Question by Tobias: Soviet conscription during World War II?
The Soviet Union had the most victims in the Second World War (the Great Patriotic War).
More than 20 million people were killed by the Germans.
And most of the battle fields on the Eastern Front were Belarus, Ukraine, Baltic states and the western side of Russia.
So, I guess the Russian civilians living on the eastern side of the Urals and the Asian part of Russia (the Far East)might not have lost their lives, because their cities were not occupied by the Germans.
But what about the Red Army soldiers?
Were the men in the Asian part of Russia also conscripted to the Army and did they fight against the Germans as well?
Take, for example, a young man living in Vladivostok (the Far East), a very very distant city from the Eastern Front.
Answers and Views:
Answer by Teumashen
The Russian Army did utilize troops from Siberia and the Far East during the war. In fact, the arrival of fresh troops from the East played a major role in pushing back the Germans, particularly in the Battle of Moscow.
Read all the answers in the comments.
What do you think?
ammianus says
Definitely, men were conscripted in large numbers from all over the Soviet Union – the existing Red Army already had soldiers from central Asian and far eastern parts of the country at the time of Operation Barbarossa.
The Military Museum in Tashkent,Uzbekistan, has detailed displays and information on troops from Uzbekistan that served in Soviet forces in WW2, of which there were many thousands; I'm sure the same was true of other Soviet republics in central Asia. Large numbers of Siberian troops spearheaded the Russian Winter Offensive at the end of 1941.(Vladivostock is in Siberia).
Stalin needed all the Soviet Union's manpower resources to fend off, and then eventually defeat, the Germans; the 10-13million + Soviet military deaths in WW2 show this, so conscription would have been rigourously enforced across the whole of the USSR.