This image is the cover for the book Red Assault, Savas Beatie Orders of Battle Series

Red Assault, Savas Beatie Orders of Battle Series

An aviation historian explores Russian airborne assault innovations in the decade before WWII using paratrooper memoirs and archival research.

Through the 1930s, the USSR was pioneering new developments and technologies in airborne assault. The Red Army was conducting mass airborne assault exercises—dropping paratroopers, tanks, and guns from the skies—when no other nation on Earth even had airborne assault troops.

In Red Assault, the Russian aviation historian Vladimir Kotelnikov explores these pioneering achievements. He describes the armament, equipment, and military hardware developed for airborne troops, as well as fantastical projects that reflect the unrestrained imagination of the Soviet military’s aviation designers. Kotelnikov offers a detailed account of the aircraft designed for airborne troops, while also describing troop drop exercises and real operations leading up to 1941.

Kotelnikov’s research is drawn from government archives and museum collections, as well as the memoirs of pioneer military paratroopers in the USSR, some of which have never been published before.

Vladimir Kotelnikov, Kevin Bridge

Vladimir Kotelnikov was born in Moscow on 9 December 1951. He graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute (University) in 1975 and was engaged in research and development in the area of high-temperature strength. Vladimir defended the academic degree of the Candidate of Science in 1981 and read lectures on aircraft piston engine design at the Moscow Aviation Institute.Since the 1980s Kotelnikov has conducted archive research on the history of Russian aviation of the inter-war and WWII period. In addition, he has paid specific attention to the history of foreign aircraft testing and operations in Russia. As the result of his work he published several hundred articles and dozens of books in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, UK, France, Germany, Spain, and US, among them - Lend-Lease and Soviet Aviation, Americans in Russia, Russian Piston Aero Engines, Early Russian Jet Engines, Air War Over Khalkhin Gol, Le Petlyakov Pe-2 and others. Being an aviation historian, he received a diploma as a professor of the Academy of Aviation and Aeronautics Science and currently acts as a consultant on piston aero engine design to Russian aviation museums as well as to different aircraft restoration groups.Since 2003 Vladimir has held the post of an editor of the Aviakollektsiya aviation history magazine, published in Moscow.

Helion and Company