Soviet & Russian Fighters

Two naming systems overlap. At home, aircraft carry the initials of their design bureau (OKB) — MiG, Su, Yak, La, Il, Tu — with odd numbers traditionally reserved for fighters. NATO, unable to wait for official names, assigns reporting names: an F-word for fighters, deliberately meaningless, where one syllable marks a propeller aircraft (Frank, Fin) and two mark a jet (Fagot, Fulcrum). Suffix letters track major variants — Flanker-B to Flanker-E covers twenty years of Su-27 evolution.

One lane per line of work, one dot per type entering service — prototypes sit at first flight. The pattern: wartime mass production, a jet sprint through the 1950s with a new MiG every three years, an interceptor wall against NATO's bombers in the 1960s, the fourth-generation pair of 1983 and 1985 — then the post-Soviet thinning, in which the Flanker line produced new variants at a pace no other design bureau could match.

Soviet air power was built on mass: the armoured Il-2 Sturmovik remains the most-produced combat aircraft in history, and the Yak and Lavochkin fighters that escorted it were turned out in the tens of thousands. The jet age arrived on captured German engines — on 24 April 1946 the Yak-15 and the MiG-9 made their first flights on the same airfield, and within three years the same bureaus had produced the swept-wing MiG-15.

For four decades MiG meant Soviet fighter. The MiG-15 shocked the West over Korea, the MiG-17 outflew supersonic jets above Vietnam, and the MiG-21 became the most-produced supersonic aircraft in history — flown by some sixty countries. The swing-wing MiG-23 brought numbers, the MiG-29 agility to answer the F-16. Then the line thinned: post-Soviet Russia chose the Flanker, and the MiG-35 found six airframes' worth of orders.

One airframe carried Russian air power out of the Soviet Union. The Su-27, designed to answer the F-15, spawned a two-seat multirole line (Su-30, the backbone of India's and China's heavy fleets), a carrier variant (Su-33), a side-by-side strike bomber (Su-34) and the definitive single-seater (Su-35) — before its aerodynamics fed the Su-57, Russia's first stealth fighter. It is the most exported heavy fighter of the post-Cold-War era, and most of the family is now in combat over Ukraine.

The PVO — a separate air-defense service, distinct from the air force — grew its own family of fast, radar-heavy interceptors against NATO's bombers: delta-wing Fishpots, the enormous Tu-128 patrolling the Arctic, and the Su-15 that shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007 in 1983. The line peaked in raw performance with the stainless-steel MiG-25, built against a Mach 3 bomber that never came, and survives in the MiG-31 — today's Kinzhal missile carrier.

The attack line never lost the Il-2's DNA. The Su-7 and the swing-wing Su-17 carried tactical strike through the Cold War, the Su-24 brought all-weather low-level penetration, and the MiG-27 turned the Flogger into a bomb truck. The armoured Su-25 is the direct heir — titanium bathtub around the pilot, built for the same low-altitude gunnery as 1943, and flown by both sides over Ukraine.

The margins of the story: Yakovlev's jump jets for the Kiev-class carriers — the Yak-38 flew with more courage than capability — ended with the supersonic Yak-141, whose design data Lockheed bought for its STOVL work in the 1990s. Sukhoi's forward-swept Su-47 stayed a single technology demonstrator, and the export-oriented Su-75 Checkmate, unveiled in 2021, has yet to fly.