page_title: Red Army
section_title: Russian Civil War
hierarchical_section_title: Red Army / History / Russian Civil War
caption_attribution_description: English: Leo Trotzki in uniform (Soviet general)
context_page_description: The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, frequently shortened to Red Army, was the army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution. The Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. Beginning in February 1946, the Red Army, along with the Soviet Navy, embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces; taking the official name of "Soviet Army", until its dissolution in December 1991.
  The Red Army provided the largest land force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II, and its invasion of Manchuria assisted the unconditional surrender of Imperial Japan. During operations on the Eastern Front, it accounted for 75–80% of casualties the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS suffered during the war and ultimately captured the Nazi German capital, Berlin.
context_section_description: The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) occurred in three periods:
  October 1917 – November 1918: From the Bolshevik Revolution to the First World War Armistice, developed from the Bolshevik government's nationalization of traditional Cossack lands in November 1917. This provoked the insurrection of General Alexey Maximovich Kaledin's Volunteer Army in the River Don region. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) aggravated Russian internal politics. The overall situation encouraged direct Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, in which twelve foreign countries supported anti-Bolshevik militias. A series of engagements resulted, involving, amongst others, the Czechoslovak Legion, the Polish 5th Rifle Division, and the pro-Bolshevik Red Latvian Riflemen.
  January 1919 – November 1919: Initially the White armies advanced successfully: from the south, under General Anton Denikin; from the east, under Admiral Aleksandr Vasilevich Kolchak; and from the northwest, under General Nikolai Nikolaevich Yudenich. The Whites defeated the Red Army on each front. Leon Trotsky reformed and counterattacked: the Red Army repelled Admiral Kolchak's army in June, and the armies of General Denikin and General Yudenich in October. By mid-November the White armies were all almost completely exhausted. In January 1920 Budenny's First Cavalry Army entered Rostov-on-Don.
  1919 to 1923: Some peripheral battles continued for two more years, and remnants of the White forces continued in the Far East into 1923.
  At the start of the civil war, the Red Army consisted of 299 infantry regiments. The civil war intensified after Lenin dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly (5–6 January 1918) and the Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), removing Russia from the Great War. Free from international war, the Red Army confronted an internecine war against a variety of opposing anti-Communist forces, including the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine, the "Black Army" led by Nestor Makhno, the anti-White and anti-Red Green armies, efforts to restore the defeated Provisional Government, monarchists, but mainly the White Movement of several different anti-socialist military confederations. "Red Army Day", 23 February 1918, has a two-fold historical significance: it was the first day of drafting recruits (in Petrograd and Moscow), and the first day of combat against the occupying Imperial German Army.
  In June 1918, Trotsky abolished workers' control over the Red Army, replacing the election of officers with traditional army hierarchies and criminalizing dissent with the death penalty. Simultaneously, Trotsky carried out a mass recruitment of officers from the old Imperial Russian Army, who were employed as military specialists (voenspetsy, ru:Военный советник). Lev Glezarov's special commission recruited and screened them. The Bolsheviks occasionally enforced the loyalty of such recruits by holding their families as hostages. As a result of this initiative, in 1918 75% of the officers were former tsarists. By mid-August 1920 the Red Army's former Tsarist personnel included 48,000 officers, 10,300 administrators, and 214,000 NCOs. When the civil war ended in 1922, ex-Tsarists constituted 83% of the Red Army's divisional and corps commanders.
  On 6 September 1918 the Bolshevik militias consolidated under the supreme command of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic (Russian: Революционный Военный Совет, romanized: Revolyutsionny Voyenny Sovyet (Revvoyensoviet)). The first chairman was Leon Trotsky, and the first commander-in-chief was Jukums Vācietis from the Latvian Riflemen; in July 1919 he was replaced by Sergey Kamenev. Soon afterwards Trotsky established the GRU (military intelligence) to provide political and military intelligence to Red Army commanders. Trotsky founded the Red Army with an initial Red Guard organization and a core soldiery of Red Guard militiamen and Chekist secret police. Conscription began in June 1918, and opposition to it was violently suppressed.  To control the multi-ethnic and multi-c
caption: Leon Trotsky in military dress, wearing also the budenovka hat, symbol of the Red Army (1918)
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