If you know the history of the last years of the Cold War, you must know two interesting phenomena, one is the T-80U, the highest-end and best tank of the last generation of the Soviet Union, which has not been to the front line of the Cold War confrontation, except for moscow's façade troops who have received a small amount of equipment, most of them are deployed in the Far East close to China.
The other is more interesting, although we have been talking about the Soviet Union on the border with millions of troops, but the declassified data and memoirs after the Cold War show that these troops were deployed in a defensive posture until 90 years ago, worried about the Chinese offensive, and in 1990 they suddenly strengthened and began to prepare for offensive operations against our army. Why are these two questions?
This problem is a bit complicated and needs to be solved separately; on the one hand, why the Soviet army in the Far East got the largest number of high-end T-80U, on the other hand, why by the 1990s, the Soviet army in the Far East began to strengthen and switch to offensive deployment. These two problems have common causes as well as different causes.
The first is why the T-80U is concentrated in the Far East, rather than going to the Soviet garrison in Germany and the Central Cluster of the Soviet Army (in Czechoslovakia) on the front line of the East-West confrontation, this aspect is the reason for the rhythm of the rearmament, the Soviet army is rhythmically rotated in the rearmament, leaving aside what is the military region in central Asia, the cluster stationed abroad and the Sino-Soviet border, it is a rotational change, and when the T-80U began production, the Soviet army opposite NATO had just changed clothes for a few years, and it was the turn of the Soviet army in the Far East to pick up the new car.
On the other hand, after 1956, the Soviet core in Moscow has been engaged in face confrontation with the West, wanting to surrender, and in fact abandoning the dream and goal of dyeing red all over the world from 1917 to 1953; so with the so-called "peaceful coexistence, peaceful competition, and peaceful transition" triad line proposed by Khrushchev, the Soviet army has also been pursuing a restrained equipment upgrade strategy in Europe.
Until the face of the U.S. army to replace the third generation of tanks, the entire Soviet army in Germany to face the U.S. army half, the use of the same level of U.S. military technology T-62, and later replaced the T-80B because the U.S. military began to change the M1, and the half facing the British army very early to change the T-64 because the British army used the Chieftain tank technology level is higher.
Understanding this background, the large-scale soviet surge to the Far East in the 90s and the transfer to offensive deployment can be easily explained; the decision-making level in Moscow, in the mid-1980s, has begun to accelerate the surrender of defeat and surrender, and ease the situation in Europe by means of unilateral large-scale concessions. The signing of the INF Treaty in '87 announced that the Soviet army had in fact given up its offensive capability against NATO, and the unilateral disarmament of 500,000 in 1988 announced that the Soviet army had voluntarily given up its conventional power superiority over Europe.
By this time, the strength of the Soviet Union and the Soviet armed forces had suffered heavy losses from the Central Decision-Making Body of the Soviet Union, and in Central Europe it had lost the advantage of conventional forces, or even completely inferior, and had decisively lost the possibility of winning NATO in the script of the hot Cold War they expected. However, the large number of Soviet troops withdrawing from Germany and the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland still needed further arrangements.
In the midst of chaos, the Soviet army desperately needed a new imaginary enemy to arrange the army and personnel that were still quite large after disarmament, and to continue to develop its own military doctrine and combat preparations; it seemed that there was no other choice around it, that is, to start making offensive operations against our country, and to shift the imaginary enemy from the NATO group in Europe to China in the Far East.
In this context, the Soviet army foreign groups that were withdrawing from Germany and other places began to cross the entire territory to strengthen the Far East and Transbaikal, one of the spearheads of the Soviet offensive in East Germany, the elite 3rd Arms Composite Army was transferred to Khabarovsk on the other side of the Heilongjiang River, and thousands of tanks from the southern cluster and the central cluster went to the border area between Kazakhstan and China, and the Soviet armed forces put up an offensive posture against China for the first time since its establishment.
But it is clear that this act of strengthening the military strength of the Far East and Transbaikal regions is itself full of turmoil and self-contradictions in the last two years of the Soviet Union, and the year before 1990, with Gorbachev's visit to China, Sino-Soviet relations have been completely normalized, and the Soviet Union has even begun to be willing to export a large number of weapons and equipment that are not exported to the outside world with a high degree of secrecy, whether it is Su-27 fighters or other army and naval systems; at this time, it is planning to launch a large-scale war against China. Nothing but the fact that the decision-making level of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Army has fallen into turmoil and panic cannot be reflected.
Under this high-level confusion and incompetence, this scene of shifting the imaginary enemy from NATO to China, and the shifting of the preset battlefield from Central Europe to the Far East, of course, could not last long, and the Soviets quickly transferred the elite forces of the German cluster to Kazakhstan, Transbaikal and the Far East, and then quickly disarmed them again, and the 3rd Composite Army group of the 3rd arms transferred to the Far East was hastily disbanded three months later, and by the end of the year, the once huge alliance was completely terminated.
This is almost the most important story of the Soviet army in 1990 to increase the number of troops in the Sino-Soviet border area and once carried out preparations for the offensive of our army. Whether it is the absurdity of the personification of the state or the search for détente and compromise in confrontation, especially the abandonment of the sharp weapon in their hands to carry out three détentes and one sum can only bring about defeat and surrender, then it needs to be understood by everyone themselves.