Soviet Army

The Soviet Army (often known informally, even by its own members, as the Red Army) was arguably the most formidable land force before World War III, and even after enduring a long war, several crushing battlefield defeats, a nuclear exchange and the depredations of disease, desertion and partisan attacks endemic in the Polish theatre, it is still probably the single most powerful military force operating in Poland and possibly the whole of Eastern Europe, although it is but a shadow of the force that, only three years ago, threatened to overrun the whole continent.

When the Warsaw Pact launched its attack on NATO, it was the Soviet Army that formed the core of the offensive. Soviet commanders had planned for a war of mobility in the North European Plain for decades, and their planning paid off. Although the offensive was not without setbacks and temporary defeats, it was largely successful. By 1984 Soviet forces had managed to occupy all of Denmark and most of the Netherlands and West Germany. Although they had held back from occupying the Ruhr (chiefly to avoid drawing France into the war), they were close to occupying the channel ports in Rotterdam and Antwerp. According to the Soviet battle plan, if France remained neutral and these ports were to fall into Soviet hands, NATO forces remaining in West Germany would run out of combat supplies in six weeks, leaving the USSR in control of Central Europe. Unfortunately, for all their battlefield successes, a combination of NATO air warfare, increasing unrest in Poland and the western USSR, and good old fashioned logistical confusion meant that the final stage of the offensive petered out. When NATO went over to the offensive in 1985, the Soviet forces were defeated and forced to fall back across Germany and into Poland and Czechoslovakia.

When NATO troops entered Poland, the Soviet Politburo, lacking faith in the Red Army's ability to stop the NATO advance, deployed tactical nuclear weapons. The resulting tactical nuclear exchange hit the Soviet Army just as hard as it did their NATO opponents. In the aftermath of the nuclear exchange, Soviet commanders struggled to deal with desertion, starvation, disease and incessant partisan attacks. Divisions that began the war with thousands of soldiers and dozens of heavy armoured vehicles were reduced to a few hundred soldiers on horseback. After the second nuclear exchange, orders stopped coming from Moscow, so Soviet commanders were left on their own, and even those who still considered themselves to be loyal soldiers had to make their own decisions about how to best defend their country. Some simply decided to withdraw to the Soviet Union in the hope that the country had survived, but those that remained in Poland tried to preserve their own forces and prevent large areas of the country falling into the hands of anti-Soviet forces - a very formidable task. Desertion was rampant - on three separate occasions, entire Soviet divisions stopped responding to orders and became very large Marauder units, often attacking their former comrades or fighting one another. Another division was taken over by Ukrainian nationalists and promptly left Poland to try to liberate Ukraine - nobody is sure whether or not they were successful.

Soviet soldiers in Poland mostly come from one of three groups. The first are the remains of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, an elite formation with many heavy weapons which suffered very badly during the battles for Germany and the Netherlands. The second are the remains of the Northern Group of Forces, the Soviet garrison in Poland, which was considered an average formation but did not endure such heavy attrition until late in the war. The third and most numerous group are the Soviet conscripts drafted into the Soviet Army after the beginning of the war. These soldiers are often soldiers only in name, many of them are simply inessential workers who were handed not-very-good weapons, given a few days training, and shoved into the frontline. Many of them do not speak Russian very well. In addition to the former Soviet troops, there also significant numbers of East German soldiers who fell back into Poland alongside Soviet forces, although they do not usually operate independently and have an even higher desertion rate than their Soviet counterparts.

The Soviet forces in East Germany and Poland before the war numbered more than 400,000, to say nothing of East German forces or wartime conscripts. Now there are roughly 15,000 Soviet soldiers in Poland who still consider themselves serving members of the Soviet Army. The rest have either been killed, joined Marauder bands, or simply gone off to try to survive independently, sometimes alone, sometimes with local communities.