Red Army reasons might be judged impolitic and cost their personal freedom or even their life In the midst of the BARBAROSSA onslaught, command powers of political officers were actually expanded, in a desperate effort to return the military to the revolutionary élan it had displayed in the days of the Konarmiia and Russian Civil War (1918–1921) Commissars were attached to every Front as part of the Military Council, and even politruks were given coauthority with lower-level commanders It was not until October 9, 1942, that the dual command system ended, when the office of commissar was abolished as part of a set of larger reforms Politruks remained in place from that date, but were reduced to health and morale functions and stripped of command authority Officers were given back epaulets and rank insignia and their formal title of “officer” in January 1943 Who were the soldiers of the Red Army, the ordinary krasnoarmeets? Most were Russians, but a large minority were Ukrainian and a smaller minority were Belorussians More than a dozen other ethnic groups supplied significant numbers of men to fight in Red Army uniform: Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Jews, Kazakhs, Poles, Siberians, Uzbeks, Yakuts, and others No Volga Germans or Tatars were permitted to fight Along with other “suspect minorities,” they were internally deported, entire populations brutally uprooted and moved upon the whim and prejudice of the great tyrant, Joseph Stalin, away from the advancing Germans Thus, Volga Germans, Tatars, Ingush, Chechens, and others were condemned en masse and deported from homelands they occupied for centuries That was part of a wider and deeper “barbarization” effect of the war on Soviet society, as Omer Bartov termed the phenomenon with regard to Nazi Germany and the Wehrmacht, for the Soviet state and Red Army also became barbarized under extraordinary conditions of the Eastern Front Most krasnoarmeets were very young, becoming even more so after the mass casualties of 1941–1942 wiped out most of the prewar Red Army The majority of those who fought during the Great Fatherland War were born after the Bolshevik Revolution Raised under Bolshevism’s banners and closed ideological system, they were already steeped in regime propaganda when they first put on a uniform They were reindoctrinated in Soviet propaganda and values in barracks and at the front by the Red Army’s “political administration,” or PURKKA It was a mark of how effective the system was, how deep NKVD terror ran, and how needful of leadership the Red Army and population felt in the darkest days of the war, that many krasnoarmeets charged German positions shouting “Za Stalina!” (“For Stalin!”) None of the political pestering and spying on tired and frightened soldiers or discrimination against non-Russians mattered as much as certain basic facts: Red Army soldiers wrapped sore and swollen feet in portyanki, slept on straw or the ground, ate black bread and cabbage soup, drank buckets of tea or anything at all that contained alcohol, and killed Germans By 1945 they would kill more Germans than all other Allied armies combined Active recruitment of women started in midsummer 1942 By the end of the year the number of women in uniform had grown greatly By the end of the war, over 990,000 women served in the Red Army or in its civilian support auxiliaries The pressure of intense and sustained combat made young men and women older and much harder overnight In many cases they became inured to the great 900