This book is part of a multi-volume work dedicated to the pre-war period of the history of the USSR and the first post-war decade. On the basis of a detailed study of the development of weapons of the Red Army, the author was forced to draw a number of conclusions that allowed him to put forward a hypothesis about the existence of a new layer in the history of the USSR. The facts in their aggregate indicate that before the war there was a process of inhibition of scientific, technical and military-technical progress, and in a number of areas of military-technical knowledge there is a systematic regression of the once achieved.