![]() ![]() ![]() The first of Red Square’s Victory Day parades was staged on 24 June 1945, weeks after the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. In fact, while it appeared at a number of military parades, the Scrooge was never used operationally by the Soviet military, and a first missile in this class would only be fielded in the mid-1980s. Subsequent intelligence reports noted that “hidden base areas probably will be, or have been, constructed”. No name was known for this alarming new weapon, but in the practice of the day it was dubbed “Scrooge” by NATO intelligence officers. In November 1965, marking the anniversary of the October Revolution, among the military vehicles passing through Moscow were fearsome-looking ICBMs mounted on tracked carriers - a major advance over missiles stored in vulnerable fixed sites. ![]() The parades could be engineered to both celebrate Soviet military prowess and deceive the foe. While the actual missiles could naturally not be revealed to the public at their launch sites (helping conceal their location from US attack, as well as the actual number of deployed weapons), they could roll through Red Square on the occasion of the parades marking any number of significant military events: Victory Day, Defence of the Fatherland Day, the October Revolution, and others. This in turn led to a race between the superpowers to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in the “missile race” that pushed the world closer to the spectre of mutually assured destruction. When Nikita Khrushchev boasted of factories “turning out missiles like sausages” it was a classic case of the premier’s trademark braggadocio, but it had its intended effect of convincing Washington of Soviet military power. There was nothing to ensure, however, that what was being put on show was a genuine reflection of Soviet military capabilities. Here, the rows of vehicles are notable for their polished appearance, extending to the wheels of jeeps and armoured personnel carriers picked out in patriotic red and white. Those photographs that are included are primarily drawn from “in the field” intercepts, grainy satellite imagery, while the finest are those gleaned from military parades. At the height of the Cold War, however, outside of espionage and subterfuge, military parades provided the best showcase for such hardware.Ī typical issue of the Pentagon’s manual of paranoia, Soviet Military Power, from the mid-1980s is primarily illustrated with a combination of (frequently exaggerated) graphic depictions of “little red men” (and tanks, and bombers and warships) and dramatic artist’s impressions. In the later years of the Cold War, perestroika led to Soviet military equipment being actively marketed, including in the west, and it immediately became more familiar. When the US required an example of the Soviet Air Force’s latest MiG-15 fighter after it had made a dramatic entry to combat in the Korean War, a bounty was offered to any North Korean pilot willing to defect in one of the jets. Agents of the so-called “military liaison” missions patrolled east Germany in adapted civilian cars, cameras at the ready to record any Soviet military movement they may have encountered, no matter how banal: a single emblem or serial number could yield the identity of a new weapon, an idea of the number of troops deployed in the area, or readiness times. As a result, intelligence went to extraordinary lengths for the privilege of having Soviet equipment in their hands. Beyond the symbolic significance of the Red Army and its various branches, for military intelligence in the west, opportunities to see the Soviet military up close were few and far between. ![]()
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