Army and naval ranks in modern Russia were established on February 11, 1993 by the Law on Military Duty and Military Service. He envisaged the introduction of ranks from the first - private / sailor - to the Marshal of the Russian Federation. The only Russian marshal for more than two decades was the former Minister of Defense of the country Igor Sergeyev.
First marshals
The Marshal of the Russian Federation replaced the title of Marshal of the Soviet Union that existed since 1935, which 80 years ago was awarded to five legendary Soviet commanders, heroes of the Civil War - Semyon Budyonny, Vasily Blyukher, Kliment Voroshilov, Alexander Egorov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky. Of the entire quintet of red commanders, only two survived to the Great Patriotic War - Budyonny and Voroshilov. The rest were repressed in 1937-1939, destroying as "enemies of the people and foreign spies."
In total, 36 military leaders became Marshals of the Soviet Union, and five prominent political figures of the USSR for their contribution to strengthening the country's defense capabilities. Among the latter were Joseph Stalin, Lavrenty Beria, Nikolai Bulganin, Leonid Brezhnev and Dmitry Ustinov. The Soviet Marshal at number 41 was the penultimate Minister of Defense of the USSR, Dmitry Yazov, who was removed from his post after the failure of the coup attempt and the creation of the State Emergency Committee in August 1991.
Russian stars
Soon after the formation of sovereign Russia and the Russian Ministry of Defense in 1992, their own Armed Forces began to be created in the country. The law on service in them and military duty appeared in February 1993. He, in particular, provided that the Marshal of the Russian Federation would henceforth be considered the highest rank in the country. In second place by status were the Army General and Fleet Admiral.
The first owner of the epaulette with one embroidered star with a diameter of 40 mm, with silver rays diverging radially and forming a pentagon, the emblem of the country without a heraldic sign and oak wreaths in the buttonholes appeared only four years later. On November 21, 1997, the newly-made Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Igor Sergeyev became the bearer of a special sign under the name “Marshall Star”. Sergeyev stayed at his post until his retirement in 2001 and replaced by a native of the KGB, Sergei Ivanov.
And he could become an admiral!
It is curious that at the very beginning of the army career, the future Russian Marshal No. 1 dreamed of naval service. For the sake of this, Igor Sergeev, a 17-year-old graduate of a secondary school in Makeevka, even came to Leningrad in 1955. But having entered the Higher Naval Hydrographic School, a year later, together with the entire course, he was transferred to Sevastopol. At the Faculty of Engineering of the Naval Academy named after Admiral Nakhimov, cadet Sergeyev began to study rocket weapons, having for a long time connected his fate with him.
After graduating in 1960, on the eve of the Caribbean crisis and the Soviet Union rattling military “muscles” off the coast of Cuba and the United States, the young lieutenant went to serve in the recently created Missile Forces. Starting an officer career in the same 60th as head of the missile inspection department, he eventually rose to the post of commander in chief of all domestic strategic missile forces, the Strategic Missile Forces.
