Fortified district

[1][2][3][4][5][6] Each fortified district consisted of a large number of concrete bunkers (pillboxes) armed with machineguns, antitank guns and artillery.

"Strong in artillery and machine guns and weak in riflemen, the fortified region was used as an economy of force minor formation for purely defensive tasks such as the holding of passive sectors or the flank of a penetration.

This use of fortified regions in an economy of force role proved so successful that the Red Army routinely employed them in the same fashion, but on an even larger scale, for the remainder of the war.

[8] Of the 47 fortified regions in the Red Army at the end of World War II, more than 30 were used to form machine gun artillery brigades and the rest were disbanded.

By the 1950s the fortified regions in the Far East had been disbanded, and only a few remained in the Transcaucasus and Karelia, using different TO&Es from the World War II units (see http://www.ww2.dk/new/army/other/ur.htm).

As Sino-Soviet tensions increased during the 1960s, the Soviet Army began to create new fortified regions to provide security in the Far East.

Depending on their location, they could also consist of a company of tank turrets dug in as pillboxes, two or three artillery caponiers, and a ZPU-2 anti-aircraft gun platoon.