DESCRIPTION

Red Army in Winter Dress x 48

The RKKA

Contrary to the later Soviet legends about "the heroic worker-peasant Red Army, inspired by Communist ideas and therefore fighting barefoot in the snow", the RKKA (Workers' and Peasants' Red Army) was considerably better armed and supplied than its enemies, who had to rely on the scant deliveries of the former allies of the Entente. To anyone who has seen the depth of snow cover in Russia, it is clear that even the most fanatical soldier could not have gone barefoot.

In the chaos that ruled the former empire after the revolution, the Bolsheviks took over more than 90% of the tsarist army’s stores, which were located in the central regions of the country; an area already controlled by the new power. With the most severe repression, and in a climate of disintegration of monetary institutions, they succeeded in requisitioning thousands of tons of foodstuffs from the peasants without compensation ("prodrazverstka").

The true creator and ideological inspiration of the RKKA, Leon Trotsky, forcibly mobilized 65% of the former Russian officer corps and, after placing them under the supervision of political commissars and effectively making their families in the rear hostages, quickly managed to build the army, which was sufficiently effective to subjugate the derailed country, but luckily for the rest of the world not to "liberate” it.

Initially, the "idealistic" Red Army was created with volunteers and mercenaries, and it was only later that they forcibly recruited the population tired of the World War - something that was later thoroughly hushed up by Communist historians. Lead by experienced commanders, supervised by commissars, reasonably dressed, fed and armed, the Red Army soldier nevertheless did not display durability in the fratricidal slaughter, with the rate of desertion reaching as high as 40%. As a result in the RKKA of the Civil War period the units considered most reliable were the "International" (in reality hired) units of the Latvians, Estonians, Hungarian prisoners of war and especially Chinese.

The image of the "Red Warrior" in a pointed cloth cap (“budennovka”) prevalent in Soviet era films does by no means correspond to historical reality. The fact is that toward the end of 1917 the government intended to dress the Russian army with some national features in the uniform, developed based on the sketches of the famous Russian artist Vasnetsov. The "Budennovka", as it was later named in honour of the commander of the 1st Red Horse Army, Budenny, was initially called a "bogatyrka".