Soviet Armed Forces

The Armed Forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union, 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 Soviet Union 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 Red Army, the Air Forces, the Navy, the troops of the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU), and the convoy guards of the union-republic NKVDs (on 30 October 1925, the convoy guards of the union-republic NKVDs were united into the Convoy Guard under the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union). The OGPU was later corporated into the newly created NKVD of the USSR in 1934, and thus its Border and Internal Troops were under the joint management of the People's Commissariats of Defense and of Internal Affairs (in 1934, the Convoy Guard Troops were included in the Internal Troops). 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. In the Soviet Union, general conscription applied, which meant that all able-bodied males aged eighteen and older were drafted into the armed forces. International observers regarded the armed organizations as collectively one of the strongest such forces in world history. The relative advancement and development of the...