Soviet
PETLYAKOV Pe-8 [TB-7] Part I
The TB-7 bomber is perhaps one of the few Soviet warplanes built before the war whose history clearly reflects all the distinctive features of aircraft development under the onerous totalitarian Soviet regime of the 1930s and 1940s. The fact that even its designation changed twice (fromANT-42 to TB-7 and then Pe-8) gives food for thought, not to mention that it…
Most Recent
Sukhoi Su-15 Series Part II
The Su-15 and Su-15UT are powered by two Tumanskiy R11F2S-300 or R11F2SU-300 axial-flow afterburning turbojets rated at 3,900 kgp (8,600 lbst) at full military power and 6,175 kgp (13,610 lbst) in full afterburner. The R11F2S-300 is a two-spool turbojet featuring a three-stage low-pressure (LP) compressor, a three-stage high-pressure (HP) compressor,…
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
Tsiolkovsky Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born on September 17, 1857, in the Russian village of Izhevskoye in the rural province of Ryazan, one-hundred twenty miles (195 km) southeast of Moscow. As a young boy, he was full of energy and displayed an eager quest for knowledge. But at age ten…
The Legacy of Unternehmen Barbarossa I
As far as high-speed mechanized troops are concerned and their location on the forward zone, one has, in general, to see the threat of their sudden concentration in the mere fact of their existence. These motorized troops, having carried out a march of up to 100 kilometers on the day…
The Legacy of Unternehmen Barbarossa II
Barbarossa’s failure to deliver the knockout blow and the subsequent failure to take Moscow suggest that December 1941 was the moment Germany lost the war. At best, it could expect a long war of attrition in a struggle against the combined might of the United States, the British Empire, and…
The Red Army of the Russian Civil War
The supreme achievement of the Soviet government in the civil-wars years: the creation of the Red Army. Much of the credit for this has, rightly, been apportioned to war commissar L. D. Trotsky. The foregoing account of the 1919 campaigns concentrated on the White advances because the Reds tended not…
White Defeat in the Russian Civil War
The Red versus White struggle was decided on the battlefield, but the outcome of civil wars also depends on the contenders’ ability, through politics and propaganda, to convince people to fight for them (or at least not to raise arms against them). In this field, governance, the Whites were a…