ABSTRACT
The Russian ground forces have always been the largest and most important of the armed services; indeed, the Russian word armiya can equally well translate the English words 'army' and 'armed services'. It is only comparatively recently that Russians have begun to use the terms vooruzhenyye sily (armed forces) and sukhoputnyye voysk (ground forces) to distinguish the two concepts. In May 1945 the Soviet Union had over 11 million men under arms and 80 per cent of them served in the ground forces. The Great Patriotic War (1941-45) was basically a land war and the other services played subsidiary roles. The development of nuclear weapons, however, threatened the ground forces' pre-eminence and the newly created Strategic Rocket Forces (RVSN) became the senior branch of the armed forces. The ground forces remained the largest of the armed services, absorbing nearly half of the Ministry of Defence's manpower and recovered from their eclipse under Khrushchev in the 1960s, but the other Soviet armed forces benefited even more from the great expansion of Soviet defence spending between 1975 and 1985. Nevertheless, the ground forces continued to dominate in senior appointments, such as Minister of Defence and Chief of the General Staff and with 2 million troops and over 200 divisions, the Soviet Union remained the predominant land power in the world.1
