Further information: Eastern Front (World War II), Battle of Moscow, Battle of Stalingrad, and Azerbaijan in World War II While the Germans made huge advances in 1941, killing millions of Soviet soldiers, at Stalin's direction the Red Army directed sizable resources to prevent the Germans from achieving one of their key strategic goals, the ...

Under the terms of this pact, the German Wehrmacht moved into western Poland on 1 September 1939, and the Soviet Red Army moved en masse into eastern Poland sixteen days later. Great Britain, which had signed a bilateral defense treaty with Poland earlier that year, declared war against Germany as required by a secret protocol to the treaty.

The Soviet Army or Soviet Ground Forces (Russian: Советские сухопутные войска, romanized: Sovetskiye sukhoputnye voyska, SSV) was the main land warfare uniform service branch of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1946 to 1992.. Until 25 February 1946, it was known as the Red Army, established by decree on 15 (28) January 1918 "to protect the population, territorial integrity ...

Starting with that of the Soviet Red Army during the second world war. Following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 under Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Red Army which had been decimated through purges conducted on its ranks by a paranoid Stalin was locked in a brutal fight with the forces of the Third Reich.

The 280 mm mortar M1939 (Br-5) was a Soviet heavy artillery piece used during World War II, it was the Red Army's heaviest field piece during the war. Though nearly obsolete by the beginning of World War II, the T-26 was the most important tank of the Spanish Civil War and played a significant role during the Battle of Lake Khasan in 1938 as well as in the Winter War.