Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

WEAPONRY (RED ARMY). Almost the entire stock of weapons and ammunition of the Imperial Russian Army was inherited by the Soviet government and its armed forces, as well as the plant to produce more (notably in the shape of the huge arsenal at Tula). The arms industry was overseen by VSNKh, and by 1920 its 2,000 factories claimed to have produced 3,000,000 rifles, 21,000 machine guns, 1,600,000 handguns, and 3,000 artillery pieces (as well as 5,600,000 greatcoats and 4,000,000 summer uniforms). Throughout the period, however, the supply of weapons to the Red Army was complicated by the great diversity of available equipment—more than 60 makes of artillery pieces and 35 types of rifle, for example—meaning that spare parts were often hard to obtain, and users of the weaponry had to frequently retrain.

Of the 1,300,000 rifles left over from the tsarist army, the majority were the Russian 7.62mm Mosin-Nagant M.1891, commonly known as the trekhlineika (literally, “the little three-liner,” from its caliber in the old Russian system). Most of these had been produced domestically, but some were manufactured to order during the First World War by the Remington Company in the United States. They were available in several versions: pekhotnaia (infantry), the shorter and lighter dragusnkaia (dragoon), and the bayonet-less kazachskaia (Cossack). Numerous foreign-manufactured rifles were also used, including 7.92mm German Mauser M.1898, the 8mm Austrian Mannlicher M.1895, the Japanese Ariska M.1905, and a version of the American Winchester M.1895 that had been adapted for Russian ammunition. The most commonly used revolver of the civil-war period was the 7.62mm Nagant M.1895, although members of the Cheka and military commissars greatly favored the German Mauser.

With regard to bladed weapons (which, because of the shortage of spare parts, often had to be resorted to), cavalrymen and artillerymen used the Cossack or (hand-guardless) Caucasian shashka (saber) or kinzhal (dagger), which could be intricately decorated, while all mounted forces also used the M.1910 lance.

The most widely used machine gun was the Maxim M.1910, although the French Hotchkiss M.1914, the American Colt, and the British Lewis M.1915 were also to be found. All types of machine gun could be mounted on a tachanka, and some were mounted on aircraft.

The most common mortar among Red Army forces was the imperial Russian Likhonin 47–58mm, while the 3-inch field gun M.1902, the 3-inch mountain gun M.1909, and the M.1910 Howitzer constituted the bulk of the light artillery deployed by the Reds. Heavy artillery was largely made up of the 107mm field gun M.1910 and the 6-inch M.1910 Howitzer, with some of the French 120mm cannon M.1878. Also deployed in smaller numbers were the 6-inch M.1904 siege gun, the British 6-inch and 8-inchVickers Howitzers, the 11-inch Howitzer M.1914, the 12-inch Obukhov Howitzer M.1915, the 10-inch coastal cannon, and the 37mm trench gun M.1915, as well as the 37mm and 40mm automatic guns.

In the early months of the civil wars, the Red Army’s access to artillery was limited, as most guns were located in areas of the front that had not yet come fully under Soviet control, but this situation eased by the spring and early summer of 1918. Thereafter, for ease of movement, artillery was often mounted on armored trains or trucks and on military flotillas. The Reds also utilized a number of tanks. In all circumstances, all sides in the civil wars tended to favor artillery operations in the “direct fire” mode, but this was more the case with the Reds (who often lacked training) than the Whites. Also, dominance was usually established by the side that could deploy its artillery first and fastest, so efforts to find concealed positions on the open steppe were kept to a minimum. The Soviet leadership were also fascinated by the potential presented by the German Army’s “Paris Gun,” which in March–July 1918 had bombarded Paris from a distance of 80 miles, and during the summer of 1918 they established a special subcommittee of the Artillery Directorate of the Main Field Staff of the Red Army to investigate means of increasing the range of its own artillery to a comparable distance (although nothing concrete was achieved during the civil-war years).

Finally, in Soviet historiography a great show is made of the ingenuity with which Red partisan forces, especially in Siberia, manufactured their own weaponry, including machine guns, mortars, and light artillery (although the illustrations used with these accounts suggest that these homemade guns might have been as lethal for anyone firing them as they were for their intended targets).