Even though Bolshevik influence in the ranks was strong, the officer corps was staffed with many who violently opposed communism. The Russian army, exhausted by its participation in World War I, was in the final stages of disintegration and collapse. The February Revolution replaced the Tsar with the Russian Provisional Government, 1917 which was itself overthrown by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Members of the Red Army gather around Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in Petrograd. The two other Soviet militarized forces were the Internal Troops ( MVD Troops), subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, and the Border Troops, subordinated to the KGB. In their official order of importance, the Soviet armed services were the Strategic Rocket Forces, Ground Forces, Air Forces, Air Defense Forces, and Naval Forces. The Soviet military consisted of five armed services. The Soviet Union fell in 1991, thanks not to military defeat but economic and political factors (see history of the Soviet Union (1985-1991)). By the early 1980s, the Soviet armed forces had more troops and nuclear weapons than any other nation. The Cold War between the two nations led to military buildups, the arms race, and the Space Race. The Soviet Union became the sole superpower rival to the United States. After the war, it occupied part of Germany and many nations in central and eastern Europe, which became satellite states in the Soviet bloc. In World War II, the Red Army was the major military force in the defeat of Nazi Germany. In the late 1930s, the Red Army invaded Finland fought a brief undeclared border war (together with its ally Mongolia) with Japan and its client state Manchukuo and, was deployed when the Soviet Union, in agreement with Nazi Germany, took part in the partition of Poland, annexed the Baltic States, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (from Romania). ![]() The new government formed the Red Army to fight various enemies in the Russian Civil War. The military history of the Soviet Union began in the days following the 1917 October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov depicted saluting a military parade in Red Square above the message "Long Live the Worker-Peasant Red Army- a Dependable Sentinel of the Soviet Borders!"
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