Military history of the Soviet Union

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to his control over and support from the Party and state bureaucracy, 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.

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 Republican 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 fascist forces of Francisco Franco.

After fierce fighting, in which mustard gas was used by the Soviet Union at the Battle of Tutung, Ma Zhongying retreated and Zhang committed suicide to avoid capture.

In late 1930s, Soviet Union was no longer satisfied with the status quo in its relations with independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact gave a great opportunity to recover the provinces of Imperial Russia lost during the chaos of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War.

When the Poles were close to defeat and the Polish government left the country, on 17 September the Red Army invaded Poland from the east to regain the territories populated mostly by ethnic Belarusians and Ukrainians.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 established a non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union with a secret protocol describing how Poland and the Baltic countries would be divided between them.

The Red Army had little time to correct its numerous deficiencies before Nazi Germany and other Axis countries allied with it swept across the newly relocated Soviet border on June 22, 1941, in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa.

The poor Soviet 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, Soviet forces were often ordered to stand their ground despite limited defensive capabilities, resulting in numerous encirclements and correspondingly high numbers of casualties.

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 war in Europe.

Much of Eastern Europe and great parts of the Soviet Union were devastated by Red Army troops as a result of an aggressive policy of "scorched earth".

[citation needed] This policy resulted in the 1949 introduction of the AK-47, designed two years earlier as an improvement on the submachine gun which supplied Soviet infantry with a rugged and reliable source of short-range firepower.

With Eastern Europe under Red Army occupation, the Soviet Union remained adamant in the face of Truman's attempt to stop Communist expansion, and in 1955 Moscow introduced the Warsaw Pact to counterbalance the Western NATO alliance.

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 1948–49 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.

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.

The Soviet Union wished to constrain U.S. deployment of an antiballistic missile (ABM) system and retain the ability to place multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs).

With the notable exception of Khrushchev and possibly Gorbachev, Soviet leaders from the late 1920s onwards emphasized military production over investment in the civilian economy.

[clarification needed] 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 put the figure at 15%).

The political chaos and rapid economic liberalization, the infamous IMF shock therapy, had an enormously negative impact on the strength and funding of the military.

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.

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.