The Samokhodnaya Ustanovka 122

Excerpt from Tanks Encyclopedia 

The SU-122 was the first major variant of the successful T-34 chassis. After the first German Sturmgeschütz assault guns were seen in operations, an order was issued in April 1942 to several design bureaus to devise plans for a prototype SPG. Many heavy guns were tested in the process. It was seen the assault gun formula amassed the advantages of a cheaper, easier produced vehicle with the use of heavier guns, albeit with the disadvantage of having to turn the entire vehicle to aim in combat. In the end, both 122 mm (4.8 in) and 152 mm (5.98 in) field howitzers were retained. Only the 122 mm (4.8 in), developed by F. F. Pietrow’s design bureau as the M-30S, was found suitable for a medium tank chassis.

Development of the SU-35

In fact, before any T-34 adaptations were produced, ten captured German Sturmgeschütz IIIs served as testbeds for the adaptation of the M-30S, under the name of SG-122. Deemed too complicated and difficult to maintain, they were phased out in favor of a proper Russian mass-built SPG. The most obvious option back then was the T-34. This choice was made by Uralmashzavod Uralsky Machine Building factory (UZTM), headed by chief engineers Kurin and Kusjin. They then developed the U-34, a long barrel 76 mm (3 in) gun armed turretless version based of the T-34 chassis.

They decided not to waste time, thus using the gun mount of the SG-122 and the hull, chassis, engine and transmission of the T-34. This led to the development of the final U-35, during the summer of 1942. After difficult trials led during the winter, the SU-35 was officially approved for production in limited numbers because of many flaws, but larger orders came after better trials and it was renamed into the SU-122.

Specifications and production

The Samokhodnaya Ustanovka 122 mm (4.8 in) or, in short, SU-122, was not at first a satisfactory model. The gun elevation was poor (initially designed for −3° and +26° with a 10° of traverse), the crew compartment was poorly ventilated and the crew was badly placed. All these defaults were corrected, as well as other minor modifications for mass-production. A slightly less sloped glacis (still 45 mm/1.77 in thick, almost 80 mm/3.15 in effective), simplified slits, rearranged fighting compartment layout, an increase in ammunition carried and a more efficient commander periscope.

The Unsuccessful Assassination Attempts on Lenin

On January 14, 1918 the first of ten assassination attempts was made on Vladimir Lenin.

Generally, the topic of assassination attempts on Lenin was poorly covered by Soviet historians, while the amount of disclosed information for free public access was all the more limited.

Before the October Revolution of 1917 there were no recorded cases of any assassination attempts on Lenin. The first planned attempt on his life took place a month and a half after the Bolsheviks seized power and took over Petrograd (now St. Petersburg).

On 14 January Lenin delivered a speech at the Mikhailovsky Manezh in Petrograd, greeting the first detachment of the First Socialist Army, which was to be sent to the front. The incident occurred at 7.30, as Lenin, along with his sister Maria and the Swiss communist Fritz Platten, was driving back to Smolny Palace, where he resided. The driver was going slow, taking precautions against black frost, snow-wreaths and thick fog. When passing the bridge over the Fontanka River, there came the sound of the bullets banging against the car. Platten managed to push Lenin’s head down, saving the leader’s life, while the driver thought to speed up. When the car was examined upon arrival at the Smolny Palace, its body was found peppered in several places, with two bullets having broken right through the windshield, one of them wounding Platten’s finger.

Though the news of the event itself was made public, the plotters were kept secret; all the more, the state security forces were neither able to catch nor identify the perpetrators right away. The terrorists disappeared and the details of the attempt were kept secret, as members of the Petrograd police were rumored to have been implicated in the matter. Disclosing the details would also have been politically unwise, as nobody was supposed to even think of raising their hand against the leader of world communism. As it was revealed later, some of the attackers were former White Guard officers. This fact only came up when the terrorists fled to the city of Novocherkassk, which had become one of the centers of the White movement. Some of the participants, who survived through the Civil War of 1918-1922, and found themselves in emigration, were able to share the classified secrets of the attempt. It was prepared by Prince Dmitry Shakhovskoy, at the cost of half a million rubles.

Fritz Platten, who had taken Lenin’s bullet, was arrested years later on espionage charges. In the course of the search of his house, the police found a revolver that had not been declared. This gave grounds for the Soviet government to suspect Platten of planning attempts on other government members.

Though the investigation ruled out any chance of Platten’s involvement with foreign intelligence services, he was still sentenced to four years for illegal possession of a gun. In 1942, while still in prison, Platten died of heart disease, ironically on Lenin’s birthday, 22 April. In 1956, Platten who actually saved the life of the Bolshevik leader was posthumously rehabilitated.

Lenin was attacked about ten more times, the most successful attempt being the one performed by the woman terrorist Fanny Kaplan on 30 August 1918, when the two bullets she fired reached their goal and seriously injured Lenin. However, as new never-before-seen information emerges, doubts arise as to whether the attempt actually took place due to a series of serious discrepancies in the whole assassination plot story, starting from the fact that Kaplan proved to have been almost blind by the time the attempt was performed. The full true story, however, seems will never be fully unraveled.

Feliks Edmundovich AKA Iron Felix

(1877–1926)

   Born into a family of Polish landowners, Dzerzhinsky joined the Socialist Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania while a student. As a political activist, he was arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist authorities on several occasions, and the February 1917 revolution found him in a Moscow prison cell. As a revolutionary and a prisoner, Dzerzhinsky took great interest in operational tradecraft and the counterintelligence operations of the tsarist secret service, Okhrana. Dzerzhinsky specialized in ferreting out informers from among revolutionaries.

   Following the Bolshevik coup of 7 November 1917, Vladimir Lenin asked Dzerzhinsky to form a security service, which took the name All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage (Chrevzuychanaya komissiya po borbe s kontrarevolutsei i sabotazhem). 

Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka—as it was referred to by most citizens—became a secret police empire responsible for the security of the state and the party. Dzerzhinsky described the Cheka as “the party’s fighting detachment.” Most of his deputies were not Russians but came from the Polish, Latvian, and Jewish minorities. Many had served in the Bolshevik underground in and outside the tsarist state.

   During the Russian civil war, Dzerzhinsky often traveled as the party’s representative to various military fronts as a troubleshooter, and he was instrumental in ordering and managing the Red Terror in 1918 that followed the attempted assassination of Lenin. On the first day of the terror, the Cheka executed without trial more than 500 men and women. During its short existence, the Cheka executed close to 150,000 Soviet citizens and imprisoned tens of thousands in forced labor camps. Dzerzhinsky publicly noted that the Cheka stood for terror, and regretfully that sometimes the sword of the revolution fell on the innocent as well as the guilty.

   Given his long political apprenticeship outside the Bolshevik Party, Dzerzhinsky kept out of party politics as long as Lenin was alive.

However, following Lenin’s death in 1924, Dzerzhinsky supported Joseph Stalin in his struggle with Leon Trotsky. As a result, the Cheka, which Dzerzhinsky created, became the Stalinist NKVD, a weapon that the leadership could use against dissidents within the party. The interrogators who had destroyed countless intellectuals, clergy, and refractory peasants showed little disinclination a decade later to purge the party of enemies.

   In 1922, as part of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the Cheka was folded into the new GPU (State Political Administration). The GPU lost none of the power of the Cheka. Moreover, Dzerzhinsky was rewarded for his work in building the security service by being made chair of the Council of the National Economy. This appointment led to greater participation by the security service in the Soviet economy, and the employment of thousands of prisoners in logging, gold mining, and manufacturing. Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 following a speech to a party meeting. He was remembered by security professionals as a knight of the revolution. His statue at the service headquarters at Lubyanka was torn down immediately following the failed 1991 August putsch but recently has been placed back in its position of honor.

   Following Dzerzhinsky’s death, an admirer noted that his two most striking qualities were fanaticism and mercilessness. Dzerzhinsky was an aesthetic and workaholic who lived in his office the first year he managed the Cheka, subsisting on the meager rations fed his troops in the field. He sought to mold a service of revolutionary priests, describing his Chekist colleagues as having “clean hands and warm hearts.” He was also a formidable manager who controlled a security service with a staff of 250,000. He had little real interest in foreign intelligence, and the foreign intelligence section was mainly directed at the penetration of émigré movements. Under Dzerzhinsky’s leadership, the Cheka organized the Trust operation to lure émigrés to return to the Soviet Union. By the time of his death, the security service had eliminated the threat of émigré political action against the infant Soviet state.

Afghanistan

On December 11, 1979, a bomb exploded near the Soviet UN mission in New York – a provocative act designed by the American secret services on the eve of the surge of Soviet military troops into Afghanistan.

On September 16, 1978, the pro-Soviet Afghan leader Nur Mohammad Taraki was overthrown following the coup d’etat and replaced by the new leader, Hafizullah Amin.

In several months Afghanistan had gone through all the stages any socialist state would go through, as all lands were confiscated and all private land was put into the collective agricultural units and this reflected negatively on the living standards of the population.

The Soviet authorities were outraged by the fact that the overthrow had taken place without their knowledge. Neither Leonid Brezhnev, then-leader of the Soviet Union, nor Yury Andropov, the KGB head, or Andrey Gromyko, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs were aware of it. Amin managed to win over the top officials of the country, and, Brezhnev could not but acknowledge Amin on his new post by sending him a congratulatory telegram.

However, the Soviet authorities got worried over nothing, as Amin had decided to resume their adherence to the Soviet Union, as all the multiple Soviet military and civil advisers had always been lending huge support and served as true protection against the menace from the North. Amin was the first one to suggest introduction of the Soviet troops into the country to secure his position and control the Pakistani border solely by means of his own forces.

The Soviet diplomatic mission used every effort it could to make sure the Afghan leader abstained from bringing in troops, as the Soviet government was reluctant to embark on such a perilous venture.

However, after the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel had been signed by the countries’ leaders on March 26 of 1979 in Washington DC, the Soviet positions in the Middle East were seriously undermined.

Besides, the Justice Party of Süleyman Demirel of Turkey, which took over in November of 1979, allowed Americans to dislocate several flight squadrons in the areas in the proximity of the Iranian and Soviet borders. In December of 1979, a meeting between American authorities and then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collaboratively decided – against the will of the Soviet Union – to deploy the new nuclear-guided weapon systems in Europe, all aiming toward the Soviet Union. All such events seriously threatened the Soviet Union’s position on the international arena, which demanded action on the part of the Soviet Union.

Extensive participation in the life of Afghanistan was a serious item on the Soviet budget. Besides, none of the Soviet leaders wanted to resort to military force. While the Soviet authorities were debating whether to bring in troops into Afghanistan or try and settle the tension peacefully (which they preferred) the American secret services performed two provocative acts in a row.

On December 11, a bomb detonated right by the Soviet UN mission in New York, and in a week, an office of the Soviet airline Aeroflot blew up in Munich, Germany. There were no victims recorded in both accidents. As a result, the decision to introduce the troops to Afghanistan was made on December 12, 1979.

Commonwealth of independent State

On This Day 8 December:

On December 8, 1991, the USSR became history when the Soviet leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus concluded an agreement on the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

The leaders of the three founding states – President of RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich of Belarus – met at a government retreat in Belavezha outside of Brest in Belarus to sign the so-called Belavezha Accords.

The document stated that the USSR ceased to exist as a subject of international law and geopolitical reality. However, based upon the historical community of peoples, relations between them, given the bilateral treaties, the desire for a democratic rule of law, the intention to develop their relations based upon mutual recognition and respect for state sovereignty, the parties agreed on the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The CIS was a free association of former Soviet republics, with common defense forces and a common economic front. Its charter stated that all fifteen members were sovereign, independent nations, meaning they no longer regarded themselves as part of the Soviet Union (established in 1922).

In the end, the dissolution of the USSR and establishment of the CIS was formally endorsed on December 21, 1991, in Almaty, as leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine signed the Protocol to the Agreement on the Establishment of the CIS.

The Soviet government had previously recognized the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania on September 6, 1991 and the three Baltic nations, as well as Georgia, chose not to join the CIS (Georgia joined two years later, in December 1993).

Article cite on Russiapedia.rt.com