Red Army
붉은 군대
The army of Soviet Russia and then the Soviet Union, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (RKKA), founded by decree of the Council of People’s Commissars on 28 January 1918; it fought the civil war and the Great Patriotic War and was renamed the Soviet Army on 25 February 1946.
In depth
Leon Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs from March 1918 to January 1925 and chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, built the army out of the volunteer Red Guards into a conscript force. He recruited former tsarist officers as “military specialists”—about three-quarters of its officers in 1918—and placed political commissars beside them to watch their loyalty. By 1920 the army numbered some 6.5 million men and had won the civil war. 23 February 1918, the first day of mass enlistment and of fighting against the German army, was later kept as Red Army Day.
In June 1937 a secret military tribunal condemned Mikhail Tukhachevsky and a group of other commanders, and in the purge that followed three of the five marshals and most army and corps commanders were removed. In the Great Patriotic War that began with the German invasion of June 1941 it mobilised about 34.4 million men and lost more than 11 million dead and missing, before taking Berlin in May 1945. In February 1946 it was renamed the Soviet Army.