TTAG has Russian readers. One of them (hey Hyperprapor!) sends me links to Rodina Mat, tipping us off to the latest Russki advancement in firearms technology. Today’s Red Army Day, when the country honors the millions of men and women who served in what was one of the largest, most influential and most powerful armies on the face of the earth. The scope of what this army accomplished in a short time is remarkable (if often lamentable). I suggest you take a moment to reflect on the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (or RKKA) and take a shot of vodka in solidarity with those brave men and women. Me, I’m off to the range to play with my Mosin Nagant M1891/30.

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25 COMMENTS

  2. It is certainly the day to celebrate, as The Motherland magazine highlights, the glory of the great Red Army, which was (and is) an army of conscripted serfs treated by their NCO’s and junior officers with contemptible often fatal hazing and routine brutality. This is not news. It was as true in the 1920’s as in the 1990’s, and is today. They’ve tried moving in part to a volunteer army, but sane people do not volunteer for such abuse. A conscript army in service to the dictator of a deeply corrupted government which essentially just arbitrates between various mafia families (agencies, police units, local governments) is nothing to celebrate, as 9 of any 10 Russian privates will tell you…if asked.

  3. Solidarity with the Red Army? I spent a good part of my young life learning to kill those evil people, I have no intent to honor them.

  4. Many folks don’t know what a burden the Russian army carried during World War II. Millions of Russians died in the War defeating Germany. I’m not so thankful for the stuff that came after 1945.

    • The Russian conscript soldiers (and the peasants) suffered ungodly hell during WWII. Absolutely. It was not the great ‘patriotic’ effort, but a fight for survival after Stalin cut deals with the Germans to partition Poland, and utterly failed to prepare for war. I am glad to honor today the suffering of the peasants and privates. I am unwilling to honor the General Staff and the institution itself, inseparable as they were from the doctrine they knowingly served. They never opposed the Archipelag Gulag even decades after the war. Indeed, many of their weapons in the 50’s and 60’s were still being engineered within that system by the forced labor of dissident engineers and scientists. I’ll drop it, but wow.

    • Not buying it. Sure they fought the nazis effectively but they were still just a different flavor of the same totalitarian stain on humanity that the nazis were. I will not stand in solidarity with the army of the USSR no matter what name it might have.

  5. Stop. The USSR was just a different flavor of murdering fascist dictatorship, and no part of it should be celebrated. I’ll take a moment of silence for the poor peasant families whose sons were dragooned into invasions and petty wars with Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Baltics, China, Japan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, and plenty of others in the service of the party’s alcoholic paranoid fantasies. The Soviet leadership at all levels were evil death-lovers – the only people they brutalized more than their own soldiers and civilians were the tens of millions of foreigners who sorrowfully came under their sway. The USSR is gone, and good riddance. How about we drink to that?

  6. definetly going for a Mosin shoot today!
    and i think im going to wear my russian flappy ear fur hat (whatever they’re called) just to feel in character 😉

    • Since when are the Russians the good guys? Since they fought with us to stop the Nazi bastards, that’s when. They took more casualties in one single tractor factory battle than the Americans took in the whole bloody war!

  8. my great grandad was part of the russian revolution, he didn’t like the Tsar because of the fact that he was a jew, and the Tsar didn’t like jews. He sold his stuff, bought a Mosin and a Colt 1903 .32 and joined the Reds. of course, as soon as the Bolsheviks turned on the jews, he hiked his ass over here. My dad’s still got his .32 (not a single piece replaced, still works like a charm), but too bad he lost his Mosin on the way over. He probably sold it for the tickets or something.

  9. The Red Army lost fewer men to the Germans than the Russian nation lost to Stalin’s purges. Still, had the Russians not defeated the Germans on the Eastern Front, the US and it’s allies would have been defeated by the Germans on the Western Front.

    The Germans threw over three million men and thousands of tanks and guns against the Russians and lost most of them.

    • The Russians had no choice but to throw endless lives into Stalingrad. Else they would have shortly lost their southern oil fields, lost the war, and been massacred…and we would have been forced to fire bomb Berlin as we did Dresden, and ultimately nuke them less than a year later. Apparently we were reluctant to nuke…. Europeans.

      • Your revisionist history is repellent. The primary reason for developing nuclear bombs was for use against Germany. They were defeated before it was completed. Or should we ha e bombed them even after the war in Europe was ended?

        • Revisionist? My date and yours for the earliest availability of Little Boy don’t agree. The failure to use a nuke in order to end the war in Europe sooner, but then using it on Japan when we had essentially won in the Pacific, is a topic still debated by serious historians. The topic of the post was whether to honor the Red Army. I say ‘no thanks’. Two of you say “but without them we would have lost.” I simply point out that the obvious. No, without their efforts THEY would have lost (post early 1943). Yes, their sacrifices were huge. Yes, Stalin’s insistence that Hitler would not attack them was a big cause of their horror. No, we would not have lost if Hitler had fewer divisions on the Eastern Front 1943-1945. But, hey, I’ll sign on to the idea that every Nazi soldier killed was a positive. Confession: I was a Russian Language major in college, my first work dealt with some of their issues, I had experience inside Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, and I fought Soviet-trained and equipped NVA in territory they completely owned, for eight weeks, Laos Feb-March 1971. I’m not neutral in the matter. And of course if Russia had gone so far as to act like France, then the Germans would have won Europe, and we would not have entered the war. As it was we were late to the game.

      • The Russians had no choice but to throw endless lives into Stalingrad

        So? For every German that the Russians killed, there was once lass Nazi to kill Americans. I wasn’t a math major, but it still makes sense to me.

        And the Russians were in no position to nuke Germany, nor was Germany in position to nuke Russia, since neither of them had the capability. The Russians detonated their first nuke in August, 1949. After the War, it was estimated by American scientists that the Germans were five years away from success.

        The bottom line is that the Russians fought a fierce and vicious war, and won. A bunch of ignorant muziks defeated the finest infantry in the world. Good for them. Good for us, too.

        • It proves nothing except that endless waves of people will eventually overrun the opposition. And by the time the Russians overran the Germans, the local German Army wasn’t nearly the “finest infantry in the world”

          • So? The Germans had guns, and our fathers and grandfathers weren’t bulletproof. The Nazis who died in the East weren’t able to kill us in the West. Period.

            And BTW, when the Germans attacked Russia, the Nazis OWNED Europe. They were not only the finest infantry in the world, they dominated the world until the Russians cracked them.

  11. I admire and hate the Red Army.
    The Red Army did have dedicated and brave soldiers who really did turn the tide of WWII.
    The Red Army would have been worthless without American equipment and supplies.
    The Red Army was a tool of Stalin and the Commies who were probably even worse than Hitler and the Nazis.

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