Adapting GOST to the new era

After the end of World War Two, the Soviet Union took away one thing. A future war with great powers was, in their mind, inevitable. Russia had barely survived two world wars, often fighting with the lowest grade gear, sometimes even leased from other countries. From this knowledge came fear, and from this fear came paranoia. The great bear began to prepare itself for the next great war.

Most nations celebrated their diplomatic successes at the end of the second great war. Most nations prepared to rebuild. Not the Soviet Union. In a speech at the Bolshoi Theater in 19xx, Stalin celebrated Russian military industrial capacity. Their ability to produce 30,000 tanks in three years; 2,000,000 LMG’s; and over 7 billion rifle cartridges. They were preparing for a war that would never come.

Many people tend to forget there existed a weapon of mass destruction before the atom bomb: Chemical Weapons. They aren’t quite as flashy as their nuclear counterpart, and no where near as prominent as their biological brothers, but they are as cheap to produce as they are deadly. While the west may not have prepared extensively for the “poor man’s WMD,” the east certainly did.

An often forgotten fact of World War Two was its mutually destructive potential. Nearly all sides of the conflict had some form of chemical weapons, and nearly everyone had a cheaply issued gas mask. While the war did not end in sarin agents dropped from the sky, the fear was still there. A fear that would stick with the Soviet Union. Starting in 1962, the USSR would produce millions of gas masks. The GP-5, PMG, PMK, just to name a few, all rolled out of Russian factories for the general populace.