"Boris!"
"Ivan."
"Have you seen this new memorandum from Stalin? What can it mean?"
"I think it is fairly clear what it means, Ivan. 'Make the whole army into cavalry or I'll have you purged' doesn't leave much to doubt."
"No. I mean: what is Stalin thinking with this order? Why would he want the entire army to be changed over to Cavalry?"
"Perhaps he just likes horses."
* * *
The Red Army was a sorry affair as 1936 began. Hordes of illiterate, badly-trained peasants made up most of the army's divisions. Some possessed vehicles in which to travel, but few of these actually ran, and those that did had no real roads to follow. The army was supported by an antiquated air force and by a navy that would have been embarrassed to show its face at Tsushima.
Disgusted at the poor levels of readiness in his armed forces, the Wise, Benevolent, Gracious and Charming Stalin turned his prodigious intellect to the problem, and soon seized on the only solution: Cavalry.
Riding a horse required skill and discipline. Riding a horse required not being too drunk to stay on. Riding a horse meant not walking in the mud. Riding a horse meant not needing actual roads. It was the perfect solution!
Besides, it was statistically provable that horses were loyal to the revolution. None had ever been arrested for counter-revolutionary activity, after all.
Thus, on 1 January 1936 the order went out: all existing (non-Cavalry) units of the Red Army were to be disbanded, and the troops retrained as cavalrymen. Enormous horse studs were created in the vast Russian steppe to supply the new divisions that were projected to be formed.
A downside of this plan was that the country would temporarily be defended by 30,000 men on broken down nags and carrying lances and black powder muskets. But Stalin was confident that this was a risk worth taking.
And so it proved: as the months of 1936 ticked by, lots of men and lots of horses were enlisted in the New Model Red Army. For some reason, all of these troops were sent to the Sinkiang border for exercises. Lots of them.
Lots.
For exercises.
In August 1936, the Spanish got into a squabble over whether the daily siesta should be from 12 noon to 2pm as it had been in the past, or 1pm to 3pm as the more modern-thinking workers believed. A Civil War ensued. Stalin immediately ordered that supplies and aid be sent to the workers. Thousands of horses were immediately shipped to Spain. Unfortunately, when the ship arrived the workers were on siesta, and the counter-revolutionary forces won the day.
Stalin pouted in his dacha for a week.
Still, the Red Army was now looking far more splendid than it ever had before, with hundreds of thousands of men and horses able to be massed for dazzling parades in Red Square.
Or they could have been, if they weren't still all on the Sinkiang border.
These were
long exercises.
More months ticked by, and the world was generally pretty quiet, until some Chinese con man sold the Kwantung Army a bridge that didn't belong to him. Fighting ensued, and suddenly Japan and China were at war.
Loudly declaiming the perfidious lies and deceptions of the Chinese business class, which had too long oppressed the workers, Stalin announced that the Soviet Union was now also at war with the "mercenary bankers and counter-revolutionaries" of Nanjing.
What a happy coincidence that the whole Red Army was still on exercises on the border with Sinkiang!
The new, improved, much taller than before Red Army entered Sinkiang in October 1937. They were still there two months later. In this time, Soviet Commanders had learned three important lessons:
1. Crossing mountains is really, really slow.
2. The Mongolian Army sucks.
3. Horse meat is not very tasty.
Stalin, infuriated by the slow progress of his forces, ranted and frothed and executed a few commanders to 'encourage' the rest. Then he had a good lie down and felt better.
News from the front was about to improve, however, as the Red Army's leaders hit upon a successful new strategy:
Having lots, lots,
lots more troops than the enemy.
