Today in Sasha's history.
Author: Sasha
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What was the origin of the Soviet Guards in World War II? July 5, 1943: The Battle of Kursk begins with a large-scale invasion offensive by German troops into Soviet positions.
What was the origin of the Soviet Guards in World War II?
The Guards were not created in the USSR, but by Peter the Great (Peter I).
However, the prototype of the Guards was created as early as the time of Ivan the Terrible, five hundred years ago in the 16th century.
The Guards, created by Ivan the Terrible, was an army that obeyed only the orders of the Tsar, and its main task was to protect the Tsar.
Why such an army?
Because of the national conditions of Russia.
In the time of Ivan the Terrible, or Ivan IV, the Russian Tsardom had just been created, and he was also the first tsar.
At that time, there were many powerful nobles in Russia, who held local military and administrative powers, which were actually equivalent to separating one side.
During the early years of Ivan IV, the country was governed by a council of regency consisting of his mother Yelena and seven great nobles.
When her mother Yelena tried to fight the aristocratic power and monopolize power, she was directly poisoned by political enemies.
After his uncle Glinsky came to power, although he attacked the power of the aristocracy, he could not fully control the government.
A few years later, his uncle was also assassinated and died, and Ivan IV was forced to start ruling the country at the age of 17.
The successive killings of his father and uncle also let him know how powerful the old nobles were.
In addition to foreign aggression, Ivan IV's main purpose in his life was to build up his army to fight against the old nobles.
In addition to creating a standing army, Ivan IV created an elite guard army in the hope of having a direct force to counter the killer skills of the old traditional nobility of Tsarist Russia.
With the help of the Guards, Ivan IV inflicted a heavy blow on the old nobility, leaving them no longer able to compete with the Tsar. Thus, the basic system of Tsarist Russia was established, which continued to rule for 400 years.
In the time of Ivan IV, the Guards were not yet under this name, but were called the Shooting Guard. These soldiers were mostly armed with muskets, hence the name.
The members of the Shooting Guard were not nobles at all, but simply professional soldiers recruited from among the freedmen who were not serfs.
The Shooting Guards were supported by the Tsarist state and were mainly responsible for defending the royal palace and capital, and were loyal to the Tsar alone.
Although the Shooting Guards were not nobles, they were even given land for the Tsar's reuse, making them the new nobles and soldiers for generations.
The officers of the Shooting Guards were crowned new nobles by the Tsar, and a special class of military privileges was formed.
Gradually, eighty or ninety percent of the officers of the Shooting Guards or the Guards were nobles, while no more than half of the ordinary Russian troops.
The Guards were an important military force in Russia and the defenders of the Tsar, and almost all coups d'état were related to them.
By the time of Peter the Great, his sister Sophia (Wei Xiaobao's lover in the novel) relied on a part of the Guards to rebel and seize power, killing two of Peter the Great's uncles (in front of Peter the Younger) at the age of 10.
The Guards supported Sofia primarily because their power was weakened.
As the new aristocracy of Tsarist Russia, the old aristocracy disdained them, and the tsar also thought that they were too strong and used the power in their hands to constantly suppress them.
The method of suppression was simple, not to pay enough to the Guards, or even to take back their fiefdoms.
A soldier who can't get enough to eat is like a hungry dog, and can only obey the orders of his master unconditionally.
By the time of the coup d'état in Sofia, the arrears of salaries to the Guards over the years amounted to 240,000 silver rubles, which greatly exceeded the current total amount of funds in the state treasury.
In order to gain the support of the Guards, Sophia promised to pay all the arrears and return the fiefdom.
After the usurpation was successful, Sophia did not break her promise, and even did not hesitate to melt all the silver jewelry in the palace into coins and pay this huge amount.
Peter the Great, after all, was the legitimate Tsar and tried to regain power at the age of 17.
Sophia once again manipulated the Guards to rebel, and by this time most of the Guards had already disobeyed her orders, and some had defected to Peter the Great. More importantly, the standing army of Tsarist Russia mostly supported Peter the Great, and it was difficult for a part of the Guards to control the situation in the country.
As a result, the commander-in-chief of the Guards was executed, Sophia was placed under house arrest in a monastery to wait for death, and Peter the Great managed to regain power.
After coming to power, Peter the Great temporarily retained the original Guards for the sake of the stability of the country.
However, another rebellion of the Guards in 1698 made Peter the Great understand that these white-eyed wolves would only defend their interests at any cost, even to the point of killing the Tsar.
As a result, Peter the Great completely crushed the rebellion, executed more than 1,000 Old Guards, or Shooting Guards, and completely disbanded the remnants.
Peter the Great abolished the Old Guards in favor of creating a Guard that was completely loyal to himself.
These officers of the Guards, almost all of whom were childhood friends of Peter the Great, were extremely loyal. From then on, the famous Guards Preobrazhensky Regiment and the Semenovsky Regiment of the Guards Army began to appear.
As a result, the name Guards was officially introduced, and the Shooting Guards were completely abolished.
Ironically, the female Tsarine Catherine also used the Guards to usurp the throne and killed her husband, the real Tsar Peter III.
And why did the Guards support Catherine, in the final analysis, it is the same as the shooting guards of its predecessors, it is for naked interests.
Peter III was a politically incompetent monarch, and under his unscrupulous rule, the Russian army was generally in arrears for more than three months, as were the Guards.
And Catherine promised that after taking the throne, she would give the Guards a lot of economic benefits and political privileges, and hundreds of Guards officers immediately expressed their cooperation.
Naturally, the Guards were not just usurped for power, they were an elite fighting force.
It is said that most of the successive tsars liked to personally select the soldiers of the Guards, and those selected must have been both strong and handsome, with a strong will to fight.
The Preobrazhensky Legion, for example, was formed and fought in a series of wars, including the Great Northern War, which annihilated the Swedish army led by Karl XII in 1709 on the outskirts of Poltava. The regiment also participated in the Prut March, the Persian Campaign and the Great Patriotic War of 1812, as well as the Russo-Turkish War and the suppression of the Polish uprising.
As for the late formation of the cavalry unit of the Guards, it also participated in the Great Patriotic War of 1812 and fought bloody battles with the French army. The Guards Cavalry unit initially consisted of only 2 brigades and was inexperienced in combat, and was not at all a match for Napoleon's battle-tested French Guards. In December 1805, the Battle of Austerlitz was the first appearance of Alexander's Guards on the battlefield. Grand Duke Konstantin personally led the Russian Guards, which served as reserves, in a desperate counteroffensive to recapture the Platzen Heights. As a result, they were repeatedly repulsed by the French Guards under the command of Bessière, and suffered heavy casualties.
Even so, many young Guards cavalry were not afraid of death and fought bloody battles with the French army to the death.
In Russia, the Young Guard is used to describe brave and fearless young warriors, and there are novels of the same name.
By the time Napoleon was defeated, the Russian Guards cavalry grew stronger and stronger, expanding to 2 divisions.
Interestingly, the officers and soldiers of the Guards had certain privileges, they lived relatively well-off, had a higher level of education, and slowly became a new force in Tsarist Russia, a progressive force.
In 1825, the participants in the December Uprising were overwhelmingly the Guards, whose leaders were almost exclusively Guards officers, representatives of the Russian aristocracy.
Why did the Guards revolt?
They believed that the Tsarist regime was still held by the Tsar and the old aristocracy.
Even in Catherine's time, the Guards did not receive much benefit, but the old nobility received a lot of new privileges.
As a nascent military-political group, they wanted to seize the main power of the state and carry out the reform of the political system like in Western Europe.
They wanted the realization of a constitutional system in Tsarist Russia, which in essence would weaken the power of the tsar and the old aristocracy, which would of course be suppressed by the current regime.
Tsar Nicholas I wanted to use the Guards to contain the old noble group, so he still gave preferential treatment to the rebellious Guards.
In the end, only more than 500 Guards leaders were tried, 5 of whom were executed, and the remaining 120 or so were deprived of the nobility and surrendered and exiled to Siberia.
Time flew by, many of the Normanov dynasties fell, and the tsarism ended, but the royalists still had a strong military force.
Since the Guards were the guards to defend the Tsar, they were naturally the main force of the Royalists and the main force against the Red Army.
Once the Cheka organization of the Red Army captured the officers of the Guards, whether they were guilty of a clear crime or not, they were generally executed as die-hard counter-revolutionaries.
When the Soviet-German war broke out, the Soviet army began to collapse and its morale was severely damaged. At this time, Stalin considered reviving the heroes of resistance against foreign enemies, that is, the names of the Guards, to boost morale.
Stalin chose the most combative Soviet troops, calling them the Guards.
On September 18, 1941, People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR Stalin and Chief of Staff of the Red Army of the USSR Marshal Shaposhnikov jointly signed Order No. 308, awarding the four infantry divisions the title of Guards: "In many battles against the bandits of Hitler in fascist Germany and in the defense of our Soviet Motherland, the 100th, 127th, 153rd and 161st Infantry Divisions showed valor and fearlessness and were exemplary examples of discipline and organization. On more than one occasion, these divisions inflicted a crushing defeat on the German fascist army, causing them to flee and terrify them. ”
According to the regulations, all units that received the title of "Guardsmen" were given a salary increase, with the commander being increased by half and the number of soldiers being doubled.
By the end of World War II, the Soviet Guards had developed into a formidable force.
On May 9, 1945, the Soviet army that received the title of Guards was: 11 combined armies of all arms and 6 tank armies; 1 cavalry mechanized cluster; 40 infantry corps, 7 cavalry corps, 12 tank corps, 9 mechanized corps and 14 aviation corps, 217 infantry divisions, 9 airborne divisions, 17 cavalry divisions, 6 artillery divisions, 53 aviation divisions, 6 anti-aircraft artillery divisions, 7 rocket artillery divisions; 13 motorized infantry regiments, 3 airborne regiments, 66 tank regiments, 28 mechanized regiments, 3 self-propelled artillery regiments, 64 artillery regiments; 1 mortar brigade, 11 fighter anti-tank artillery brigades, 40 rocket artillery brigades, 6 engineering brigades and 1 railway brigade; 1 fortified area; 18 combat ships and many services (arms) units.
The Guards is an honorary title, an honor for Soviet servicemen.
In order to preserve this honor, countless soldiers paid with their lives.
On June 11, 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR made the following additional provisions to the Guards: The Guards units must be exemplary for the whole army········· In the event of annihilation of a Guards unit in the course of a war, loss of its flag, greed for life and fear of death, and a rout in battle, its command will be brought before a military tribunal, stripped of the title of Guards and reorganized.
In March 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the formation of the Russian National Guard on the basis of Russia's former internal affairs forces.
Putin's guard chief, Viktor Zolotov, was appointed head of the Russian Federal Guards and the first commander-in-chief of the Guards.
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