Soviet Army - Cold War

Cold War

Soviet Military Districts 1990

• Leningrad Military District
• Belorussian Military District
• Baltic Military District
• Carpathian Military District
• Kiev Military District
• Odessa Military District
• Moscow Military District
• Volga-Urals Military District
• North Caucasus Military District
• Transcaucasian Military District
• Turkestan Military District
• Siberian Military District
• Transbaikal Military District
• Far Eastern Military District
• The Central Asian Military District was dissolved in 1988 and the Volga and Urals Military Districts merged around 1991.

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 Groups). In the late 1970s and early 1980s new High Commands in the Strategic Directions were created to control multi-Front operations in Europe (the Western and South-Western Strategic Directions) and at Baku to handle southern operations, and in the Soviet Far East.

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.