National Units of the Red Army in the 1930s

Abstract

The emergence and development of national formations in the interwar period was due to a number of objective factors and should be considered in the overall context of the development of the country’s armed forces and state national policy. The influence of these factors varied in different periods. National formations were established in the mid-1920s on the wave of political emancipation of the USSR’s national regions and the mass introduction of the korenization practice (Soviet ‘localization policy’) - a special state policy in the national regions aimed at major promotion of national cadres, development of national cultures and languages. In addition, it was planned to use national formations for further revolutionary expansion into neighboring countries of the East. The article analyzes the development of national military units as a special institution within the Red Army which survived during the 1930s and reached its zenith, as well as the period of its rapid decline. The paper notes that the fate of the national parts was determined not only by the peculiarities of development of the Soviet armed forces on the eve of the major war but also by the vicissitudes of big-league politics and ideology, namely, the change of the course - from world revolution to construction of a national socialist state to be accompanied by the Great Purge and discreditation of national movements. Prospects of a big war and Red Army’s accelerated reorganization revealed a discrepancy of national formations with dictates of the time. Since the late 1930s, mass conscription of citizens of all nationalities of the USSR and their extraterritorial distribution throughout military units (outside their homeland regions) was introduced. For these reasons, further existence of any national troops became irrelevant since those were in conflict with the goal of mass mobilization and reserve accumulation. We should also note the absence of a certain official responsible for the construction of a corresponding national structure within the Red Army. This resulted, on the one hand, in the chaotic development of national units in the first half of the 1930s, and, on the other hand, in the absence of lobbyists inside the Defense Ministry, subsequent to which those were abolished without any discussions.