army with the general arming of the people, the Bolsheviks abolished the Imperial army on 16 March 1918. But the need for an armed struggle against the counter-revolution, and foreign military intervention forced the CEC and the CPC, January 15, 1918 to issue a decree establishing of the "Workers' and Peasants' Red Army", very early before the disbandment of the Imperial ground forces. At first the new army had no ranks, aside from the single rank of "RedArmyMan". However, due to a real need, first informally and then more formally (although no document on an introduction of ranks or names of commanders was issued) in official correspondence acronyms began to appear representing position-holder titles. For example, komdiv was an acronym of Division Commander; likewise kombat stood for Battalion Commander, etc. By the middle of the Civil War (January 1919), these "positional ranks" became quite formal, and since January 1920 the names of officers was fixed by the Order of the Red Army. Instead of ranks, these were officially known as "categories of the Red Army." This system was maintained until May 1924. Some of these acronyms have survived as informal position names to the present day. During the civil war ships did not play a significant role. Many of the sailors and petty officers of the fleet went to fight on land in the Red Army. For a long time a scale of naval ranks did not exist at all. Most of the naval officers were addressed either by their position or by their tsarist rank with the addition of the prefix byvshiy (abbreviated as "b."), which meant "former". Since 1924, the real rehabilitation and creation of the fleet began. Personal ranks as such did not exist during this period in the Navy. By then, the only new rank created was the Sergeant Major (Starshina) rank in the Red Army. It was first introduced in the Worker's and Peasant's Red Navy at the same time, with the old Imperial Naval rank of Bootsmann in the Navy the only old rank still used. The Soviet Air Forces began as a committee for ex-Imperial military aviation in 1918, and was later transformed into a separate service later as the Workers and Peasants Red Air Fleet. It shared the same ranks as the Army and the naval air component shared the ranks of its mother service. 1925–1935 By that year, the ranks were