Post-War Soviet Air Defense

Soviet air defense after the Great Patriotic War was very poor.  They lacked a comprehensive radar tracking and intercept network to defend their vast airspace.  Only the Western front had a  rudimentary fighter interceptor system available, an it was a relic of the Great Patriotic War.  It would be ineffective against the high altitude bombers, jet fighters, and carrier based aircraft that the Western nations were beginning to employ in vast numbers.  Stalin's short term answer was to do more of the same thing that saw him through the previous war.  He ordered the building of more aircraft and more anti-aircraft guns.  Guided missiles and other new technologies would take a back seat to anti-aircraft guns, fighters, and other systems with proven reliability.

The anti-aircraft guns were the responsibility of the army who had control of all types of artillery. The army would placed these weapons around strategic sites within the Soviet Union to defend against strategic bombers.  The guns were fairly conventional, although some would be made much larger (reaching sizes of 130mm in the early 1950's) and given radar fire control systems.

Interceptor aircraft operated by the Air Force formed the the other half of Soviet air defense.  They were slow turboprop aircraft that were usually incapable of stopping Western jets.  The use of captured German jet technology in interceptors led to faster aircraft, but it was only when the British government sold the Nene engine to the Soviets that real improvement began.  Aircraft like the MiG-15 would prove to be a great threat to the West.  

Despite the advances made in aircraft technology, they planes would have to be guided to their targets by the incomplete radar network of the time.  The radar system was so incomplete that the West would have little difficulty striking targets deep within the Soviet Union even as late as 1957.

By the early 1950's the Soviet air defense network was a larger and more complete version of its Great Patriotic War counterpart.  It worked well enough during peacetime, but it would be virtually useless in a nuclear conflict with the West.  Its largest problems were the fact that it lacked a centralized command system, a complete radar network, and a means for engaging high altitude bombers.  These faults would be addressed in the years that followed, leading to a comprehensive air defense network that made crossing into Soviet space a truly dangerous proposition..

Establishment and Organization of the PVO  

When Stalin's died in 1953 the reigns of power passed to Nikita Khrushchev who stopped the massive mobilization and reduced the size of the Soviet army.  He also attempted to streamline the military, reduce waste, and prepare the military for the future.   It was this move towards greater efficiency that led to the combining of all air defense assets of the Army and Air Force into one unified command.  This new organization was created in 1954 and was to be known as the Protivozdushnaya Oborono Voisk Strany or simply as the PVO.

Unlike the old air defense system, the PVO would make use of all available technologies to improve its interception capabilities.  Guided missiles were one technology that held particular promise and would soon replace the large obsolete anti-aircraft guns.  The organizational structure of the PVO reflected the new priorities.

The PVO would monitor ten air defense districts that encompassed the whole of the Soviet Union.  A further six districts over Eastern Europe would augment these.  Still, the system was rigidly centralized and most important decisions had to be referred to Moscow for review.

The PVO of the 1950's

The first task of the newly organized air defense force involved putting a stop to NATO reconnaissance attempts.  This was simply a continuation of the duties that the Army and Air Forces had been performing since the end of the Great Patriotic War.  Interceptions were fairly common during the early 1950's, and often escalated into small aerial battles along the Soviet frontier and coastline.

Nikita Khrushchev rejected this policy fearing it would show how weak the Soviet Union was at the time and prompt the militarists in the West to start a war that the Soviets could not win.  The American president and many others in the West simply thought that the Soviet Union was attempting to hide their massive military and aggressive intentions.  They felt that they had to find another way to learn what was happening inside the Soviet Union.

This led to Operation Genetrix, a plan to send thousands of high altitude balloons with photographic equipment over the Soviet Union.  They would later be recovered over the Pacific Ocean by aircraft.  The balloons were launched in both Europe and Turkey beginning in January 1956.  They were very difficult for PVO forces to stop because of their small size and very high altitude.

The pilots of IA-PVO quickly learned how to best intercept them, and only 45 of the first 450 launched actually were recovered as planned.  By March 1956 the PVO was intercepting every balloon that entered Soviet airspace.  The missions were stopped later that month when the Soviet government made an official protest tot he United States.

With the end of Project Genetrix, the West sought another method of gaining photo intelligence of the Soviet Union.  This became all the more important when the Soviet Union unveiled its SS-6 'Sapwood' nuclear ballistic missile.  The answer came in 1957 when the U-2 began its reconnaissance missions over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.  Their efforts were concentrated on major cities (Moscow and Leningrad), strategic missile sites, and on rail lines.  This was because the SS-6 was so large that it could only be transported by rail.

All early attempts by the PVO to intercept the U-2 were fraught with failure.  No aircraft in the Soviet inventory was capable of reaching the altitudes that the U-2 operated at.  Even when they began making 'zoom climbs' (where the aircraft flies straight and level, accelerating to its maximum speed, the pulling up to reach as high an altitude as possible) they would not be able to engage the U-2.  On once occasion a prototype Su-9 was ordered to ram the U-2, but it was unable to do so.

It would eventually take three years for the PVO to stop the U-2.  It was on 1 May 1960 when a battery of SA-2 'Guideline' missiles shot down a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers over Sverdlovsk.  This single act had tremendous political repercussions.  It caused the West to end overflights over the Soviet Union (they would use satellites for intelligence instead) and worsened relations between the West and the Soviet Union.