72-CW-1251 SOVIETS IN COLD WAR SPECIAL TROOPS WITH NBC PROTECTIVE SUITS 01

VDV or WDW (Rus. Vozdushno-Diesantnyye troops) is initially Soviet, and now Russian airborne troops, which were formed in 1930 on the initiative of the Marshal of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Tukhachevsky - by the way, the same one who lost the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. It can also be assumed that the Red Army was a pioneer in the creation of large airborne units on a European scale, quite clearly distancing other armies in this respect in the mid-1930s. For the first time, Soviet troops of this type were used in the fighting in Mongolia (against Japan) in 1939, but mainly as light infantry. VDW troops were also used during World War II, but they were not as successful as, for example, the Allied paratroopers during the Normandy landings in 1944. The real renaissance of VDV, however, took place after 1945, when the Soviet Army began to perceive in this type of armed forces its strategic retreat, and their great reformer and great commander was General Vasily Margiełow. It was, inter alia, on his initiative that in 1964 the WDW became a special type of armed force that was directly subordinated to the supreme command. It is worth adding that the WDW participated both in the operation in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and on a very large scale in Afghanistan (1979-1989). At the time of the collapse of the USSR, the VDV troops had as many as 7 divisions and 11 independent brigades! In 2016, however, the Russian airborne troops consisted of 4 divisions and 6 independent brigades.