Conscription in the Soviet Union

Conscription was introduced into what would become the Soviet Union in 1918,[1] almost immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to strengthen the forces of the Red Army.

[6] On 9 February 1942, Stalin issued an order which stated it would be expedient to “conscript into the ranks of the Red Army… citizens in the liberated territories between the ages of 17 to 30 who have not been conscripted into the Red Army during the previous months of the war” due to the fact they were “burning with hatred for the invader and a desire to participate in the subsequent liberation of their Soviet Motherland with weapons in their hands.”[3] Following this order, non-Russian inhabitants of liberated territory began to be forcibly conscripted into the Red Army ranks as it moved westward toward Germany.

[7] This broadening of the conscription pool created a diverse range of military personnel along the front lines, with soldiers of many different nationalities, ethnicities and languages being present.

In order to adhere to the concept of ‘universal service’, while maintaining the size of the armed forces, conscript turnover was increased so that a large majority of young men reaching military age were still conscripted to serve, but not at the expense of increasing the size of the armed forces beyond the limits deemed necessary.

[2] Conscripted soldiers, particularly those in their first year of service who had not yet earned either rank or respect to protect them, faced physical violence and sexual assault from superior officers, and regularly had their pay and food rations confiscated.

[9] However, between late autumn 1982 and 1988 the Soviet Union had a mandatory draft for students of most universities,[10][11] with the peak conscription fraction in 1987.

It is difficult to know the exact number of women conscripted during WWII and in what roles they served, as information about female soldiers was generally repressed in official reports and government documents from that period.

[3] This was only 4 months after the Soviet Union officially entered WWII, and by late March 1942 over 100,000 women had already been conscripted into air defence units.

[12] By the end of the war, the air defence force was more than 1/4 female, with 300,000 women, both volunteers and conscripts serving as communicators, machine gunners, pilots and medical personnel.

Within the armed forces resistance grew in the form of organised ethnic and nationality groups in order to protect each other from abuse and call attention to the treatment suffered by conscripts.

The group also organised public protests and called for government action to protect the rights of soldiers and conscripts whilst they served.