When introducing Soviet Battlefield Helicopters it is perhaps appropriate to recall that the founder of the United States' helicopter industry, Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky, was born in Kiev, in the Soviet Union, 102 years ago. However, the vast territories of the Soviet Union might have been specially created for the helicopter and development of the modern battlefield helicopter began in 1947 when Stalin asked Mikhail Leontievitch Mil, Chief of the TSAGI Helicopter Laboratory (the Soviet equivalent of RAE Farnborough) to submit proposals for a small military utility helicopter. Two proposals, those of Yakovlev and Mil, were accepted for evaluation, both of which were built and ready for testing by September 1948. The Mil Design Bureau's first helicopter, the Mi-1 was selected for quantity production in 1950, followed two years later by the larger Mi-4, some of which still remain in operational service today. Long before the West, the Mil Bureau saw the possibilities of arming helicopters and after early attempts to install anti-tank missiles on the Mi-1, the Mi-4 carried both rocket launchers and gun pods.
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