Soviet Armed Forces

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Soviet Armed Forces" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article may rely excessively on sources too closely associated with the subject, potentially preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral. Please help improve it by replacing them with more appropriate citations to reliable, independent, third-party sources. (December 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (December 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Russian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 983 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at [[:ru:Вооружённые силы СССР]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ru|Вооружённые силы СССР}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Armed Forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Вооружённые Силы Союза Советских Социалистических Республик Vooruzhonnyye Sily Soyuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik
The Soviet flag was also being used as the Banner of the USSR Armed Forces
Founded	23 February 1918; 106 years ago (1918-02-23) (as the Red Army) 25 February 1946; 78 years ago (1946-02-25) (as the Soviet Armed Forces)
Disbanded	26 December 1991; 32 years ago (1991-12-26) (Soviet Union dissolved) 24 December 1993; 30 years ago (1993-12-24)[1] (United Armed Forces disbanded)
Service branches	Soviet Army Soviet Air Forces Soviet Air Defence Forces Strategic Rocket Forces Soviet Navy[2] Soviet Airborne Forces
Headquarters	Ministry of Defence, Khamovniki District, Moscow, RSFSR
Leadership
General Secretary	Joseph Stalin (1922–1953) Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–1991)
Minister of Defence	Nikolai Podvoisky (1917–1918) Yevgeny Shaposhnikov (1991–1993)
Chief of the General Staff	Pavel Lebedev (1921–1924) Viktor Samsonov (1991–1992)
Personnel
Military age	18–35
Conscription	2 years (Army & Air Force) 3 years (Navy)
Available for military service	92,345,764 (1991), age 18–35
Active personnel	4,900,000 (1985)
Reserve personnel	12,750,000
Expenditure
Budget	US$128 billion (official, 1988)[3] US$200-300 billion (CIA, Pentagon estimate, 1988)[4]
Percent of GDP	4.9% (official, 1988) 7.7–11.5% (CIA, Pentagon estimate, 1988)
Related articles
History	Military history of the Soviet Union
Ranks	Military ranks of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Armed Forces,^[a] also known as the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union,^[b] the Red Army (1918–1946) and the Soviet Army (1946–1991), were the armed forces of the Russian SFSR (1917–1922) and the Soviet Union (1922–1991) from their beginnings in the Russian Civil War of 1917–1923 to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In May 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin issued decrees forming the Russian Armed Forces, which subsumed much of the Soviet Armed Forces. Multiple sections of the former Soviet Armed Forces in the other, smaller Soviet republics gradually came under those republics' control.

According to the all-union military service law of September 1925, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Ground Forces, the Air Forces, the Navy, the State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the convoy guards.^[5] The OGPU was later made independent and amalgamated with the NKVD in 1934, and thus its Internal Troops were under the joint management of the Defence and Interior Commissariats. In 1989, the Soviet Armed Forces consisted of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the Ground Forces, the Air Defence Forces, the Air Forces, and the Navy, listed in their official order of importance.^[2]

In the USSR, general conscription applied, which meant that all able-bodied males aged eighteen and older were drafted into the armed forces.^[6] International observers regarded the armed organizations as collectively one of the strongest such forces in world history.^[7] The relative advancement and development of the government's militaries was a key part of the history of the USSR.

In the context of the Cold War, an academic study by the rival U.S. Department of Defense in 1984 found that the Soviets maintained a notable reach across the world and particularly inside Europe. The analysis explicitly concluded that "Soviet armies have always been massive" while "they are also highly modernized, well-equipped, and have great firepower... [as well as] mobility", which meant that "manpower and materiel combined make the present Soviet ground forces a very formidable land army." Although Soviet military strategy in general merited comment, "the ground forces constituted the largest of the five Soviet military services" as of the date the research ended.^[7]

Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).