. Please go ahead and move it back. User:172 23:43, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::IMO it is never too late to move it back. Although it was me who rose the issue now, at the same time I would suggest to wait 1-2 days for other opinions. User:Mikkalai 01:15, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) :Well, any other opinions? User:Mikkalai 01:15, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::No objections from me. User:172 04:22, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) : "of Soviet Union" was done for consistency. On the other hand, special cases require special treatment. The RSFSR/USSR case is clearly special. "Soviet history" it is then. --User:Gene s 05:45, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Russia versus the Sovet Union== When adding to this article, please refrain from using the word "Russia" as it was not the official name of the country during the period covered on this page. It's akin to referring to the UK as "England". It's used often, but it is NOT correct. --User:Woohookitty 23:50, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ==Timeline== Eventually the timeline can go in an article organized along the lines of Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War. User:172 23:52, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ==U.S. report pasting== Please be aware that much of the content of this article has been copied and pasted by User:172 without modification from a United States government report [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sutoc.html] of 1989. Furthermore, the article's structure is being shaped to match this, with even valid but presently-empty sections that do not have material in the US report being deleted or renamed to match sections that can be pasted. This is hardly acceptable scope, neutrality, or quality. User:119 20:51, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) :(1) It is public domain, and better than nothing. (I haven't had time this week to write my own work.) As for quality and neutrality, the LOC handbooks indeed come with their own biases, but they are generally far less biased than the hysterical anticommunism that usually pervades Wikipedia articles, making every single political crisis in the Third World out to be a part of some grand Kremlin conspiracy. (2) I have modified all of the content that I have posted, not taking anything from the LOC sourcebook for granted, posting only stuff that I can personally vouch for with other sources. If anyone has any specific qualms about any of the content that I have posted, I will provide independent sources backing it all up. (3) As for the scope, even if this article were to become as detailed as our largest text-based article found in Wikipedia:Offline reports/This is one of the longest articles (November 2003), given the wealth of literature on this topic, writing at this level of detail only requires when to write from his own general knowledge and from other sourcebooks; such a broad article can only be a most general of surveys. As for the organization, it is not based on that of the LOC handbook. It is based on my own proposal to first trace the origins of the military/party/government structure and the military's relationships with other Soviet institutions, and then to give a brief overview of Soviet national security, ending it with an examination of the nature and size of the Soviet military-industrial complex. This organization is an alternative to one based on a simple timeline, chronicling every single Soviet military intervention (an organization more fitting for an article that takes into account the history of Soviet foreign relations along with military history). User:172 23:26, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC) **Re:User:172, I have no problem with the text you have added, and personally I love the format, but I do have a couple of things to ask you: 1. Since you have these other souces, and have used them as references already, could you add them to the page's References? 2.though, like I said, I like the form, I think "National security" is too broad a term. Shouldn't it be something like "Practical deployment of Soviet military" or "Soviet theory in practice" or "History of Soviet military activity" or something (I know none of those sound quite right). Do you have any ideas for changes? would you object if I changed it? Also, shouldn't that section be more comprehensive? I don't understand why it shouldn't include all of the events currently relegated to "Timeline". perhaps I misunderstand its purpose. Thanks. User:Ryan Anderson 00:00, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC) :(1) Yes, I'll start working on a references section, along with the other unfinished sections. (2) I like "Practical deployment of Soviet military." Please go ahead and change it to that title. The other two proposals are okay, but they may encourage other users to get too chronological. Yes, the section can be more comprehensive, along with all the others. Every section of the article is a work in progress. (3) Nice work on your own contributions, especially the photos. User:172 01:27, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Collapse of the Soviet Union and the military== Maybe I am nitpicking, but should we really use the term "collapse of the military" in the section title? I would say the transition from Soviet to Russian armed forces was carried out reasonably smoothly and continuity was maintained. There were almost no political purges whatsoever, and the majority of the Russian officers at least continued their careers. Since 1991 Russia still has no difficulty in maintaining an unbroken strategic nuclear parity with the USA. Of course I am not denying that Russia's military has for the most part only a fraction of the Soviet capability before 1991, but collapse it not an appropriate word to describe what happened. User:Balcer 03:44, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) :This had little to do with the military, but rather the unraveling of the Communist Party. User:172 05:15, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::Oh, I see that I misunderstood. I guess then it would be a bit more clear to have: The military and the collapse of the Soviet Union, to avoid the suggestion that the military collapsed along with the USSR User:Balcer 05:26, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::: I could add something about the Russian Navy's 300th anniversary. I'm just not sure it would be what this page was looking for. Some facts I could add: Russia, (of course) US, Chinese, Japanese, N and S Korean ships were all there. The history of these countries speak for themselves, but from my understanding Japan and Russia were still at war at the time, never having signed a peace treaty after ww2. US, Chinese tensions were very high during that time with taiwan having elections later that year. Also directly about the Navy, many sailors reported not having been paid in months, some reported partial payment only. Further, when coming into harbor, it was obvious that the Russian ships were painted only on the side facing the shore. User:24.28.229.74 04:24, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) == Dividing up "conventional weapons" == This article was really coming along great when it seemed to lose its steam a few days ago, but I believe that we have the proper start of a featured article. The problem I see is that "Cold War and Conventional Weapons" was too broad a category that covered too many conflicts, so I divided it up into regions. I hope to heavily edit the text in those areas when I have the time later today or tommorrow. This is Ryan Anderson. :Perhaps, but the division was starting out as chronological. Rather than dividing it up into region, period may be better. User:172 19:32, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) == Cuban Missile Crisis == There should be some reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis, particularly the stationing of Soviet missiles on the island and the standoff between Soviet vessels and the US Navy in regards to the quarentine zone. User:AndyL 23:55, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Timeline headings== The date/title/conflict/outcome headings in the timeline chart appear to be covered in black. Can someone fix this? User:172 :I see bold, black text on a red background? User:119 22:57, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::On my browser it appears all in black. User:172 23:00, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC) :::Sorry, I was experimenting with adding a red background. Thanks to 119 for reverting my edit. User:Ryan Anderson 00:13, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::::The chart looks very nice now. User:172 02:20, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC) == Red Army and intial expansion of the Soviet Union == A huge topic is missing here. In particular, the crucial role of the Red Army in establishing of Soviet states in the areas of Caucasus and Central Asia; see, e.g., Democratic Republic of Georgia and Basmachi Revolt articles for some idea. User:Mikkalai 21:36, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC) *I believe I've adressed your concerns. Please tell me if I'm missing anything important. User:Ryan Anderson 21:32, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC) == NPOV == I put an NPOV banner on this page, in the hopes of circumventing the embarrassment of having it as a featured article. I've already corrected some hyperbole and glowing references. Where is the subjugation of the Baltic States, and aiding of the Nazi's in Poland, and the occupation of non-Axis nations in eastern Europe? --User:Silverback 01:20, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :Um, this is about the MILITARY history of the Soviet Union, not the political history. I suppose it would be worth mentioning the havoc the Red Army caused to Germany and her allies at the end of WW2, since that was more on a personal level than a political level. I think it's also worth mentioning that the Soviet Union had branches of the military specifically in order to quell unrest (which I suspect is already mentioned but I'd have to check). However, I don't see what the subjugation of the baltic states has to do directly with the military. Surely this is something the Kremlin would decide upon and the army would be more of an instrument than anything else? It's certainly worth mentioning but I fail to see how it affects the point of view (or lack of) of this article. User:Nvinen 01:39, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :The invasion of Finland certainly merits mention. Isn't this one of the few times the Red Army was totally defeated? They pulled out of Afghanistan and Chechnya is not going all that well, but my understanding is they were completely repulsed by the Finns, who ended up on the side of the Nazis once Germany invaded the USSR. User:Nvinen 01:42, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::The subjugation of the Baltic states was a "use" of the military, how is it not part of the military history? I realize this is a broad coverage, but to talk about brilliant campaigns and victories, and to leave out these less glorious uses of the military just seems POV to me. One thing that I think still is missing, is the disregard for the lives of the soldiers during WWII. It is not enough just to cite the losses, divisions that could easily have been saved were not responsibly evacuated, in decisions every bit as callous and stupid as Hitlers throwing away of his troops at Stalingrad. The USSR lost 7 million, not because it was a great sacrifice, but because it didn't care. How many of the 20 million civilians lost were due to the scorched earth "strategy", or the failure to evacuate Leningrad? I'm not sure if the callousness of civilian deaths are part of military strategy or policy that should be included in this article, but it might be.--User:Silverback 03:24, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::It's certainly true that Soviet infantry have been used as cannon fodder more than once, especially in defence of the USSR. I agree, if this article is going to discuss campaigns, it should discuss them all. They were pretty desperate, though. I think we should also mention the chaos the soldiers caused. User:Nvinen 07:39, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::Hmm, you're right, the bit which talked about WW2 didn't mention the enormous losses they took in the desperate circumstances, nor the brutality of the Red Army once they went on the offensive. I put in reasonable mentions of both, I think, along with a couple of references. The rapes and murders of the Red Army in Germany and the USSR late in the war seem to be well documented. User:Nvinen 08:11, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :This article was a Collaboration of the Week, was listed on Per Review for over two weeks, and was listed on FAC for an additional two weeks and in all of this time no one objected on the grounds of NPOV until you, just now. This said, I think it is unfair for you to classify this as an "embarrasment" to the Wikipedia community. This is ''not'' to say, however, that your specific claims are without merit. However, since these complaints are yours alone, they ought to be very easy to enumerate and satisfy. Would you care to do this? Just make a list of your specific complaints regarding NPOV, note which ones have already been corrected and tell us how we can help correct those still standing. It appears that the ones you have already mentioned on this Talk Page have all been meted out in your own edits and -if this is the case- the NPOV banner should be removed. User:Ryan Anderson 20:35, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Thanx for your assistance. I have remove NPOV. The other changes I'd like to see would take more time to document, and it would be unfair to hold up an article that is fairly neutral. It is unclear to me whether some of the decisions that resulted in so many loss of civilian and military lives were political or military and thus should be documented here vs elsewhere.--User:Silverback 21:24, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::Thank you for your help. I may have gotten a little snappy at first, but I do appreciate what are obviously genuine efforts to improve the article, and I do agree that before you got here we had some POV problems still unresolved. User:Ryan Anderson 17:28, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC) =="Strategic doctrine"== I do not think "Strategic doctrine" is not appropriate in this context. The article is really just discussing the there-unnammed military doctrine of Deep Battle. Where you see "Strategic doctrine" used is essentially national security plans, or "grand strategy." Military doctrine, such as what this section discusses, is much more limited. I'm so glad you reverted me and told me to explain rather than assuming good faith or asking for clarification. User:119 00:44, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) *My apologies. I have not been at Wikipedia for very long, and this is really the first page I've contributed to that has received significant input from other users, so I am rather unfamiliar with rules of decorum. I assumed that since you changed my section header without consulting me that I was justified in doing the same. I understand what you're saying now, and I agree that "Military doctrine" is a more appropriate section heading. What put me off was the word "thought", which seemed nonspecific and unprofessional. At the time I did not understand the distinction between Military and Strategic, and there was no explanation in your edit summary, so I was confused by the relevance of the edit. User:Ryan Anderson 01:57, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Section retitled "Military doctrine" as compromise. Does this agree with you? User:Ryan Anderson 18:35, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) =="Scorched earth"== Please explain how rape and murder fit into a "scorched earth" policy. The Wikipedia article on "scorched earth" does not mention either. However the rapes and murders of the advancing Red Army in World War 2 are extremely well documented. Even Russians suffered. I think it's a sick joke that you dismiss it like that. This ends my involvement in Wikipedia. Well established facts are dismissed as "POV" if someone doesn't like them. Well, I'm sick of it. User:Nvinen 01:17, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) *Please feel free to document these rapes and murders yourself, if you would like. The purpose of my edit was not to eliminate content, only to remove "brutal wrath", which ''is'' POV. You'll note that no mention of rape or murder is even made in the sentence I editted, so I don't understand why you're accusing me of dismissing facts. All I did was make the sentence more specific. If it is still not adequate to fit your needs, feel free to expand it. I think such information would make a wonderful addition to this article. User:Ryan Anderson 02:02, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) ==American Library of Congress as a good source?== I see that the article includes a mention that some of the material was sourced from the American library of Congress... surely that is a little biased considering that for most of the Soviet Union's history, the USA was against the USSR (invading it during its birth, and the Cold War later), except for when they allied during WWII. I can't see anyone using a Stalinist source for American military history... :You're right, this could potentially have been a problem. I do not, however, see where it has actually materialised as one. All of the text imported from the LOC has been heavily expanded and editted since its introduction, and if you look further up on this talk page you'll see that quite recently this article was even accused of having a ''pro-Soviet'' bias. If you note any specific instances of bias, please amend them appropriately or post them here so that others may edit accordingly. Otherwise I do believe this article represents our policy of NPOV. User:Ryan Anderson 17:48, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) == tables == beautiful tables User:141.212.190.54 16:12, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) == its army was the major force in the defeat of Nazi Germany? == I'd feel more comfortable with something on the order of it was "the major army in the defeat of Nazi Germany". Certainly it is difficult to attribute relative credit when one considers the importance of air power in the strategic bombing of the German economy and attrition of the Luftwaft and when one considers the importance of the Navy in securing supply routes across the Altantic to the western front, and lend lease supplies across the Pacific and considerable loss of lives and materials.--User:Silverback 22:48, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) I agree and there is no need to resolve the dispute about how to attribute credit in order to find how to say this. Now I changed it to " ... where it (the SU) was the major military force in the defeat of Nazi Germany". User:Irpen 23:18, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC) == article is a bit duplicatous == The section of this article related to the "Cold War and Conventional Forces" is very broad and gives more of a political history of this time period. Most of this information can be found in the series of articles titled "History of the Soviet Union". I can understand that this article is perhaps being planned as a "parent" or "root" article for many smaller, more focused articles, but military buffs who visit this article will seek more in depth military related info. I suggest more information regarding high level military functions (e.g. locations of military districts, establishment of Soviet bases worldwide, reorganizations of the armed forces). Also, this page should spark some interest in developing a page about Marshalls of the Soviet Union. I look forward to future edits. == The history of USSR - question for the West. == This discussion is moved to the Talk:History of the Soviet Union page. Please continue it there if necessary. User:Irpen 18:38, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC) ==Atrocities== Regarding 83.109.137.11's edits: *his change of "helped partitioning" by "took part in partitioning" of Poland is not reverted. *The addition to the article intro: "..but also committed war crimes on a large scale and was instrumental in Soviet ethnic cleansing of many nationalities" was deleted. There were no convictions or admissions of the war crimes during the WW2 by the military, so even if mentioned, it should be presented as allegations. Hatyn Massacre and ethnic cleansings were indeed admitted by the state later but these crimes were conducted by NKVD troops (not the army). Allegations of rape ''by the military'' in Germany are indeed documented in recent publications. So, they should be mentioned, but in the atrocities chapter rather than in the lead. *From the ''"atrocities"'' chapter the massacres of civilians during the WW2 deleted for the same reason as above. Crimes of the state and crimes of the military are not the same thing. Besides, again these where conducted by NKVD which was never part of the military. *"being instrumental in the war of aggression" is not an atrocity per se. War of aggression and a war crime (atrocity) are different things and should be presented properly. I agree, the fact that Soviet Union was involved in wars of aggression deserves mention in ''this'' article. But not in atrocities section and not in the way so that mention would look odd in the context. Just don't use the article as a grab bag for everything that comes to mind by putting it in the text disregarding its structure. Please, no flames. User:Irpen 17:05, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC) I don't see articles where German actions during WWII are presented as "allegations". Wikipedia must treat the Soviet Union in the same way as other countries (for instance Germany) are treated. That Stalin didn't convict himself (solely because he won the war) is irrelevant. If Germany had won the war, Stalin and his functionaries had been the one convicted of war crimes. The article is discussing war crimes because they undoubtly took place, which is only denied by some historical revisionists. Massacres committed by Soviet troops in Eastern Germany, notably in East Prussia, Silesia etc., and other places, are well documented by the German government after the war. // Peter :As a matter of interest where any of you relations combatants in WWII?--User:Irate 21:06, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC) ::My grandparents fled from Latvia to western Germany shortly before their country was brutally occupied by Stalin for the second time. I never was there before after the liberation. They were Latvian patriots and anticommunists and would most likely have been killed or deported if they stayed. Why do you want to know? // Peter :::To make sure I judge response correctly.--User:Irate 00:14, 2005 Mar 30 (UTC) Whether or not Peter's relations were involved in WWII as combatants or as members of civil population suffered from the Soviet or Allied occupation is irrelevant to the points he is making. Allegations of rapes committed by Soviet troops have been discussed in several recent mainstream books written by historians, so they deserved to me mentioned and rapes of civil population by military is a war crime. If Peter is aware of any serious sources (I do mean equally serious as the books quoted above) that document the massacres of civil German population under Soviet occupation and conducted by the army, not NKVD, he should bring them up at this talk page. Peter, please cite your sources. If they are acceptable, we can decide how to include them in the article. And when we do, we should do this properly, by reworking the article so that it retains its good style of the featured article of the day. Do not just paste your thoughts in the text to make a point. Care should be taken to express the material in good academic style. Please, no flames. User:Irpen 21:40, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC) :One of the problems mentioned is Victors justice, if that's to be properly accounted for then everyone debating has to be aware of the potential partiality of their upbring. A certain amount of disclosure of ones potential bias is necassary in these discussions. I personally don't doubt the claims of Russian atrocities, but the easten front is a long why from here.--User:Irate 22:19, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC) One can be partial based on personal background of course. But Encyclopedia article, while written by people, are based on established information, not the original research that is more prone to bias. Of course, the sources can also be picked selectively. That's why it is important to quote the sources when bringing non-conventional ideas into the articles. One more point. The Nazi war crimes are considered to be the crimes of Nazi State, not the crimes of the German military. Atrocities, mass executions, village razing, etc. were conducted by SS troops rather than regular army. Therefore, similar caution should have been applied if one was writing an article on the Military History of Germany, which does not exist. However, the article Nazi Germany is an appropriate place for such crimes. I want to repeat again that the WP articles is not the place to randomly dump some information, even factually accurate, by readers who advance their point of view. The encyclopedic style requires care. At least, when making a significant edit, the editors should read an entire article, decide on the place to include the information and exercise care to make a good article rather than use it to advance his views. User:Irpen 22:47, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC) :I personally on read English and a bit of French entire works are closed to me. So even judging the accuracy of the victors documents is not that testable.--User:Irate 23:24, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC) Show me an army that did not commit atrocities against civilians (Does Luxembourg have army?). The issue is not whether they were committed or not, but the topic should not be discussed in one place, with reliable sources, and not smeared in thin layer everywhere. Notorious cases like Evacuation of East Prussia must be presented in separate pages, to localize possible heated discussions. User:Mikkalai 22:58, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC) :Show me any large group of armed men that hasn't commited atrocites?--User:Irate 23:24, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC) == Main Page Discussion == Moved from Talk:Main Page. --User:Fangz 02:20, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC) "In the 1940s, the Soviet Union took part in World War II, assisting in the defeat of Nazi Germany" Guys! Soviet Union did not assist in the defeat of the Nazi Germany, Soviet Union defeated the Nazi Germany having lost 27 mln lives. The West opened the Second Front only 11 months prior to the Victory Day of May 1945 and only assisted in the defeat of Germans. The bulk of the job of bringing the end to the World War II was done by peoples of the former Soviet Union, for which Europe should be thankful. You guys in the West, should know the European history better. BAYRAM :The Stalinists not only "took part" in the Second World War, they started it themselves. It was their war. Just ask the peoples of Eastern Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania. // Peter :I have to agree with 134.32.227.27 that when reading that sentence in the article it really disturbed me and I think it will disturb a lot of people especially Russians. It is one of those articles written from a very American perspective I guess. User:Male1979 User talk:Male1979 07:56, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC) ::Well, I think a lot of British and French people will be disturbed if Russia, which began the war as a German ally, gets the credit for defeating Germany. User:RickKUser talk:RickK 08:13, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC) Rick! First of all, not Russia, but Soviet Union, which composed of 15 republcs, now independent states. Second, Soviet Union, was not a German ally at the time, it's useful to read the history carefully. Soviet Union signed a Non-Agression Pact with the Nazi Germany to protect itself from Germany's agression or delay it for as long as possible. This non-agression pact was also signed as a response to the Munich Cospiracy signed by British and French prime-ministers and Hitler himself. According to the Munich Cospiracy Germany was allowed to annex part of Chekhoslovakia, which gave the way for annexing the whole country and other European countries. Rick, just try to imagine one thing: Soviet Union lost 27 MILLION LIVES in the war, so it should get the credit as the main power which defeated the Nazi. BAYRAM ::YEAH! The Russian Stalinist Hordes "protected" themselves by attacking and massacring the peoples of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland etc. etc. Tell us another rubbish story, will you? I any event, the Stalinists killed at least 50 Million people and ruined half of the European continent, which they brutally occupied and suppressed for half a century until the liberation in 1990! The Russian hordes are even today occupying Chechnya and mass raping large number of women in "good old Russian tradition". // Peter :I live in Finland and I don't think Soviet troops ever masacred any Finns. What are ''Russian Stalinist hordes'', sound like racism to me. Most Soviet citizens didn't choose Stalin in an election, so it's wrong to blame ordinary Soviet citizens for the attrocities commited by the regime. You don't seem to appreciate that the main victims of any oppressive regime are the citizens of the regime themselves. Stalin killed far more Russians than anyone else. And let's remember that mass murder was being perpetrated on both sides, the Nazis did their fair share of massacring said people. The war was always going to happen when an expansionist like Hitler was appeased. Both regimes were as obnoxious as each other. The Soviet Union almost certainly could have won by themselves, but the Allies probably could have defeated the Nazis as well. Lets remember that it was a joint effort, both the Allies and the Soviet Union contributed to the defeat of the Nazis. I always think it was a great shame that Roosevelt sold the Poles down the river, after all the Brits and the French went to war in the first place because of the invasion of Poland.--User:84.231.87.71 17:10, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC) ::They lost twenty-seven million lives 'cause they just threw bodies at the Germans. And the Non-Agression Pact was an alliance, they carved up Poland, something allies would do. The Americans and British were far more responsible for the war ending than the Soviets. GreatGatsby :::It's factual nonsense. Sorry but extremist opinions seem to become more and more mainstream in America, right down to this kind of falsification. You 'patriots' really hope to re-write history like that, don't you? ::::In countries with well-functioning democracies in the US and Western Europe, the Putin regime is in no position to spread their russian historical revisionism and Soviet propaganda. // Peter ::::A good project would be to extend the coverage of American efforts to free the Europeans as well as the Russians from totalitarianism ideologies like stalinism, see the National Committee for a Free Europe, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. :::::"In countries with well-functioning democracies in the US and Western Europe" (Peter, above). Remember Florida? Democracy for who? For white republicans with revisionistic sense of history. - Nijo ::::::At least you can say what you want in the western world, take part in political and economical life without being persecuted by Comrade Putin like Khodorkovsky was. Russian bandits, hordes and rapists in Putin-occupied Chechnya can in no way be called civilized. The Russians are now building statues of the worst criminal and mass murder in history, Joseph Stalin. They are ignoring the dark side of their history and the many million people they killed in Gulag, they are ignoring their grotesque war crimes in WW2 and after, ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, massacres etc. They are gloryfying Soviet symbols (symbols which are banned as criminal in countries like Hungary and was considered banned in the entire EU by the Justice Commisionary Franco Frattini a few weeks ago). Many people in the western world believe the russians have a problem with historical revisionism which needs to be dealt with before Russia can delevep a really democratic society. The Russians needs to be educated in the crimes of the Stalinists and Soviet Regime. The Sakharov Museum in Moscow har stated that this is a necessity to prevent such crimes from ever happening again and a moral duty. // Peter ::::::"It is frightening that young Russians nearly have no knowledge of the horrible crimes the communist state committed" (Jurij Samodurov, leader of the Sakharov Museum) so your point is? Russia is evil? Yeah, but then so is the USA, guilty of the most appalling war crimes and genocides, and the most cynical sponsoring, in turn, of war criminals and mass murderers. It's always nice to know how evil people were on the other side of the fence, but it would be ever so much more useful, and honest, to start to cope with your own history. User:80.218.88.6 16:25, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC) :Why do you presume history of the United States is ''my'' history? In any event, the policies of the US cannot be compared to the crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during the Stalinist dictatorship. // Peter ""It is frightening that young Russians nearly have no knowledge of the horrible crimes the communist state committed" - Politically oxymoronic. The Soviet Union wasn't a communist state, it was a socialist state. "In any event, the policies of the US cannot be compared to the crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during the Stalinist dictatorship." - So wait, the coup of Chile in 1973, planting of Saddam, funding the contras in Nicaragua, the little escapade in Somalia, the massacre in the Philippines in 1899, imperialism in Latin America till WWII, aren't crimes against humanity? -- User:Natalinasmpf 03:51, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) "Why do you presume history of the United States is ''my'' history? In any event, the policies of the US cannot be compared to the crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during the Stalinist dictatorship." - Peter! I personally do not want to diminish brutalities against all ethnicities in the Soviet Union committed during Stalin times. Killing and jailing you own people can not be justified. However, my initial comment was with regrad to the phrase that Soviet Union only assisted in the defeat of the Nazi Germany. All people who read books know that this is an outright lie, and effort to enhance the role of the West in WWII by using the pretext of Stalinist brutalities. We also all know very well, that the United States was the only country in history that used the nuclear weapon, which happenned twice in Japan killing many thousands of innocecnt people. The US killed 1 million Vietnamese in the Vietnam war and continuing its stupdid war in Iraq. Peter, if you do not want to compare the US policies with the Stalinist ones, please do not. The peoples of the former Soviet Union have already rejected the Stalinist era crimes. But you, Americans should know your history better and enhance the educational level of your people as this is one of the first steps towards the real democracy. BAYRAM Posted by 69.143.240.74 in the wrong section of this talk page, 02:45, 2005 Mar 27; inserted here 03:48, 2005 Mar 28 (UTC): :::Well, the USSR did sign the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact, which formally made them allies of Nazi Germany. They did so due to a variety of factors, ranging from resentment at the fact that the West (Britain and France) had chosen to ignore them on a number of proposed partnerships in the interwar period to the admiration the Russian culture often expresses for stern leaders of every stripe. They did not join in the fight against Germany until they were attacked. The domestic policies of Stalin's USSR were so oppressive that many Soviets greeted their invaders with open arms, and this combined with a recent humilating defeat at the hands of the Finns caused Stalin to panic and fight the war against Germany with a new found fervor, including shooting any soldier or sailor that looked like he might try to flee the battlefield. The Soviet Union had designs on Poland and had discussed dividing it with Germany before the signing of the Pact, so arguing that the Soviets were altruistic in the war would be difficult. The Soviets committed dark atrocities during the war, like the Katyn Forest Massacre. Instead of 'liberating' Warsaw, they circled it for days while the Germans razed every buiding. Their behaviuor after the War was deplorable. But, however dubious the intent or cruel their approach, they did fight the Germans pretty fiercely, and it's doubtful the West could have defeated the Nazis without them, with the possible exception of using nuclear weapons which hadn't yet been invented. So some credit is due, but with a caveat. An analysis of their delaration of war with Japan and Truman's subsequent decision to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a causal link should be considered as well. You can't ignore them, but I wouldn't glorify them either. Ignoring Russia seems to be a mistake that Europe makes quite frequently, usually with disastrous results. Tell their story, so long as it's told objectively. :they ''may'' be compared, but ''should not''. Each of these tragedies should be looked at for what it is, without succumbing to the temptation to immediately point fingers to what are perceived as even worse monstrosities. Nobody pointed out yet that the "US" had to depopulate a whole continent before they could even get started on their follow-up atrocities. It's too easy to point with fingers, though. Every nation should try to take responsibility for their history as well and as maturely as they can. User:Dbachmann User_talk:Dbachmann 13:42, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) Now, now, kids. It is undeniable that the leadership of the (early?) Soviet Union, particularly Stalin himself, match pretty much every definition of evil there is. I do not believe anyone can disagree with that. Perhaps it was merely a willingness to sacrifice human decency for some dubious goal. That is irrelevant. It is also undeniable that the Soviet Union had a key role in the defeat of Nazi Germany - that without the actions of millions of Russian soldiers (who are simply people fighting to liberate their country. Most played no part in the atrocities committed by their government.) there is absolutely no way the Second World War could have been won. The same, in fact goes for the rest of the allies. The USA helped supply the survival of the Red Army. Britain gave a vital foothold in western europe. And so on. We should agree on some sort of compromise. I'd be happy with the current wording - as long as The Military History of the United States stated that the US also 'assisted' in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Let's not let our opinions get in the way of the facts.--User:Fangz 23:30, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::This is ridiculous. The stalinist hordes committed horrible war crimes, massacres, mass rapes of million of women during the war. In fact every stalinist soldier should have been tried for war crimes. The claim that they were "fighting to liberate their country" is ridiculous. They were waging war of aggression against Poland, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and numerous other countries. They were fighting to conquer, occupy and suppress other peoples. They were fighting for the stalinist regime that killed, deported and enslaved more people than any other regime in world history. Those opposed to stalinism, in fact some 1 million Russians, fought on the German side. // Peter :::Prove it. Ie. prove that every single soldier fighting under the banner of the Soviet Union (a) knew about the atrocities that were taking place, (b) were in active support of Stalin's policies in every way, (c) actively engaged in various atrocities. (d) Prove additionally that the Soviet propaganda at the time - advertising 'driving back the nazi invaders' was widely disbelieved by the new recruits. (e) Prove finally that *anyone* against the Stalinist agenda must neccessarily be in support of and fight for the Nazi regime. Know that you are claiming against the historical consensus on that time, and so the onus of proof is on you.--User:Fangz 12:07, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::::I didn't claim that every Russian soldier knew about the crimes, but seriously, even if they were told that they were 'driving back the nazi invaders' when the Soviet Union attacked Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from 1939 on, at a time when Germany was their ally, I don't find it important. It's really just silly. What is an established historical fact is that the Soviet Union was waging wars of aggression and that regular russian troops committed war crimes on a much larger scale than what is usual in a war against many nationalities. ::::Also, when I said that those opposed to stalinism fought on the German side, I meant ''those who took part in the war'', the only Russians who actively fought Stalin and his terror rule. ::::I don't believe any of my claims are "against historical concensus". I don't believe historical concensus even exists on this matter. The differences between the view of pro-western historians in the Baltic countries, Poland, Hungary and other countries on the first side, and of Stalinist apologists in Russia on the second side, is big. // Peter :Is Wikipedia a discussion forum now then? In the old days it always used to be an encyclopaedia. Please try to direct all this intellectual energy into improving the article (Military history of the Soviet Union) rather than scoring points off each other. User:GrahamN 23:45, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Ok, I've added an Military history of the Soviet Union#Atrocities section. Please all contribute. Just try to keep it NPOV, and not original research.--User:Fangz 12:35, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::Oh come on Fangz. Graham already ended the argument. Now you're going to continue it by making others ask the question, "Why does the Soviet Union get an "Atrocities" section and the other countries don't?" User:Btr003 ::::I don't this Graham ended the argument - and if he did, I don't think that affects the point that the Soviet Union has indeed a controversial history with many allegations of atrocities. And I do agree with Peter and others that to have an article about the history of the soviet military whilst not mentioning the unsavoury aspects would be a failure of WP's mission as an encyclopedia. If we have a disagreement about the content of the article, then we have to improve the article by sorting out the facts, and adding it so long as it is NPOV. And in any case, other countries do have an atrocities section, or even links to whole articles devoted to discussing their crimes. eg. Holocaust, Human Rights in China, Human rights in the United States, Italian war crimes (This seems to be in an NPOV debate, but it certainly isn't a target for deletion.) Democratic Kampuchea#Revolutionary Terror and so on... We need to at least get the more popular/more proven allegations in.--User:Fangz 22:19, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC) For crying out loud, Military history of the Soviet Union is NO LONGER ON the Main Page! And "//Peter", stop posting messages above the line asking people to stop scoring points off each other! :Anonymous, I don't know which line you are referring to, and I have never asked people to "stop scoring points off each other"! // Peter :: "//Peter", the line asking you (and others) to stop is now underlined. You kept posting above that line by User:GrahamN after 23:45, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) without putting in the time and date .... (e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&diff=11594934&oldid=11594861]) Why ? If this discussion about Military history of the Soviet Union has to continue, it should go to Talk: Military history of the Soviet Union, not Talk: Main Page. Please. You people are all crazy. Just because someone tells you to do something doesn't mean you have to do it. Also, the discussion about Military history of the Soviet Union has already started here, we should continue it here. == Wikipedia:Naming conventions (military units) == Forgive the spam, but I'm trying to round up wikipedians with an interest in international military history to help work out some conventions for the names of military units. If you are interested in that sort of thing, please visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions (military units) and join the discussions on the talk page. — User:Bobby D. Bryant 17:48, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC) ==Annexed territories in late 30s== Currently the article says: :In the late 1930s, the Red Army Winter War; fought a brief Battle of Halhin Gol (together with its ally Mongolia) with Japan and its client state Manchukuo; and, in Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, took part in the partition of Second Polish Republic, annexed the Baltic States, as well as Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (from Romania). Re the last part ("it annexed.."), this was annexed by the state (USSR) the army was the instrument that made it possible. I would like to changed this by, for example: :"...secured annexing of ... by the Soviet Union". What do you think? -User:Irpen 16:13, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
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Military history of the Soviet Union
[[Image:Rkka.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov salute a military parade in Red Square above the message "Long Live the Worker-Peasant Red Army—Loyal Sentinel of the Soviet Borders!"]] The military history of the Soviet Union began in the days following the 1917 October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. The new government formed the Red Army to fight various foes in the Russian Civil War. In the late 1930s, the Red Army Winter War; fought a brief Battle of Halhin Gol (together with its ally Mongolia) with Japan and its client state Manchukuo; and, was deployed when the Soviet Union, in Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, took part in the partition of Second Polish Republic, annexed the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (from Romania). In World War II, the Red Army was the major military force in the defeat of Nazi Germany. After the war, it military occupation part of Germany and many nations in central and eastern Europe, which became satellite states in the Eastern bloc. The Soviet Union became the sole superpower rival to the United States. The Cold War between the two nations led to military buildups, the nuclear arms race, and the Space Race. By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces had more troops and nuclear weapons than any other nation. The Soviet Union fell in 1991, thanks not to military defeat but economic and political factors (see history of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)). The Soviet military consisted of five armed services. In their official order of importance, the Soviet armed services were the Strategic Rocket Forces, Soviet Army, Soviet Air Force, Soviet Anti-Air Defense, and Soviet Navy. The two other Soviet militarized forces were the Internal Troops (MVD Troops), subordinated to the MVD, and the Soviet Border Troops, subordinated to the KGB.
==Tsarist and revolutionary background== [[Image:LeninTrotskyAndRedArmy.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Members of the Red Army gather around Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Saint Petersburg.]] The February Revolution replaced the Tsar with the Russian Provisional Government, 1917 which was itself overthrown by the October Revolution of 1917. The Russian army, exhausted by its Eastern Front (World War I) in World War I, was in the final stages of disintegration and collapse. Even though Bolshevik influence in the ranks was strong, the officer corps was staffed with many who violently opposed communism. The Bolsheviks perceived the Tsarist army to be one of the foundations of the hated old regime, and decided to abolish it in favor of establishing a new military loyal to the Marxism cause. Thus the core of the Tsarist army became the core of the Russian Provisional Government, 1917 army which became the core of the White movement, which in intermittent collaboration with Allied Intervention in Russia forces from outside Russia (Japanese, Britain, France, United States) battled the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. On January 28, 1918 the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin decreed the establishment of the Red Army, officially merging the 20,000 Red Guards (Russia) with 200,000 Baltic Fleet sailors and a handful of sympathetic Saint Petersburg garrison soldiers. Leon Trotsky served as their first commissar for war. The early Red Army was egalitarian but poorly disciplined. The Bolsheviks considered military ranks and saluting to be bourgeois customs and abolished them; soldiers now elected their own leaders and voted on which orders to follow. This arrangement was abolished, however, under pressure of the Russian Civil War (1918–1921), and ranks were reinstated. During the civil war, the Bolsheviks fought counterrevolutionary groups that became known as the White movement as well as armies sponsored by Russia's former allies such as the United Kingdom and France, which saw a need to overthrow the Bolshevik government. The Red Army enjoyed a series of initial victories over their opponents, and in a surge of optimism Lenin ordered the Soviet Western Army (Russia) Russian westward offensive of 1918-1919 retreating from the ''Ober-Ost'' ares. This operation swept the newly formed Ukrainian People's Republic and Belarusian National Republic and eventually lead to the Soviet invasion of Second Polish Republic, a newly independent state of the former Imperial Russia. By invading Poland and initiating the Polish-Soviet War the Bolsheviks expressed their belief that they would eventually triumph over opposing capitalism forces both at home and abroad. The overwhelming majority of professional officers in Russian army were of nobility (dvoryanstvo); moreover, most of them had joined the White armies. Therefore the Workers' and Peasants' Army initially faced a shortage of experienced military leaders. To remedy this, the Bolsheviks recruited 50,000 former Imperial Army officers to command the Red Army. At the same time, they attached political commissars to Red Army units to monitor the actions and loyalty of professional commanders, formally termed as "military specialists" (''voyenspets'', for ''voyenny spetsialist''). By 1921 the Red Army had defeated four White armies and held off five armed, foreign contingents that had intervened in the civil war, but began to face setbacks in Poland. Polish forces managed to break a long streak of Bolshevik victories by launching a bold counteroffensive at the Battle of Warsaw (1920) in August of 1920. At Warsaw the Red Army suffered a defeat so great and so unexpected that it turned the course of the entire war and eventually forced the Soviets to accept the unfavorable conditions offered by the Treaty of Riga, signed on March 18, 1921. It was the biggest defeat of the Red Army in history. After the civil war, the Red Army became an increasingly professional military organization. With most of its five million soldiers Military discharge, the Red Army was transformed into a small regular force, and territorial militias were created for wartime mobilization. Soviet military schools, established during the civil war, began to graduate large numbers of trained officers loyal to the Soviet power. In an effort to increase the prestige of the military profession, the party reestablished formal military ranks, downgraded political commissars, and eventually established the principle of one-man command. ==Development of the structure, ideology, and doctrine of the Soviet military== ===Party control=== The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had a number of mechanisms of control over the country's armed forces. First, starting from a certain rank, only a Party member could be a military commander, and was thus subject to Party discipline. Second, the top military leaders had been systematically integrated into the highest echelons of the party. Third, the party placed a network of political commissar throughout the armed forces to influence the activities of the military. A deputy political commander (''zampolit'') served as a political commissar of the armed forces. A ''zampolit'' supervised party organizations and conducted party political work within a military unit. He lectured troops on Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet view of international affairs, and the party's tasks for the armed forces. Following World War II the zampolit lost all command authority but retained the power to report to the next highest political officer or organization on the political attitudes and performance of the unit's commander. In 1989 over 20 percent of all armed forces personnel were party members or Komsomol members. Over 90 percent of all officers in the armed forces were party or Komsomol members. ===Military counterintelligence=== ''Main article: Military counterintelligence of Soviet Army'' Throughout the history of the Soviet Army, the Soviet secret police (known variously as the Cheka, State Political Directorate, NKVD, among many others) maintained control over the counterintelligence ''Special Departments'' (Особый отдел) that existed at all larger military formations. The best known was SMERSH (1943-1946) created during the Great Patriotic War. While the staff of a Special Department of a regiment was generally known, it controlled a network of secret informants, both chekists and recruited ordinary military. ===Political doctrine=== Under the direction of Lenin and Trotsky, the Red Army adhered closely to Karl Marx's proclamation that the bourgeoisie could be overcome only by a worldwide revolt of the proletariat, and to this end early Soviet military doctrine focused on spreading the revolution abroad and expanding Soviet influence throughout the world. Lenin provided an early experiment of Marx's theory when he invaded Poland in hopes of generating a communist German Revolution. Lenin's Polish expedition only complemented his March 1919 establishment of the Comintern, an organization whose sole purpose was to fight "by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the State." In keeping with the Comintern philosophy, the Red Army forcibly suppressed the anti-Soviet Basmachi Revolt in Central Asia in order to keep Turkestan in the Soviet alliance system. In 1921, a Red Army occupation of the Democratic Republic of Georgia overthrew the representative Georgian government and replaced it with a Soviet Republic. Georgia was then forcibly merged with Armenia and Azerbaijan in order to form the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, a member state of the Soviet Union. ===Military-party relations=== During the 1930s, Joseph Stalin's five-year plans and History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)#Stalinist development built the productive base necessary to modernize the Red Army. As the likelihood of war in Europe increased later in the decade, the Soviet Union tripled its military expenditures and doubled the size of its regular forces to match the power of its potential enemies. [[Image:Stalin 02.jpg|right|frame|Joseph Stalin implemented a nationwide industrialization drive which provided significantly to the Soviet military complex, only to later deprive the Red Army of its most experienced commanders during the Great Purge.]] In 1937, however, Stalin Great Purge the Red Army of its best military leaders. Fearing that the military posed a threat to his rule, Stalin jailed or executed many Red Army officers, estimated in thousands, including three of five marshals. These actions were to severely impair the Red Army's capabilities in the Winter War (Winter War) of 1939–1940 and in World War II. Fearing the immense popularity of the armed forces after World War II, Stalin demoted war hero Marshal Georgy Zhukov and took personal credit for having saved the country. After Stalin's death in 1953, Zhukov reemerged as a strong supporter of Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev rewarded Zhukov by making him minister of defense and a full Politburo member. Concern that the Soviet army might become too powerful in politics, however, led to Zhukov's abrupt dismissal in the fall of 1957. Khrushchev later alienated the armed forces by cutting defense expenditures on conventional forces in order to carry out his plans for economic reform. Leonid Brezhnev's years in power marked the height of party-military cooperation as he provided ample resources to the armed forces. In 1973 the minister of defense became a full Politburo member for the first time since 1957. Yet Brezhnev evidently felt threatened by the professional military, and he sought to create an aura of military leadership around himself in an effort to establish his authority over the armed forces. In the early 1980s, party-military relations became strained over the issue of resource allocations to the armed forces. Despite a downturn in economic growth, the armed forces argued, often to no avail, for more resources to develop advanced conventional weapons. Mikhail Gorbachev downgraded the role of the military in state ceremonies, including moving military representatives to the end of the leadership line-up atop Lenin's Mausoleum during the annual Red Square military parade commemorating the October Revolution. Instead, Gorbachev emphasized civilian economic priorities and reasonable sufficiency in defense over the professional military's perceived requirements. ===Military doctrine=== [[Image:T-26tankinSpain.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Throughout the 1930s, the Red Army concentrated its efforts on developing a highly mechanized, mobile war machine. Pictured here, a Soviet T-26 tank performs operations during the Spanish Civil War.]] The Russian army was defeated in the World War I, a fact which strongly shaped the early stages of Red Army development. While the armies of Britain and France were content to retain strategies which had made them victorious, the Red Army proceeded to experiment and develop new tactics and concepts, developing parallel to the reborn Wehrmacht. The Soviets viewed themselves as a nation unique to human history and thus felt no loyalty to previous military tradition, an ideology which allowed for and prioritized innovation. From its conception, the Red Army committed itself to emphasizing highly mobile warfare. This decision was influenced by the formative wars of its history, namely the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War. Both of these conflicts had little in common with the static trench warfare of the First World War. Instead, they featured long range mobile operations, often by small but highly motivated forces, as well as rapid advances of hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days. Under Lenin's New Economic Policy, the Soviet Union had few resources to devote to the Red Army during its formative years in the 1920s. This changed only when Stalin began the industrialisation drive in 1929, a policy created in part to allow for unprecedented funds to be dedicated to the military. APP-6a.">Image:1942SovietTankCorpsArmy.png|thumb|right|250px|Type Soviet Tank Corps and Tank Army of 1942 and 1943 using APP-6a. Using these new resources, the Red Army of the 1930s developed a highly sophisticated concept of mobile warfare which relied on huge formations of tanks, aircraft, and airborne troops designed to break through the enemy's line and carry the battle deep to the enemy's rear. Soviet industry responded, supplying tanks, aircraft and other equipment in sufficient numbers to make such operations practical. To avoid overestimating the power of the Soviet army it should be noted, however, that while before 1941 Soviet formations of a given level were at least equal to and often stronger than equivalent formations of other armies, huge wartime losses and reorganisation based on war experience reversed the trend during the later war years. Thus, for example, the Soviet Tank Corps was equivalent in armored vehicle power to an American armored division, and a Soviet rifle (infantry) division, unless specifically reinforced, was often equivalent to an American infantry regiment. Soviets did not follow the Germans in assuming that the next war would be decided so quickly as to rely principally on equipment produced before the start of the war. Instead, they developed their armament factories under the assumption that during the war they would have to rebuild the whole equipment of the ground and air forces many times over. This assumption was indeed proven correct during the four-year-long war. The Red Army's focus on mobile operations in the early 1930s was gravely disrupted by Stalin's Great Purge. Since the new doctrines were associated with officers who had been declared enemies of the state, the support for them declined. Many large mechanised formations were disbanded, with the tanks distributed to support the infantry. After the German blitzkrieg proved its potency in Poland and France, the Red Army started a frantic effort to rebuild the large mechanised corps, but the task was only partly finished when the Wehrmacht attacked in 1941. The huge tank forces, powerful only on paper, were mostly annihilated by the Germans in the first months of Operation Barbarossa. Another factor contributing to the initial defeat was that the Soviet rearmament effort was started too early, and in 1941 the majority of Soviet equipment was obsolete and inferior to that of the Wehrmacht. These doctrines were eventually successfully used at the front starting in 1943 after the Red Army regained the initiative. ==Practical deployment of the Soviet military== ===Interwar period=== ''See also: Interwar period'' Following the death of Lenin, the Soviet Union was enmeshed in a struggle for succession that pitted Trotsky and his policy of "world revolution" against Stalin and his policy of "socialism in one country." Stalin prevailed and Trotsky was removed as war commissar in 1925, resulting in a turn away from the policy of spreading the revolution abroad in favour of focusing on domestic issues and defending the country against the possibility of foreign invasion. Eager to dispose of Trotsky's political and military supporters, Stalin directed the execution of eight high-ranking generals between 1935 and 1938. Primary among these was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, leader of the Soviet invasion of Poland and generally considered one of the most talented strategists in the Soviet military. Despite Stalin's isolationist policies, and even though USSR's borders would remain static for fifteen years following Lenin's death, the Soviets continued to involve themselves in international affairs, and the Comintern was instrumental in establishing the Communist parties of Republic of China in 1921 and French Indochina in 1930. Additionally, the Red Army played a crucial role in the Spanish Civil War, supplying over 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 1,500 artillery pieces, 300 armored cars, hundreds of thousands of small arms and 30,000 tons of ammunition to the Second Spanish Republic cause. Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War was greatly influenced by the growing tension between Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany and an avid supporter of the fascism forces of Francisco Franco. Nazi-Soviet relations were tempered by Hitler's personal hatred of the people of East Europe and by the longstanding ideological feud between fascism and communism. Direct armed conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union was delayed by the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, which essentially divided the nations of Eastern Europe into two spheres of interest, one belonging to the Soviets and the other to the Nazis. As a result of this pact the Red Army would launch an Polish September Campaign#Soviet aggression and Bessarabia in the opening months of World War II. Stalin continued to fear Nazi aggression and on November 30, 1939 announced the invasion of Finland in an effort to use Finnish territory as a buffer-zone between Germany and the heart of industrial Russia. The resulting Winter War proved disastrous for the Soviet military. The Red Army, which was still feeling the sting of Stalin's purges and finding itself starved of industrial and intellectual resources, suffered a series of embarrassing defeats before accepting armistice on March 6, 1940. As a direct result of the Soviet aggression the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations on December 14, 1939. ===World War II=== ''Main article : Eastern Front (WWII) [[Image:Soviet Reichstag.gif|thumb|right|250px|Marking the Soviet Union's victory, a soldier raises the Flag of the Soviet Union over the German Reichstag (building) in the Nazi Germany capital of Berlin.]] The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 established a non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and a secret protocol described how Poland and the Baltic countries would be divided between them. In the Polish September Campaign of 1939 the two powers invaded and partitioned Poland, and in June 1940 the Soviet Union occupation of the Baltic countries. The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies before Nazi Germany swept across the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet's poor performance in the Winter War against Finland encouraged Hitler to ignore the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and take the Red Army by surprise. During the initial stages of the war, the Soviet military was forced to retreat and also forced to stay and be killed or captured, trading territory for time while suffering a staggering number of casualties. The United States program of lend lease was extended to the Soviet Union in September 1941, supplying planes, tanks and other war materials. Eventually the Soviets managed to slow the Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg, halting the Nazi offensive in December 1941 outside the gates of Moscow. The Red Army then launched a powerful winter counteroffensive which pushed the enemy away from the capital. At the start of 1942, the weakened Axis armies abandoned their march on Moscow and advanced south towards the Caucasus and Volga river. This offensive, in turn, ran out of steam in autumn 1942, allowing the Soviet forces to stage a devastating counteroffensive on the overextended enemy. The Red Army encircled and destroyed significant German forces at the Battle of Stalingrad, which ended in February 1943 and reversed the tide of the entire war. There were enormous losses to the troops on both sides during this stage of the campaign, but especially for the USSR with millions of casualties in the battles for Moscow and Stalingrad. In the summer of 1943, following the Battle of Kursk, the Red Army seized the strategic initiative for the remainder of the war. All Soviet territory was liberated from German occupation in 1944. After having driven the German army out of Eastern Europe, in May 1945 the Red Army launched the final assault on Battle of Berlin that effectively ended the World War II in Europe (see V-E Day). Much of Germany and even parts of the USSR were devastated by the advancing Red Army troops as a result of an aggressive policy of "scorched earth" . Once Germany was defeated, the Red Army joined the war against Empire of Japan, and in summer 1945 carried out an offensive against the Japanese forces stationed in northern Manchuria. The Red Army emerged from the war as the most powerful land army in history and became known as the Soviet Army thereafter. The defeat of the Wehrmacht had come, however, at the cost of seven million soldiers and perhaps 27 million civilians dead, by far the highest losses List of World War II casualties by country. This is believed to be one of the highest human death tolls from any military conflict . ===The Cold War and conventional forces=== ''See also: Cold War'' [[Image:AK-47.jpg|thumb|right|United States Marine Corps test fire an RPK. This light machine gun is typical of the Red Army's influence in the post-war world. It is based on the AK-47 assault rifle, which would ultimately effect change in both future rifle design and in the methods of modern warfare.]] By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had a standing army of 10 to 13 million men. Immediately following Germany's surrender, this number was reduced to five million; this decline was indicative not of diminishing interest in the Soviet military but rather of a growing interest in establishing more modern and mobile armed forces. This policy resulted in the 1951 introduction of the AK-47, designed four years earlier as an improvement on the submachine gun which supplied Soviet infantry with a rugged and reliable source of short-range firepower. Also important was the 1967 introduction of the BMP-1, the first infantry fighting vehicle commissioned by any armed force in the world. These innovations would help direct the course of Soviet military operations throughout the Cold War. Many of the Soviet forces who fought to liberate the countries of Eastern Europe from Nazi control remained in the region even after Germany's surrender in 1945. Mindful of Russia's vulnerability to western invasion, Stalin used this military occupation to establish satellite states, creating a buffer zone between Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviets quickly became an enormous political and economic influence in the region and the Soviet Union actively assisted local communist parties in coming to power. By 1948, seven eastern European countries had communist governments. In this setting, the Cold War emerged out of a conflict between Stalin and U.S. President Harry S. Truman over the future of Eastern Europe during the Potsdam Conference in 1945. An aggressive Truman charged that Stalin had betrayed the agreement made at the Yalta Conference. With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, the Soviet Union remained adamant in the face of Truman's attempt to use the U.S. atomic monopoly to coerce the Soviets into making concessions, and in 1955 Moscow introduced the Warsaw Pact to counterbalance the Western NATO alliance. Conventional military power showed its continued influence when the Soviet Union used its troops to 1956 Hungarian Revolution and Czechoslovakia: 1948 - 1968#Warsaw Pact Intervention and the end of Prague spring to suppress the democratic aspirations of their peoples and keep these countries within the Soviet alliance system. The Soviet Union and the western forces, led by the US, faced a number of standoffs that threatened to turn into live conflicts, such as the Berlin Blockade of 1948-1949 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which saw "hawks" on both sides push the respective rivals closer towards war due to policies of brinksmanship. This attitude was tempered by fears of a nuclear conflict and desires among moderates for détente. Under Khrushchev's leadership, Soviet relations with Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were finally repaired with the 1956 dissolution of the Cominform. This decision generated a further rift between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, a neighboring communist state which felt the Soviets were turning their back on the fundamental Marxism-Leninism struggle for the worldwide triumph of communism. This Sino-Soviet split erupted in 1967 when the Red Guards (China) besieged the Soviet embassy in Beijing. Additional conflicts along the Sino-Soviet border followed in 1969. Tension between the political forces in Moscow and Beijing would greatly influence Asian politics during the 1960s and 1970s, and a microcosm of the Sino-Soviet split emerged when Ho Chi Minh's Soviet-aligned North Vietnam invaded Pol Pot's pro-Chinese Cambodia in 1978. The Soviets had ensured the loyalty of Vietnam and Laos through an aggressive campaign of political, economic and military aid – the same tactic which allowed the USSR to compete with America in a race to establish themselves as neocolonial rulers of newly independent states in Africa and the Middle East. Extensive arms sales made weapons like the AK-47 and the T-72 tank icons of the contemporary wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Also significant was the 1968 declaration of the Brezhnev Doctrine which officially asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene in other nation's internal affairs in order to secure socialism from opposing capitalist forces. This doctrine was used to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In Afghanistan the Soviet forces met a fierce resistance from a mujahideen composed of sympathetic muslims and supported by the CIA. Battling an opposition that relied on guerrilla tactics and asymmetric warfare, the massive Soviet war machine proved incapable of achieving decisive victories and the entire campaign quickly devolved into a quagmire not unlike that which America faced a decade earlier in the Vietnam War. After ten years of fighting at the cost of approximately 20 billion dollars a year (in 1986, United States dollar) and 22,000 Soviet casualties, Gorbachev surrendered to public opinion and ordered troops to withdraw in early 1989. ===The Cold War and nuclear weapons=== ''Main article: Nuclear warfare#The Cold War The USSR 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. 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. [[Image:Joe 4.jpg|thumb|left|250px|This, the Soviet's fifth nuclear weapon test (dubbed "Joe 4" by the West) was detonated on August 12, 1953 in Kazakhstan.]] 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 testing 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 (anti-ballistic missile) system and retain the ability to place multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). The SALT I (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 nuclear weapon#Weapons delivery, 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. ==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 of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union supervised all military industries as the executive agent of the Defense Council. Within the government, the deputy chairman of the Sovnarkom 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 percent) . 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. ==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 History of the Soviet Union (1985-1991). 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 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, removing the rebellious republic government and allegedly 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 Military of Russia, 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 Transdnistria. 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. ==Timeline== == 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. == Crimes against civilians == Throughout its history, the Soviet military has been accused of several atrocities and war crimes, many of which were later admitted by the Soviet leadership, or later by the Russian government. Examples include: * Widespread allegations of rape, possibly condoned by senior command, during and following WWII. *Evacuation of East Prussia. * Crimes against civilians during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. ==See also== *List of military aircraft of the Soviet Union and the CIS *List of missiles#Russia or the USSR *List of Soviet tanks *Soviet Navy ==Notes== # [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/01/24/wbeev24.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/01/24/ixworld.html 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 # [http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Second Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm], [http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/maildrop.htm 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 # [http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Russia/ 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. ==References == * - [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sutoc.html 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 *Malone, Richard: ''The Russian Revolution''. Cambridge Press 2004 Soviet history Military of the Soviet Union Military history of the Soviet Union
Military history of the Soviet Union
I hope this article doesn't remain a mere collection of a few sentences. It looks like we really wanted to have this article in Wikipedia, but do not know how to proceed with it. It's kind of a rare phenomenon for a COTW. User:KNewman 12:07, Jan 27, 2005 (UTC) == Move page == This page should be moved back to military history of the Soviet Union since all the other military history articles use that format--User:JiangUser talk:Jiang 06:49, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :I just moved it. User:172 16:28, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :Are you going to exclude the military history of RSFSR before the creation of the SU? User:Mikkalai 21:07, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::Good question. The article should start off with the military history of the Russian SSFSR. Perhaps the title should be the military history of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union? User:172 22:49, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ==Problems with the current outline== I'm a bit troubled by the current outline, which seems a bit more fitting for (say) an article on Soviet foreign relations or Soviet diplomatic history. Instead, an article on this topic should focus on the huge Soviet military-industrial complex, which competed with other sectors of the Soviet economy and society for power and the allocation of resources. First, it should start off tracing the development of the leadership and organization of the Soviet military, its relationship to the Communist Party and the secret police, and how Soviet authorities ensured the political control of the armed forces throughout the Soviet era. Second, the article should trace the role of the defense sector in the Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's commitment to the Cold War was enormous. 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 percent). The Soviet military-industrial complex employed at least one fifth of the workforce. (The comparable U.S. figures were roughly one-sixteenth of gross national product and about one of every sixteen in the workforce.) Toward the end, the article can touch on the economic devastation suffered by main regions of the former Soviet Union with the end of the Cold War and the cutback in military spending, which hit heavy industrial plants very hard and some regions of Russia entirely dependent on the military-industrial complex. I tentatively recommend the following outline: (1) Development of the Soviet party, state, military structure (2) National security-- subsections of which can trace the role of the armed forces in the Second World War, Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and the Cold War. (3) The Soviet military-industrial complex and the economy (4) The armed forces and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first two sources I'd recommend are 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) for a relatively short survey. William E. Odom ''The Collapse of the Soviet Military'' (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998) is a definitive source. User:172 07:16, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) After writing the comments above, I just inserted a new draft outline in the article. Since this is a collaboration of the week, I hope that many other editors will fill it in and/or tweak it. I won't have time to write much of the content, though, in the next couple of weeks. User:172 07:40, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) : I looked at a few other military histories, and they appear to be based on a timeline: British_military_history, Military_history_of_Canada, Military_history_of_the_United_States. I think if we split the article according to the timeline, it would be easier for multiple editors to collaborate on it. What you propose would likely produce a better article, but it would be a lot harder to write. Your proposal requires an understanding of the issue as a whole, as opposed to just learning parts of it. I am not opposed to your proposal. I just think it's more than can be realistically done by a loose group of editors. It's a job for one or two dedicated editors working in close collaboration. --User:Gene s 07:53, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::True, but the goal of the collaboration of the week process is to produce something worthy of featured article status. While I can't write the whole thing, I can help with the research and outlining if the other editors want to write a scholarly piece that goes deeper than an almanac-like chronicle. User:172 08:03, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) My concern is that there doesn't appear to be any section on WWII -- how can we write an article about Soviet Military History and not have substantial content on WWII? --User:Bschorr 07:55, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :::As a subsection of the section on national security. It makes sense to trace the development of how the Soviets structured military, party, and state relations first and then go into the war. User:172 08:03, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::::I put in just the very beginnings of the WWII content. It's getting late here, though, and I'm afraid if I go any further I won't make any sense. Hopefully other collaborators can expand and expound as necessary. --User:Bschorr 09:08, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ==Linking while we work== While we're all working on the article, we should link items sparingly. Since we're working on bits and pieces of at a time, we don't have a very good idea about where the first mention of a item will appear in the article, and we're only supposed to link an item where it first appears in the article. User:172 23:36, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :I will respectfully disagree. In a long article like this one, a single link is nearly impossible to find, if a question arises somewhere down the text. A link per item per major section would be more reasonable (look at it in this way: a major section is a potential separtate article). User:Mikkalai 21:51, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC) :We can always remove multiple links in the same section later. I'd rather accidentally link too much and remove the extra links than accidentally link too little and not even realise that potentially useful links are missing. Just my $(1/50). User:Nvinen 04:40, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Page move II== I thought we moved the page to Soviet military history in order not to exclude the history of Soviet Russia prior to the USSR's creation in 1922. What's the logic behind moving it back?User:AndyL 23:39, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) :Oh, okay. Jiang pointed out that this page should be moved back to military history of the Soviet Union since all the other military history articles use that format. I tought about that problem and figured that the page could be moved again to military history of Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union, but I guess that'll be too lengthy and confusing for some. Please go ahead and move it back. User:172 23:43, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ::IMO it is never too late to move it back. Although it was me who rose the issue now, at the same time I would suggest to wait 1-2 days for other opinions. User:Mikkalai 01:15, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) :Well, any other opinions? User:Mikkalai 01:15, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::No objections from me. User:172 04:22, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) : "of Soviet Union" was done for consistency. On the other hand, special cases require special treatment. The RSFSR/USSR case is clearly special. "Soviet history" it is then. --User:Gene s 05:45, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Russia versus the Sovet Union== When adding to this article, please refrain from using the word "Russia" as it was not the official name of the country during the period covered on this page. It's akin to referring to the UK as "England". It's used often, but it is NOT correct. --User:Woohookitty 23:50, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ==Timeline== Eventually the timeline can go in an article organized along the lines of Timeline of events leading to the American Civil War. User:172 23:52, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC) ==U.S. report pasting== Please be aware that much of the content of this article has been copied and pasted by User:172 without modification from a United States government report [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/sutoc.html] of 1989. Furthermore, the article's structure is being shaped to match this, with even valid but presently-empty sections that do not have material in the US report being deleted or renamed to match sections that can be pasted. This is hardly acceptable scope, neutrality, or quality. User:119 20:51, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC) :(1) It is public domain, and better than nothing. (I haven't had time this week to write my own work.) As for quality and neutrality, the LOC handbooks indeed come with their own biases, but they are generally far less biased than the hysterical anticommunism that usually pervades Wikipedia articles, making every single political crisis in the Third World out to be a part of some grand Kremlin conspiracy. (2) I have modified all of the content that I have posted, not taking anything from the LOC sourcebook for granted, posting only stuff that I can personally vouch for with other sources. If anyone has any specific qualms about any of the content that I have posted, I will provide independent sources backing it all up. (3) As for the scope, even if this article were to become as detailed as our largest text-based article found in Wikipedia:Offline reports/This is one of the longest articles (November 2003), given the wealth of literature on this topic, writing at this level of detail only requires when to write from his own general knowledge and from other sourcebooks; such a broad article can only be a most general of surveys. As for the organization, it is not based on that of the LOC handbook. It is based on my own proposal to first trace the origins of the military/party/government structure and the military's relationships with other Soviet institutions, and then to give a brief overview of Soviet national security, ending it with an examination of the nature and size of the Soviet military-industrial complex. This organization is an alternative to one based on a simple timeline, chronicling every single Soviet military intervention (an organization more fitting for an article that takes into account the history of Soviet foreign relations along with military history). User:172 23:26, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC) **Re:User:172, I have no problem with the text you have added, and personally I love the format, but I do have a couple of things to ask you: 1. Since you have these other souces, and have used them as references already, could you add them to the page's References? 2.though, like I said, I like the form, I think "National security" is too broad a term. Shouldn't it be something like "Practical deployment of Soviet military" or "Soviet theory in practice" or "History of Soviet military activity" or something (I know none of those sound quite right). Do you have any ideas for changes? would you object if I changed it? Also, shouldn't that section be more comprehensive? I don't understand why it shouldn't include all of the events currently relegated to "Timeline". perhaps I misunderstand its purpose. Thanks. User:Ryan Anderson 00:00, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC) :(1) Yes, I'll start working on a references section, along with the other unfinished sections. (2) I like "Practical deployment of Soviet military." Please go ahead and change it to that title. The other two proposals are okay, but they may encourage other users to get too chronological. Yes, the section can be more comprehensive, along with all the others. Every section of the article is a work in progress. (3) Nice work on your own contributions, especially the photos. User:172 01:27, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Collapse of the Soviet Union and the military== Maybe I am nitpicking, but should we really use the term "collapse of the military" in the section title? I would say the transition from Soviet to Russian armed forces was carried out reasonably smoothly and continuity was maintained. There were almost no political purges whatsoever, and the majority of the Russian officers at least continued their careers. Since 1991 Russia still has no difficulty in maintaining an unbroken strategic nuclear parity with the USA. Of course I am not denying that Russia's military has for the most part only a fraction of the Soviet capability before 1991, but collapse it not an appropriate word to describe what happened. User:Balcer 03:44, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) :This had little to do with the military, but rather the unraveling of the Communist Party. User:172 05:15, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::Oh, I see that I misunderstood. I guess then it would be a bit more clear to have: The military and the collapse of the Soviet Union, to avoid the suggestion that the military collapsed along with the USSR User:Balcer 05:26, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::: I could add something about the Russian Navy's 300th anniversary. I'm just not sure it would be what this page was looking for. Some facts I could add: Russia, (of course) US, Chinese, Japanese, N and S Korean ships were all there. The history of these countries speak for themselves, but from my understanding Japan and Russia were still at war at the time, never having signed a peace treaty after ww2. US, Chinese tensions were very high during that time with taiwan having elections later that year. Also directly about the Navy, many sailors reported not having been paid in months, some reported partial payment only. Further, when coming into harbor, it was obvious that the Russian ships were painted only on the side facing the shore. User:24.28.229.74 04:24, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) == Dividing up "conventional weapons" == This article was really coming along great when it seemed to lose its steam a few days ago, but I believe that we have the proper start of a featured article. The problem I see is that "Cold War and Conventional Weapons" was too broad a category that covered too many conflicts, so I divided it up into regions. I hope to heavily edit the text in those areas when I have the time later today or tommorrow. This is Ryan Anderson. :Perhaps, but the division was starting out as chronological. Rather than dividing it up into region, period may be better. User:172 19:32, 4 Feb 2005 (UTC) == Cuban Missile Crisis == There should be some reference to the Cuban Missile Crisis, particularly the stationing of Soviet missiles on the island and the standoff between Soviet vessels and the US Navy in regards to the quarentine zone. User:AndyL 23:55, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC) ==Timeline headings== The date/title/conflict/outcome headings in the timeline chart appear to be covered in black. Can someone fix this? User:172 :I see bold, black text on a red background? User:119 22:57, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::On my browser it appears all in black. User:172 23:00, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC) :::Sorry, I was experimenting with adding a red background. Thanks to 119 for reverting my edit. User:Ryan Anderson 00:13, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC) ::::The chart looks very nice now. User:172 02:20, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC) == Red Army and intial expansion of the Soviet Union == A huge topic is missing here. In particular, the crucial role of the Red Army in establishing of Soviet states in the areas of Caucasus and Central Asia; see, e.g., Democratic Republic of Georgia and Basmachi Revolt articles for some idea. User:Mikkalai 21:36, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC) *I believe I've adressed your concerns. Please tell me if I'm missing anything important. User:Ryan Anderson 21:32, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC) == NPOV == I put an NPOV banner on this page, in the hopes of circumventing the embarrassment of having it as a featured article. I've already corrected some hyperbole and glowing references. Where is the subjugation of the Baltic States, and aiding of the Nazi's in Poland, and the occupation of non-Axis nations in eastern Europe? --User:Silverback 01:20, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :Um, this is about the MILITARY history of the Soviet Union, not the political history. I suppose it would be worth mentioning the havoc the Red Army caused to Germany and her allies at the end of WW2, since that was more on a personal level than a political level. I think it's also worth mentioning that the Soviet Union had branches of the military specifically in order to quell unrest (which I suspect is already mentioned but I'd have to check). However, I don't see what the subjugation of the baltic states has to do directly with the military. Surely this is something the Kremlin would decide upon and the army would be more of an instrument than anything else? It's certainly worth mentioning but I fail to see how it affects the point of view (or lack of) of this article. User:Nvinen 01:39, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :The invasion of Finland certainly merits mention. Isn't this one of the few times the Red Army was totally defeated? They pulled out of Afghanistan and Chechnya is not going all that well, but my understanding is they were completely repulsed by the Finns, who ended up on the side of the Nazis once Germany invaded the USSR. User:Nvinen 01:42, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::The subjugation of the Baltic states was a "use" of the military, how is it not part of the military history? I realize this is a broad coverage, but to talk about brilliant campaigns and victories, and to leave out these less glorious uses of the military just seems POV to me. One thing that I think still is missing, is the disregard for the lives of the soldiers during WWII. It is not enough just to cite the losses, divisions that could easily have been saved were not responsibly evacuated, in decisions every bit as callous and stupid as Hitlers throwing away of his troops at Stalingrad. The USSR lost 7 million, not because it was a great sacrifice, but because it didn't care. How many of the 20 million civilians lost were due to the scorched earth "strategy", or the failure to evacuate Leningrad? I'm not sure if the callousness of civilian deaths are part of military strategy or policy that should be included in this article, but it might be.--User:Silverback 03:24, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::It's certainly true that Soviet infantry have been used as cannon fodder more than once, especially in defence of the USSR. I agree, if this article is going to discuss campaigns, it should discuss them all. They were pretty desperate, though. I think we should also mention the chaos the soldiers caused. User:Nvinen 07:39, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::Hmm, you're right, the bit which talked about WW2 didn't mention the enormous losses they took in the desperate circumstances, nor the brutality of the Red Army once they went on the offensive. I put in reasonable mentions of both, I think, along with a couple of references. The rapes and murders of the Red Army in Germany and the USSR late in the war seem to be well documented. User:Nvinen 08:11, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) :This article was a Collaboration of the Week, was listed on Per Review for over two weeks, and was listed on FAC for an additional two weeks and in all of this time no one objected on the grounds of NPOV until you, just now. This said, I think it is unfair for you to classify this as an "embarrasment" to the Wikipedia community. This is ''not'' to say, however, that your specific claims are without merit. However, since these complaints are yours alone, they ought to be very easy to enumerate and satisfy. Would you care to do this? Just make a list of your specific complaints regarding NPOV, note which ones have already been corrected and tell us how we can help correct those still standing. It appears that the ones you have already mentioned on this Talk Page have all been meted out in your own edits and -if this is the case- the NPOV banner should be removed. User:Ryan Anderson 20:35, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Thanx for your assistance. I have remove NPOV. The other changes I'd like to see would take more time to document, and it would be unfair to hold up an article that is fairly neutral. It is unclear to me whether some of the decisions that resulted in so many loss of civilian and military lives were political or military and thus should be documented here vs elsewhere.--User:Silverback 21:24, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::Thank you for your help. I may have gotten a little snappy at first, but I do appreciate what are obviously genuine efforts to improve the article, and I do agree that before you got here we had some POV problems still unresolved. User:Ryan Anderson 17:28, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC) =="Strategic doctrine"== I do not think "Strategic doctrine" is not appropriate in this context. The article is really just discussing the there-unnammed military doctrine of Deep Battle. Where you see "Strategic doctrine" used is essentially national security plans, or "grand strategy." Military doctrine, such as what this section discusses, is much more limited. I'm so glad you reverted me and told me to explain rather than assuming good faith or asking for clarification. User:119 00:44, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) *My apologies. I have not been at Wikipedia for very long, and this is really the first page I've contributed to that has received significant input from other users, so I am rather unfamiliar with rules of decorum. I assumed that since you changed my section header without consulting me that I was justified in doing the same. I understand what you're saying now, and I agree that "Military doctrine" is a more appropriate section heading. What put me off was the word "thought", which seemed nonspecific and unprofessional. At the time I did not understand the distinction between Military and Strategic, and there was no explanation in your edit summary, so I was confused by the relevance of the edit. User:Ryan Anderson 01:57, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Section retitled "Military doctrine" as compromise. Does this agree with you? User:Ryan Anderson 18:35, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) =="Scorched earth"== Please explain how rape and murder fit into a "scorched earth" policy. The Wikipedia article on "scorched earth" does not mention either. However the rapes and murders of the advancing Red Army in World War 2 are extremely well documented. Even Russians suffered. I think it's a sick joke that you dismiss it like that. This ends my involvement in Wikipedia. Well established facts are dismissed as "POV" if someone doesn't like them. Well, I'm sick of it. User:Nvinen 01:17, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) *Please feel free to document these rapes and murders yourself, if you would like. The purpose of my edit was not to eliminate content, only to remove "brutal wrath", which ''is'' POV. You'll note that no mention of rape or murder is even made in the sentence I editted, so I don't understand why you're accusing me of dismissing facts. All I did was make the sentence more specific. If it is still not adequate to fit your needs, feel free to expand it. I think such information would make a wonderful addition to this article. User:Ryan Anderson 02:02, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC) ==American Library of Congress as a good source?== I see that the article includes a mention that some of the material was sourced from the American library of Congress... surely that is a little biased considering that for most of the Soviet Union's history, the USA was against the USSR (invading it during its birth, and the Cold War later), except for when they allied during WWII. I can't see anyone using a Stalinist source for American military history... :You're right, this could potentially have been a problem. I do not, however, see where it has actually materialised as one. All of the text imported from the LOC has been heavily expanded and editted since its introduction, and if you look further up on this talk page you'll see that quite recently this article was even accused of having a ''pro-Soviet'' bias. If you note any specific instances of bias, please amend them appropriately or post them here so that others may edit accordingly. Otherwise I do believe this article represents our policy of NPOV. User:Ryan Anderson 17:48, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) == tables == beautiful tables User:141.212.190.54 16:12, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) == its army was the major force in the defeat of Nazi Germany? == I'd feel more comfortable with something on the order of it was "the major army in the defeat of Nazi Germany". Certainly it is difficult to attribute relative credit when one considers the importance of air power in the strategic bombing of the German economy and attrition of the Luftwaft and when one considers the importance of the Navy in securing supply routes across the Altantic to the western front, and lend lease supplies across the Pacific and considerable loss of lives and materials.--User:Silverback 22:48, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC) I agree and there is no need to resolve the dispute about how to attribute credit in order to find how to say this. Now I changed it to " ... where it (the SU) was the major military force in the defeat of Nazi Germany". User:Irpen 23:18, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC) == article is a bit duplicatous == The section of this article related to the "Cold War and Conventional Forces" is very broad and gives more of a political history of this time period. Most of this information can be found in the series of articles titled "History of the Soviet Union". I can understand that this article is perhaps being planned as a "parent" or "root" article for many smaller, more focused articles, but military buffs who visit this article will seek more in depth military related info. I suggest more information regarding high level military functions (e.g. locations of military districts, establishment of Soviet bases worldwide, reorganizations of the armed forces). Also, this page should spark some interest in developing a page about Marshalls of the Soviet Union. I look forward to future edits. == The history of USSR - question for the West. == This discussion is moved to the Talk:History of the Soviet Union page. Please continue it there if necessary. User:Irpen 18:38, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC) ==Atrocities== Regarding 83.109.137.11's edits: *his change of "helped partitioning" by "took part in partitioning" of Poland is not reverted. *The addition to the article intro: "..but also committed war crimes on a large scale and was instrumental in Soviet ethnic cleansing of many nationalities" was deleted. There were no convictions or admissions of the war crimes during the WW2 by the military, so even if mentioned, it should be presented as allegations. Hatyn Massacre and ethnic cleansings were indeed admitted by the state later but these crimes were conducted by NKVD troops (not the army). Allegations of rape ''by the military'' in Germany are indeed documented in recent publications. So, they should be mentioned, but in the atrocities chapter rather than in the lead. *From the ''"atrocities"'' chapter the massacres of civilians during the WW2 deleted for the same reason as above. Crimes of the state and crimes of the military are not the same thing. Besides, again these where conducted by NKVD which was never part of the military. *"being instrumental in the war of aggression" is not an atrocity per se. War of aggression and a war crime (atrocity) are different things and should be presented properly. I agree, the fact that Soviet Union was involved in wars of aggression deserves mention in ''this'' article. But not in atrocities section and not in the way so that mention would look odd in the context. Just don't use the article as a grab bag for everything that comes to mind by putting it in the text disregarding its structure. Please, no flames. User:Irpen 17:05, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC) I don't see articles where German actions during WWII are presented as "allegations". Wikipedia must treat the Soviet Union in the same way as other countries (for instance Germany) are treated. That Stalin didn't convict himself (solely because he won the war) is irrelevant. If Germany had won the war, Stalin and his functionaries had been the one convicted of war crimes. The article is discussing war crimes because they undoubtly took place, which is only denied by some historical revisionists. Massacres committed by Soviet troops in Eastern Germany, notably in East Prussia, Silesia etc., and other places, are well documented by the German government after the war. // Peter :As a matter of interest where any of you relations combatants in WWII?--User:Irate 21:06, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC) ::My grandparents fled from Latvia to western Germany shortly before their country was brutally occupied by Stalin for the second time. I never was there before after the liberation. They were Latvian patriots and anticommunists and would most likely have been killed or deported if they stayed. Why do you want to know? // Peter :::To make sure I judge response correctly.--User:Irate 00:14, 2005 Mar 30 (UTC) Whether or not Peter's relations were involved in WWII as combatants or as members of civil population suffered from the Soviet or Allied occupation is irrelevant to the points he is making. Allegations of rapes committed by Soviet troops have been discussed in several recent mainstream books written by historians, so they deserved to me mentioned and rapes of civil population by military is a war crime. If Peter is aware of any serious sources (I do mean equally serious as the books quoted above) that document the massacres of civil German population under Soviet occupation and conducted by the army, not NKVD, he should bring them up at this talk page. Peter, please cite your sources. If they are acceptable, we can decide how to include them in the article. And when we do, we should do this properly, by reworking the article so that it retains its good style of the featured article of the day. Do not just paste your thoughts in the text to make a point. Care should be taken to express the material in good academic style. Please, no flames. User:Irpen 21:40, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC) :One of the problems mentioned is Victors justice, if that's to be properly accounted for then everyone debating has to be aware of the potential partiality of their upbring. A certain amount of disclosure of ones potential bias is necassary in these discussions. I personally don't doubt the claims of Russian atrocities, but the easten front is a long why from here.--User:Irate 22:19, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC) One can be partial based on personal background of course. But Encyclopedia article, while written by people, are based on established information, not the original research that is more prone to bias. Of course, the sources can also be picked selectively. That's why it is important to quote the sources when bringing non-conventional ideas into the articles. One more point. The Nazi war crimes are considered to be the crimes of Nazi State, not the crimes of the German military. Atrocities, mass executions, village razing, etc. were conducted by SS troops rather than regular army. Therefore, similar caution should have been applied if one was writing an article on the Military History of Germany, which does not exist. However, the article Nazi Germany is an appropriate place for such crimes. I want to repeat again that the WP articles is not the place to randomly dump some information, even factually accurate, by readers who advance their point of view. The encyclopedic style requires care. At least, when making a significant edit, the editors should read an entire article, decide on the place to include the information and exercise care to make a good article rather than use it to advance his views. User:Irpen 22:47, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC) :I personally on read English and a bit of French entire works are closed to me. So even judging the accuracy of the victors documents is not that testable.--User:Irate 23:24, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC) Show me an army that did not commit atrocities against civilians (Does Luxembourg have army?). The issue is not whether they were committed or not, but the topic should not be discussed in one place, with reliable sources, and not smeared in thin layer everywhere. Notorious cases like Evacuation of East Prussia must be presented in separate pages, to localize possible heated discussions. User:Mikkalai 22:58, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC) :Show me any large group of armed men that hasn't commited atrocites?--User:Irate 23:24, 2005 Mar 29 (UTC) == Main Page Discussion == Moved from Talk:Main Page. --User:Fangz 02:20, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC) "In the 1940s, the Soviet Union took part in World War II, assisting in the defeat of Nazi Germany" Guys! Soviet Union did not assist in the defeat of the Nazi Germany, Soviet Union defeated the Nazi Germany having lost 27 mln lives. The West opened the Second Front only 11 months prior to the Victory Day of May 1945 and only assisted in the defeat of Germans. The bulk of the job of bringing the end to the World War II was done by peoples of the former Soviet Union, for which Europe should be thankful. You guys in the West, should know the European history better. BAYRAM :The Stalinists not only "took part" in the Second World War, they started it themselves. It was their war. Just ask the peoples of Eastern Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania. // Peter :I have to agree with 134.32.227.27 that when reading that sentence in the article it really disturbed me and I think it will disturb a lot of people especially Russians. It is one of those articles written from a very American perspective I guess. User:Male1979 User talk:Male1979 07:56, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC) ::Well, I think a lot of British and French people will be disturbed if Russia, which began the war as a German ally, gets the credit for defeating Germany. User:RickKUser talk:RickK 08:13, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC) Rick! First of all, not Russia, but Soviet Union, which composed of 15 republcs, now independent states. Second, Soviet Union, was not a German ally at the time, it's useful to read the history carefully. Soviet Union signed a Non-Agression Pact with the Nazi Germany to protect itself from Germany's agression or delay it for as long as possible. This non-agression pact was also signed as a response to the Munich Cospiracy signed by British and French prime-ministers and Hitler himself. According to the Munich Cospiracy Germany was allowed to annex part of Chekhoslovakia, which gave the way for annexing the whole country and other European countries. Rick, just try to imagine one thing: Soviet Union lost 27 MILLION LIVES in the war, so it should get the credit as the main power which defeated the Nazi. BAYRAM ::YEAH! The Russian Stalinist Hordes "protected" themselves by attacking and massacring the peoples of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland etc. etc. Tell us another rubbish story, will you? I any event, the Stalinists killed at least 50 Million people and ruined half of the European continent, which they brutally occupied and suppressed for half a century until the liberation in 1990! The Russian hordes are even today occupying Chechnya and mass raping large number of women in "good old Russian tradition". // Peter :I live in Finland and I don't think Soviet troops ever masacred any Finns. What are ''Russian Stalinist hordes'', sound like racism to me. Most Soviet citizens didn't choose Stalin in an election, so it's wrong to blame ordinary Soviet citizens for the attrocities commited by the regime. You don't seem to appreciate that the main victims of any oppressive regime are the citizens of the regime themselves. Stalin killed far more Russians than anyone else. And let's remember that mass murder was being perpetrated on both sides, the Nazis did their fair share of massacring said people. The war was always going to happen when an expansionist like Hitler was appeased. Both regimes were as obnoxious as each other. The Soviet Union almost certainly could have won by themselves, but the Allies probably could have defeated the Nazis as well. Lets remember that it was a joint effort, both the Allies and the Soviet Union contributed to the defeat of the Nazis. I always think it was a great shame that Roosevelt sold the Poles down the river, after all the Brits and the French went to war in the first place because of the invasion of Poland.--User:84.231.87.71 17:10, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC) ::They lost twenty-seven million lives 'cause they just threw bodies at the Germans. And the Non-Agression Pact was an alliance, they carved up Poland, something allies would do. The Americans and British were far more responsible for the war ending than the Soviets. GreatGatsby :::It's factual nonsense. Sorry but extremist opinions seem to become more and more mainstream in America, right down to this kind of falsification. You 'patriots' really hope to re-write history like that, don't you? ::::In countries with well-functioning democracies in the US and Western Europe, the Putin regime is in no position to spread their russian historical revisionism and Soviet propaganda. // Peter ::::A good project would be to extend the coverage of American efforts to free the Europeans as well as the Russians from totalitarianism ideologies like stalinism, see the National Committee for a Free Europe, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. :::::"In countries with well-functioning democracies in the US and Western Europe" (Peter, above). Remember Florida? Democracy for who? For white republicans with revisionistic sense of history. - Nijo ::::::At least you can say what you want in the western world, take part in political and economical life without being persecuted by Comrade Putin like Khodorkovsky was. Russian bandits, hordes and rapists in Putin-occupied Chechnya can in no way be called civilized. The Russians are now building statues of the worst criminal and mass murder in history, Joseph Stalin. They are ignoring the dark side of their history and the many million people they killed in Gulag, they are ignoring their grotesque war crimes in WW2 and after, ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, massacres etc. They are gloryfying Soviet symbols (symbols which are banned as criminal in countries like Hungary and was considered banned in the entire EU by the Justice Commisionary Franco Frattini a few weeks ago). Many people in the western world believe the russians have a problem with historical revisionism which needs to be dealt with before Russia can delevep a really democratic society. The Russians needs to be educated in the crimes of the Stalinists and Soviet Regime. The Sakharov Museum in Moscow har stated that this is a necessity to prevent such crimes from ever happening again and a moral duty. // Peter ::::::"It is frightening that young Russians nearly have no knowledge of the horrible crimes the communist state committed" (Jurij Samodurov, leader of the Sakharov Museum) so your point is? Russia is evil? Yeah, but then so is the USA, guilty of the most appalling war crimes and genocides, and the most cynical sponsoring, in turn, of war criminals and mass murderers. It's always nice to know how evil people were on the other side of the fence, but it would be ever so much more useful, and honest, to start to cope with your own history. User:80.218.88.6 16:25, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC) :Why do you presume history of the United States is ''my'' history? In any event, the policies of the US cannot be compared to the crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during the Stalinist dictatorship. // Peter ""It is frightening that young Russians nearly have no knowledge of the horrible crimes the communist state committed" - Politically oxymoronic. The Soviet Union wasn't a communist state, it was a socialist state. "In any event, the policies of the US cannot be compared to the crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during the Stalinist dictatorship." - So wait, the coup of Chile in 1973, planting of Saddam, funding the contras in Nicaragua, the little escapade in Somalia, the massacre in the Philippines in 1899, imperialism in Latin America till WWII, aren't crimes against humanity? -- User:Natalinasmpf 03:51, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) "Why do you presume history of the United States is ''my'' history? In any event, the policies of the US cannot be compared to the crimes against humanity committed by the Russians during the Stalinist dictatorship." - Peter! I personally do not want to diminish brutalities against all ethnicities in the Soviet Union committed during Stalin times. Killing and jailing you own people can not be justified. However, my initial comment was with regrad to the phrase that Soviet Union only assisted in the defeat of the Nazi Germany. All people who read books know that this is an outright lie, and effort to enhance the role of the West in WWII by using the pretext of Stalinist brutalities. We also all know very well, that the United States was the only country in history that used the nuclear weapon, which happenned twice in Japan killing many thousands of innocecnt people. The US killed 1 million Vietnamese in the Vietnam war and continuing its stupdid war in Iraq. Peter, if you do not want to compare the US policies with the Stalinist ones, please do not. The peoples of the former Soviet Union have already rejected the Stalinist era crimes. But you, Americans should know your history better and enhance the educational level of your people as this is one of the first steps towards the real democracy. BAYRAM Posted by 69.143.240.74 in the wrong section of this talk page, 02:45, 2005 Mar 27; inserted here 03:48, 2005 Mar 28 (UTC): :::Well, the USSR did sign the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact, which formally made them allies of Nazi Germany. They did so due to a variety of factors, ranging from resentment at the fact that the West (Britain and France) had chosen to ignore them on a number of proposed partnerships in the interwar period to the admiration the Russian culture often expresses for stern leaders of every stripe. They did not join in the fight against Germany until they were attacked. The domestic policies of Stalin's USSR were so oppressive that many Soviets greeted their invaders with open arms, and this combined with a recent humilating defeat at the hands of the Finns caused Stalin to panic and fight the war against Germany with a new found fervor, including shooting any soldier or sailor that looked like he might try to flee the battlefield. The Soviet Union had designs on Poland and had discussed dividing it with Germany before the signing of the Pact, so arguing that the Soviets were altruistic in the war would be difficult. The Soviets committed dark atrocities during the war, like the Katyn Forest Massacre. Instead of 'liberating' Warsaw, they circled it for days while the Germans razed every buiding. Their behaviuor after the War was deplorable. But, however dubious the intent or cruel their approach, they did fight the Germans pretty fiercely, and it's doubtful the West could have defeated the Nazis without them, with the possible exception of using nuclear weapons which hadn't yet been invented. So some credit is due, but with a caveat. An analysis of their delaration of war with Japan and Truman's subsequent decision to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a causal link should be considered as well. You can't ignore them, but I wouldn't glorify them either. Ignoring Russia seems to be a mistake that Europe makes quite frequently, usually with disastrous results. Tell their story, so long as it's told objectively. :they ''may'' be compared, but ''should not''. Each of these tragedies should be looked at for what it is, without succumbing to the temptation to immediately point fingers to what are perceived as even worse monstrosities. Nobody pointed out yet that the "US" had to depopulate a whole continent before they could even get started on their follow-up atrocities. It's too easy to point with fingers, though. Every nation should try to take responsibility for their history as well and as maturely as they can. User:Dbachmann User_talk:Dbachmann 13:42, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) Now, now, kids. It is undeniable that the leadership of the (early?) Soviet Union, particularly Stalin himself, match pretty much every definition of evil there is. I do not believe anyone can disagree with that. Perhaps it was merely a willingness to sacrifice human decency for some dubious goal. That is irrelevant. It is also undeniable that the Soviet Union had a key role in the defeat of Nazi Germany - that without the actions of millions of Russian soldiers (who are simply people fighting to liberate their country. Most played no part in the atrocities committed by their government.) there is absolutely no way the Second World War could have been won. The same, in fact goes for the rest of the allies. The USA helped supply the survival of the Red Army. Britain gave a vital foothold in western europe. And so on. We should agree on some sort of compromise. I'd be happy with the current wording - as long as The Military History of the United States stated that the US also 'assisted' in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Let's not let our opinions get in the way of the facts.--User:Fangz 23:30, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::This is ridiculous. The stalinist hordes committed horrible war crimes, massacres, mass rapes of million of women during the war. In fact every stalinist soldier should have been tried for war crimes. The claim that they were "fighting to liberate their country" is ridiculous. They were waging war of aggression against Poland, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and numerous other countries. They were fighting to conquer, occupy and suppress other peoples. They were fighting for the stalinist regime that killed, deported and enslaved more people than any other regime in world history. Those opposed to stalinism, in fact some 1 million Russians, fought on the German side. // Peter :::Prove it. Ie. prove that every single soldier fighting under the banner of the Soviet Union (a) knew about the atrocities that were taking place, (b) were in active support of Stalin's policies in every way, (c) actively engaged in various atrocities. (d) Prove additionally that the Soviet propaganda at the time - advertising 'driving back the nazi invaders' was widely disbelieved by the new recruits. (e) Prove finally that *anyone* against the Stalinist agenda must neccessarily be in support of and fight for the Nazi regime. Know that you are claiming against the historical consensus on that time, and so the onus of proof is on you.--User:Fangz 12:07, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::::I didn't claim that every Russian soldier knew about the crimes, but seriously, even if they were told that they were 'driving back the nazi invaders' when the Soviet Union attacked Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from 1939 on, at a time when Germany was their ally, I don't find it important. It's really just silly. What is an established historical fact is that the Soviet Union was waging wars of aggression and that regular russian troops committed war crimes on a much larger scale than what is usual in a war against many nationalities. ::::Also, when I said that those opposed to stalinism fought on the German side, I meant ''those who took part in the war'', the only Russians who actively fought Stalin and his terror rule. ::::I don't believe any of my claims are "against historical concensus". I don't believe historical concensus even exists on this matter. The differences between the view of pro-western historians in the Baltic countries, Poland, Hungary and other countries on the first side, and of Stalinist apologists in Russia on the second side, is big. // Peter :Is Wikipedia a discussion forum now then? In the old days it always used to be an encyclopaedia. Please try to direct all this intellectual energy into improving the article (Military history of the Soviet Union) rather than scoring points off each other. User:GrahamN 23:45, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) ::Ok, I've added an Military history of the Soviet Union#Atrocities section. Please all contribute. Just try to keep it NPOV, and not original research.--User:Fangz 12:35, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC) :::Oh come on Fangz. Graham already ended the argument. Now you're going to continue it by making others ask the question, "Why does the Soviet Union get an "Atrocities" section and the other countries don't?" User:Btr003 ::::I don't this Graham ended the argument - and if he did, I don't think that affects the point that the Soviet Union has indeed a controversial history with many allegations of atrocities. And I do agree with Peter and others that to have an article about the history of the soviet military whilst not mentioning the unsavoury aspects would be a failure of WP's mission as an encyclopedia. If we have a disagreement about the content of the article, then we have to improve the article by sorting out the facts, and adding it so long as it is NPOV. And in any case, other countries do have an atrocities section, or even links to whole articles devoted to discussing their crimes. eg. Holocaust, Human Rights in China, Human rights in the United States, Italian war crimes (This seems to be in an NPOV debate, but it certainly isn't a target for deletion.) Democratic Kampuchea#Revolutionary Terror and so on... We need to at least get the more popular/more proven allegations in.--User:Fangz 22:19, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC) For crying out loud, Military history of the Soviet Union is NO LONGER ON the Main Page! And "//Peter", stop posting messages above the line asking people to stop scoring points off each other! :Anonymous, I don't know which line you are referring to, and I have never asked people to "stop scoring points off each other"! // Peter :: "//Peter", the line asking you (and others) to stop is now underlined. You kept posting above that line by User:GrahamN after 23:45, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC) without putting in the time and date .... (e.g. [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&diff=11594934&oldid=11594861]) Why ? If this discussion about Military history of the Soviet Union has to continue, it should go to Talk: Military history of the Soviet Union, not Talk: Main Page. Please. You people are all crazy. Just because someone tells you to do something doesn't mean you have to do it. Also, the discussion about Military history of the Soviet Union has already started here, we should continue it here. == Wikipedia:Naming conventions (military units) == Forgive the spam, but I'm trying to round up wikipedians with an interest in international military history to help work out some conventions for the names of military units. If you are interested in that sort of thing, please visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions (military units) and join the discussions on the talk page. — User:Bobby D. Bryant 17:48, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC) ==Annexed territories in late 30s== Currently the article says: :In the late 1930s, the Red Army Winter War; fought a brief Battle of Halhin Gol (together with its ally Mongolia) with Japan and its client state Manchukuo; and, in Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, took part in the partition of Second Polish Republic, annexed the Baltic States, as well as Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (from Romania). Re the last part ("it annexed.."), this was annexed by the state (USSR) the army was the instrument that made it possible. I would like to changed this by, for example: :"...secured annexing of ... by the Soviet Union". What do you think? -User:Irpen 16:13, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
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