The revolutionary Red Army was largely led by the Tsar's former officers
The Bolsheviks founded the Red Army in January 1918 as a force of class-conscious workers. Within months Leon Trotsky had scrapped elected officers and hired thousands of former imperial ones. By the end of the civil war in 1922, ex-tsarists made up 83% of its divisional and corps commanders.
The old imperial army was disintegrating in 1917. Some 19 million men, about 23% of the Empire's male population, had been mobilised, mostly unarmed and in support roles, and one tsarist general reckoned there were 2 million deserters. Lenin had imagined replacing standing armies with an armed people, but Red Guard units proved hopeless against real enemies. On 28 January 1918 the Council of People's Commissars created a new army open to citizens aged 18 or over, with recruits needing a guarantee from a Soviet, party or union committee. Its commander Nikolai Krylenko admitted that February that the country effectively had no army at all.
Pragmatism took over. In June 1918 Trotsky imposed a conventional hierarchy, brought in conscription, and recruited imperial officers as military specialists, sometimes holding their families hostage to secure loyalty. By September a Revolutionary Military Council chaired by Trotsky ran the war, with Jukums Vācietis of the Latvian Riflemen as first commander-in-chief. Desertion was vast: in 1919 roughly 837,000 dodgers and deserters were counted, most of whom were sent back to units, and amnesty weeks coaxed around 98,000 to 132,000 back voluntarily.
The civil war turned in 1919. White armies under Denikin, Kolchak and Yudenich advanced from three directions, then Trotsky reorganised and struck back, pushing Kolchak back in June and the other two in October. In January 1920 Budenny's cavalry rode into Rostov-on-Don, though White remnants held out in the Far East into 1923. The army also marched against newly independent states of the old empire, fighting the Ukrainian People's Republic three times.
After weak showings in the Winter War and the opening of Operation Barbarossa, it became the largest Allied land force in Europe, took Berlin and inflicted roughly 75% of German combat casualties. Up to 34 million people served in it during the Second World War. In February 1946 it was renamed the Soviet Army.
Source: Red Army
