Vystrel course

The Vystrel course was the popular name for an officer training course of the Soviet Armed Forces, later part of the Russian Armed Forces, located in Solnechnogorsk. The training course had a one-year curriculum to train battalion and regiment level command and political personnel for the rifle (infantry) arm of the Red Army, later the Soviet Army, as well as officers from the Socialist Bloc countries. History The Higher Rifle School for Command Personnel of the Workers-Peasant Red Army was formed in November 1918 in place of the Imperial Russian Army's Oranienbaum Rifle Officer School. The school's task was officer training for the infantry, but also research and development of weaponry and the production of educational literature. The course, provided twice a year for five and a half month periods, trained future company commanders. In its first decade of existence, 6,000 officers completed it, with class sizes averaging about 300 students in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932 the course was divided into two faculties, one for infantry and another for mechanized tactics; the latter was split off a year later. In 1936 Vystrel expanded to include courses for battalion and regimental commanders. On December 26, 1926, the training battalion of the Rifle Tactical Courses was used as the basis for the formation of the 2nd Rifle Regiment of the Moscow Proletarian Rifle Division of the Moscow Military District. In 1929 Vystrel added a sniper training course to its structure. After the launch of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 the Courses were evacuated from Moscow Oblast's Solnechnogorsk to Kyshtym in the Chelyabinsk Oblast with branches of the courses also organised in Gorky, Ulyanovsk, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk, Arkhangelsk and Ordzhonikidze. Over 200 of the Courses' alumni received the Hero of the Soviet Union medal (of them 8 have received it twice) and thousands received lesser decorations. After the War the Courses were busy analyzing the combat experience and implementing the lessons learned into the training of future cadres. From the 1950s on the doors of the center were opened to officers from the Warsaw Pact and allied countries, such as SFR Yugoslavia, People's Republic of China, Vietnam, Mongolian People's Republic, India, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Angola, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea etc.