Front (Soviet)

Fronts were formed from military districts when war broke out in 1941; at different times there were more than a dozen of them. A front usually had three to five combined-arms armies, often a tank army and its own air army, plus rear services, and it was as large as a whole army in other countries. They were commanded by marshals and generals such as Zhukov, Konev and Rokossovsky.

Their names came from their direction of operations, such as the Western or Voronezh Front. In autumn 1943, as the Red Army advanced west, many fronts were renamed Belorussian and Ukrainian; it was the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts that drove the Germans out of Poland in 1944–1945 and took Berlin, with Polish armies fighting within them.