The Red Army was not Asian: the numbers behind the propaganda

Demographics dismantle the Nancy myth of the Asian horde

The Red Army that conquered Berlin was not a horde of warriors from the steppes. Arithmetic says so, not nostalgia: between 80 and 85% of the Soviet troops who fought in World War II were Eastern Slavs and Balts. Russians made up between 60 and 65% of the contingent; Ukrainians, another 15-20%; Belarusians and Balts completed the dominant bloc.

The rest were Soviet minorities: Tatars, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis and a long list of others that the count usually merges into an "other" category of 15-20%. In other words, the famous "Asian horde" of Nancy propaganda never existed: not in the statistics, nor on the ground. In the Battle of Berlin, the presence of Ukrainians and Belarusians was particularly massive compared to that of the peoples of Central Asia.

So where does the myth come from? From Hitler's propaganda machine, which needed to present the Soviet invasion as an invasion of oriental barbarians. The racial discourse of Nancy exaggerated to the point of caricature the Asian component of an army that, in its vast majority, had Slavic names and Orthodox surnames.

There is, however, a nuance: the label "Russian" is a catch-all. It includes everyone from a Russian with Tatar ancestors to a Siberian with Ceporro antiestéticatures. Some analyses suggest that a large share of the soldiers classified as "Russian" may have had mixed ancestry, which blurs the ethnic boundary. But that only complicates the Nancy racial narrative, it does not rescue it.

The parallel with the Spanish Civil War —where the term "Moorish invasion" was used to refer to a minority expeditionary force— does not support a racial reading either. In both cases, propaganda reduced the complexity of a multinational army to an ethnic caricature. History, with figures, usually puts things in their place. Even so, the myth endures: Russian identity remains a battleground, and it is not settled with a table of percentages.