The Soviet Union treated electronic warfare not as an add-on but as an integral part of air defence and offensive strike planning. From the late 1950s onward Soviet doctrine emphasized mass, redundancy, and integrated radio-electronic combat to keep Soviet airspace and forward-operating corridors viable under contested electromagnetic conditions.
Soviet surface to air missile families such as the S-75 series were command guided and vulnerable to conventional noise and deception jamming. Soviet engineers and operators responded by hardening radars, adding optical or passive fallback modes, and in some cases deliberately using jamming as a decoy by creating emissions for friendly missile guidance to home on. Those evolutions appear in contemporary technical and operational reporting on the S-75 and its post-deployment upgrades.
A central tactical thread was the use of electronic deception and coordinated jamming to shape the battlespace. Rather than relying exclusively on specialist SEAD platforms the Soviet approach favored large scale corridor sanitation. In exercises and contingency plans this meant deployable chaff corridors and barrage jamming from escort jamming aircraft to create windows through dense NATO air defences. Western assessments and later histories describe those tactics as intended to mask strike packages and deny reliable radar tracks inside the corridors.
Practical examples from crises and limited local operations show how these tactics were executed. During the 1968 intervention into Czechoslovakia Soviet forces used concentrated barrage jamming and deployed chaff to blind Czechoslovak radars while airborne and ground EW assets suppressed communications and surveillance links. Contemporary reports and subsequent historical accounts document the use of multiple aircraft types to sow chaff corridors and to jam early warning and tactical radars during the operation.
Platform design reflected the doctrine. The Soviets converted fast bombers and transports into airborne jammers and ELINT collectors rather than building small, highly specialized jammer types. Examples include Tu-16 and Tu-22 series EW variants and smaller aircraft like the Yak-28PP which carried active and passive jamming suites plus dedicated chaff dispensers to accompany strike packages at range. Those aircraft provided long range, high power suppression and enabled coordinated deception, rather than a single aircraft hunting individual radar sites.
Tactically the Soviet playbook against Western anti-radiation weapons and jamming-equipped aircraft combined a few repeatable methods. First, passive guidance and optical tracking were added to some SAM systems so the battery could continue to operate if radar guidance was degraded. Second, radars employed short duty cycles, side-pointing, and intermittent emissions to defeat ARMs that needed continuous radiating to home in. Third, jamming could be used as a lure; sites sometimes illuminated and then cut emissions after an ARM was launched so the missile lost lock or followed a false track. Finally, the Soviets layered dedicated jammers and chaff to create wide area denial of radar line of sight. The interplay of these methods forced Western SEAD tactics to evolve rapidly during the Vietnam and Middle East conflicts.
On the electronic technique side Soviet EW made heavy use of both noise and deceptive methods. Noise jamming raised the noise floor and reduced detection and tracking ranges. Deceptive methods such as angle deception and range gate pull-off attempted to generate false tracking errors on conical scan and range-tracking radars. Those deceptive techniques were well established in the era and influenced both radar design and counter-countermeasure practice.
Operationally this produced a cat and mouse game. Western forces developed anti-radiation missiles, memory circuits, and tactics to exploit radar emissions. The Soviets in turn adapted SAM tactics and radar modes to reduce vulnerability and to exploit jamming signals when convenient. The result was not a single technological knockout but an ongoing operational contest in which doctrine, tactics, training, and platform mix mattered as much as raw signal power.
Lessons worth carrying forward for engineers and hobbyist students of EW are practical and concrete. High radiated power alone is not decisive. Mixed tactics that combine passive sensors, intermittent emissions, chaff, deception, and airborne jammers create resilience. Conversely, ARMs and SEAD work when they force the defender into predictable emission behavior. Examining Soviet Cold War practice clarifies why modern EW remains an arms race of tactics as much as of hardware.