Definition of Red Army

There are military units or armies that have gone down in history with their own name; thus, we have the Roman Praetorian Guard, the Viking berserkers, the Persian immortals, the Wehrmacht or the Grande Armée with which Napoleon invaded Russia.

Precisely, this last country, Russia, saw the birth and growth of a force military that, at the time, was considered one of the main in the world if not the main one: the red army.

The founding of the Red Army dates from the October 1917 revolution, as a need to militarily oppose the White Army.

The latter was made up of an amalgam of forces opposed to the Soviet regime, including many Tsarist military personnel.

Initially, the Red Army was formed by the army units that had revolted against the imperial power, as well as the most bellicose workers. The initial need was to put order in the various militias that they had created throughout the world. territory Russia and some of the territories that would later become the Soviet Union.

Leon Trotsky was the first supreme commander of the Red Army, the man in charge of organizing it and endowing it with enough discipline and effectiveness to be solvent on the battlefield.

The first phase of creation and stabilization of the Red Army was crucial and, aware of this, Trotsky did not hesitate to use personnel from the former Tsarist army to learn military tactics and to advise the newly minted military force, although he also did not hesitate to incorporate his own knowledge and those of Bolshevik activists in matters of guerrilla warfare and other practices than today we would call "asymmetric warfare”.

The first trial by fire of the Red Army, the Russian civil war that followed the revolution, was passed with flying colors.

This was not an obstacle to the subsequent failure of the armed wing of the revolution communist against Poland, in the war that faced both countries in parallel to the Russian civil war.

This is a constant that the Red Army has seen throughout its history: victory against difficult enemies, such as Axis troops in World War II, or the Victory of minimums against Finland, suffering a number of casualties and various specific defeats that helped Finland retain its independence from the USSR.

Due to the isolation that had been imposed internationally on the communist regime of the USSR, in In the interwar period the Red Army had to develop new tactics and weaponry in secret.

Symptomatic of that time is the collaboration with Germany (even when it was already ruled by Hitler from 1933) on of armored warfare (tanks) and aviation, a collaboration that was better used by the Germans, who also took advantage of a weakness of the Red Army: the lack of qualified officers due to the Stalinist purges.

With the rise to power of the paranoid Stalin, he began a series of purges that affected most of the the trained commanders of the Red Army, whom the Georgian dictator saw as a threat politics.

As a result of this, the beheading of the army and, with it, its deprivation of capable commanders, the impossibility of counterattacking of the Red Army until well into the war (practically, when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow) remains largely explained.

It is precisely in this period, that of the greatest conflict (known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War), in which the doctrine of the Red Army, with profuse use of large numbers of tanks and open-grave assaults of the infantry, is established, and that will base the power of its armored units for the following decades (currently, Russia has the army with the largest number of tanks in the world). world).

This doctrine had been tested in the conflict in Mongolia, in which the Soviets and Japanese had fought, with victory for the former under the command of Gueorgui Zhúkov, the marshal who in 1945 would be in charge of liquidating the battle of Berlin

During the war, the supreme commander of the Red Army was Stalin himself, and his commanders were still heavily politicized, and this explains some great failures.

The final victory of the Soviets in the Battle of Berlin has several explanations, some of them centering the blame on the forces themselves. of the axis, but among which the numerical superiority of the Red Army emerges powerfully, which brought a veritable avalanche of men (also machines and resources of all kinds) on the Reich.

After the Second World War, the Red Army is characterized by a few direct interventions (Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan among them), and advice and support at various levels from other governments and leftist movements throughout the world.

Until the last days of the cold WarWhen the USSR was dissolved, the Red Army remained a military force of extraordinary size and potential. Today, its direct descendant is the Russian army, but there are many military forces that share in one way or another said inheritance, and keep traditions that emanate directly from the Red Army, those of the countries that emerged from the disintegration of the USSR.

Photos: Fotolia - Popaukropa / Petr Bonek

Themes in Red Army