Evening star., 1951-01-21
By Edword Cronkshow

Oy 6UWOIu SIoHkSuoW
LONDON.-On paper. the Soviet
Army is overwhelming. Nobody
knows it's real strength. but it is
commonly accepted now that 1t
consists Of something under mil
lion men (2.8 million is the favor
ite figure) and has in being ITS
divisions.
Working from vital statistics
and allowing for a hard core of
regular soldiers, the figure of 2.8
million seems reasonable for the
total armed forces Of a country
with a population nearing 200
million, the average age Of which
is a good deal lower than that of
any other country.
But working from my own
knowledge Of Russia, I find it hard
to believe that the Kremlin at this
moment has ITS complete divisions
on a war footing, or anything
like it.
One of the things to be borne in
mind is that the MVD. or security
police, is itself complete stand
ing army of close to a million men,
and hand-picked men at that.
There were 100000 of them in
Russia during the last war, armed
and equipped like fighting troops.
but they were never, even in mo-
ments of desperate crisis, used to
fight the Germans. Their job
was at home.
Can Be Countered
Certainly, the Soviet division is
a small one, consisting of some
10000 men, or about half the size
of the British division; so that by
our reckoning, ITS divisions is, in
manpower, more like 80 or ours
But on this calculation, ITS divi-
sions would account for nearly
million men. The bulk of the So
Wet Army consists of short-term
conscripts under intensive training
and judging from my own observa-
tions in war and peace, there are
simply not enough senior non
commissioned officers and middle
grade staff officers (majors and
colonelS) to staff all those divi-
sions and to train two classes OF
conScriptS, which include a high
proportion of scarcely literate
young peasants. It is one thing
to have a division on paper, with
a skeleton headquarters, and quite
another to turn it into a fighting
formation, equipped down to the
last round of ammunition-as
every one who has ever soldiered
IN peacetime knows very we'll.
This is not to suggest that the
Soviet Army is not an extremely
powerful force. On the contrary
it is the most powerful army ir
the world at this moment. I an
suggesting only that it is not quite
as strong as it looks. For all prac-
tical purposes it is a force which
will call for all the resources o1
the West to counter. But coun.
tered it can be, provided we gc
about it with sufficient resolution
In the last war, with all her i'm
mense reserves Of manpower, the
Soviet Army only just managed
to hold its own against the Ger.
man Army. And if it had moi
been for the depletion and diver.
sion of the German air force ane
the tide Of lend-lease transport
which began to roll in toward thu
end of 1912, I do not believe il
could have gone over to a large.
scale offensive in 1943.
There is one other thing to beal
in mind when considering tn,
sheer size Of the Soviet Army
And that is that while, to us, ar
army of nearly 100000 seem.
stupendous. to the Russians II
does not. Before the 1914 wal
Russia had a regular army (apart
from conscripts) of over a million
men, as against the German regu-
lar army of 600, 900. This is bound
up with the sheer size of Russia
which occupies one-sixth of all
the land in the world and has
land frontiers OF inordinate length
These frontiers, particularly the