Russian Guards

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Guards (Russian: ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿) or Guards units (Russian: ¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿ ¿¿¿¿¿, gvardeyskiye chasti) were and are elite military units in Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. The tradition goes back to the retinue of a knyaz (his druzhina) of medieval Kievan Rus' and the streltsy, the Muscovite harquebusiers formed by Ivan the Terrible by 1550. The exact meaning of the term "Guards" varied over the time. In the Russian Empire, Imperial Russian Guard units ("Leib-Guards", ¿¿¿¿-¿¿¿¿¿¿¿, leyb-gvardiya) derived from German 'Leibwaechter' (body-guards), and were intended to provide for the security of the sovereign, initially that of Peter the Great in 1690s based on the Prussian practice. At the beginning of the twentieth century it consisted of 13 infantry, 4 rifles and 14 cavalry regiments and some other units. They were abolished in 1918. The Imperial Russian Guard units did not consist exclusively of troops recruited from Russian population, but also included Lithuanian, Finnish and Ukrainian personnel.