Red Army The Soviet Army ( ) is the name given to the main land - based branch of the Soviet Armed Forces between February 1946 and December 1991 , when it was replaced with the Russian Ground Forces , although it was not taken fully out of service until 25 December 1993 . Until 25 February 1946 , the force was known as the Red Army , established by decree on 15 ( 28 ) January 1918 " to protect the population , territorial integrity and civil liberties in the territory of the Soviet state . " After the Second World War . At the end of the Second World War the Red Army had over 500 rifle divisions and about a tenth that number of tank formations . Their experience of war gave the Soviets such faith in tank forces that from that point the number of tank divisions remained virtually unchanged , whereas the wartime infantry force was cut by two - thirds . The Tank Corps of the late war period were converted to tank divisions , and from 1957 the Rifle Divisions were converted to Motor Rifle Divisions ( MRDs ) . MRDs had three motorized rifle regiments and a tank regiment , for a total of ten motor rifle battalions and six tank battalions ; tank divisions had the proportions reversed . The Land Forces Chief Command was created for the first time in March 1946 . Four years later it was disbanded , only to be formed again in 1955 . In March 1964 the Chief Command was again disbanded but recreated in November 1967 . Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgi Zhukov became Chief of the Soviet Ground Forces in March 1946 , but was quickly succeeded by Ivan Konev in July , who remained as such until 1950 , when the position of Chief of the Soviet Ground Forces was abolished for five years , an organisational gap that “ probably was associated in some manner with the Korean War ” . From 1945 to 1948 , the Soviet Armed Forces were reduced from ca . 11 . 3 million to ca . 2 . 8 million men , a demobilisation controlled first , by increasing the number of military district s to 33 , then reduced to 21 , in 1946 . The personnel strength of the Ground Forces was reduced from 9 , 822 , 000 to 2 , 444 , 000 . To establish and secure the USSR ’ s eastern European geopolitical interests , Red Army troops who liberated Eastern Europe from Nazi rule , in 1945 remained in place to secure pro – Soviet régimes in Eastern Europe and to protect against attack from Europe . Elsewhere , they may have assisted the NKVD in suppressing anti - Soviet Western Ukrainian resistance ( 1941 – 55 ) . Soviet troops , including the 39th Army , remained at Port Arthur and Dalian on the northeast Chinese coast until 1955 . Control was then handed over to the new Chinese Communist government . Soviet Army forces on USSR territory were apportioned among military districts . There were 32 of them in 1945 . Sixteen districts remained from the mid - 1970s to the end of the USSR ( see table at right ) . Yet , the greatest Soviet Army concentration was in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany , which suppressed the anti - Soviet Uprising of 1953 in East Germany . East European Groups of Forces were the Northern Group of Forces in Poland , and the Southern Group of Forces in Hungary , which put down the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 . In 1958 , Soviet troops were withdrawn from Romania . The Central Group of Forces in Czechoslovakia was established after Warsaw Pact intervention against the Prague Spring of 1968 . In 1969 , at the east end of the Soviet Union , the Sino - Soviet border conflict ( 1969 ) , prompted establishment of a 16th military district , the Central Asian Military District , at Alma - Ata , Kazakhstan . In 1979 , the Soviet Union entered Afghanistan , to support its Communist government , provoking a 10 - year Afghan mujahideen guerrilla resistance . Cold War . Throughout the Cold War ( 1945 – 91 ) , Western intelligence estimates calculated that the Soviet strength remained ca . 2 . 8 million to ca . 5 . 3 million men . To maintain said strength range , Soviet law minimally required a three - year military service obligation from every able man of military age , until 1967 , when the Ground Forces reduced it to a two - year draft obligation . By the middle of the 1980s the Ground Forces contained about 210 divisions . About three - quarters were motor rifle divisions and the remainder tank divisions . There were also a large number of artillery divisions , separate artillery brigades , engineer formations , and other combat support formations . However , only relatively few formations were fully war ready . Three readiness categories , A , B , and V , after the first three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet , were in force . The Category A divisions were certified combat - ready and were fully equipped . B and V divisions were lower - readiness , 50 – 75 % ( requiring at least 72 hours of preparation ) and 10 – 33 % ( requiring two months ) respectively . The internal military districts usually contained only one or two A divisions , with the remainder B and V series formations . Soviet planning for most of the Cold War period would have seen Armies of four to five divisions operating in Fronts made up of around four armies ( and roughly equivalent to Western Army Group s ) . In February 1979 , the first of the new High Commands in the Strategic Directions were created at Ulan - Ude . These new headquarters controlled multiple Fronts , and usually a Soviet Navy Fleet . In September 1984 , three more were established to control multi - Front operations in Europe ( the Western and South - Western Strategic Directions ) and at Baku to handle southern operations . In 1955 , the Soviet Union signed the Warsaw Pact with its East European satellite states , formalising Soviet military control over their armed forces . The Soviet Army created and directed the Eastern European armies in its image for the remainder of the Cold War , shaping them for a potential invasion of Western Europe . After 1956 , Premier Nikita Khrushchev reduced the Ground Forces to build up the Strategic Rocket Forces — emphasizing the armed forces ' nuclear capabilities . He removed Marshal Georgy Zhukov from the Politburo in 1957 , for opposing these reductions in the Ground Forces . Nonetheless , Soviet forces possessed too few theater - level nuclear weapons to fulfil war - plan requirements until the mid - 1980s . The General Staff maintained plans to invade Western Europe whose massive scale was only made publicly available after German researchers gained access to National People ' s Army files following the dissolution of the Soviet Union . The Soviet Union dissolves . From 1985 to 1991 , Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reduce the Soviet Army ’ s financial straining of the USSR ’ s economy ; he slowly reduced its size , and withdrew it from Afghanistan in 1989 . After the 19 – 21 August 1991 Soviet coup d ' état attempt to depose President Gorbachev , the Academy of Soviet Scientists reported that the armed forces did not much participate in the coup launched by the neo - Stalinists in the CPSU . Commanders despatched tanks into Moscow , yet the coup failed . On 8 December 1991 , the presidents of Russia , Belarus , and Ukraine formally dissolved the USSR , and then constituted the Commonwealth of Independent States ( CIS ) . Soviet President Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 ; the next day , the Supreme Soviet dissolved itself , officially dissolving the USSR on 26 December 1991 . During the next 18 months , inter - republican political efforts to transform the Army of the Soviet Union into the CIS military failed ; eventually , the forces stationed in the republics formally became the militaries of the respective republican governments . After the dissolution of the Soviet Union , the Soviet Army dissolved and the USSR ' s successor state s divided its assets among themselves . The divide mostly occurred along a regional basis , with Soviet soldiers from Russia becoming part of the new Russian Army , while Soviet soldiers originating from Kazakhstan became part of the new Kazakh Army . As a result , the bulk of the Soviet Ground Forces , including most of the Scud and Scaleboard surface - to - surface missile forces , became incorporated in the Russian Ground Forces . By the end of 1992 , most remnants of the Soviet Army in former Soviet Republics had disbanded . Military forces garrisoned in Eastern Europe ( including the Baltic states ) gradually returned home between 1992 and 1994 . This list of Soviet Army divisions sketches some of the fates of the individual parts of the Ground Forces . In mid March 1992 , Russian President Boris Yeltsin appointed himself as the new Russian minister of defense , marking a crucial step in the creation of the new Russian armed forces , comprising the bulk of what was still left of the military . The last vestiges of the old Soviet command structure were finally dissolved in June 1993 , when the paper Commonwealth of Independent States Military Headquarters was reorganized as a staff for facilitating CIS military cooperation . In the next few years , the former Soviet Ground Forces withdrew from central and Eastern Europe ( including the Baltic states ) , as well as from the newly independent post - Soviet republics of Azerbaijan , Armenia , Uzbekistan , Kazakhstan , Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan . Now - Russian Ground Forces remained in Tajikistan , Georgia and Transnistria . Equipment . In 1990 , the Soviet Army possessed : Post - dissolution influence . After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 , a considerable number of weapons were transferred to the national forces of emerging states on the periphery of the former Soviet Union , such as Armenia , Azerbaijan and Tajikistan . Similarly , weapons and other military equipment were also left behind in the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 . Some of these items were sold on the black market or through weapons merchants , whereof , in turn , some ended up in terrorist organizations such as al - Qaeda . A report in 1999 claimed that the greatest opportunity for terrorist organizations to procure weapons is in the former Soviet Union . In 2007 , the World Bank estimated that out of the 500 million total firearms available worldwide , 100 million were of the Kalashnikov family , and 75 million were AK - 47 s . However , only about 5 million of these were manufactured in the former USSR .