Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "My Dad Was a Guard at KGB Radio Intelligence Center in Lithuania #ussr, #kgb, #SovietArmy" video.

Your dad was slightly younger than me. I was born in February, 1946. The Soviet army stationed soldiers from places where there was any sort of unrest or anti-Soviet feeling far enough away that they wouldn't be anywhere near their home country in case of "counter revolutionary" activity. This was especially true with soldiers from the western Ukraine, where armed resistance to the USSR continued into the mid-50's. Even though Lithuania was also a hotbed of resistance, the assumption was Ukrainians would be less likely to support an uprising in Lithuania while their own country remained occupied. Khrushchev became really paranoid about the possibility of a successful revolution anywhere after the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and that carried through to Brezhnev's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. At least he was discharged in July of 1968 so he missed having to be sent to Czechoslovakia in August. His AK-74 was probably replaced with an AKM, the modernized version of the AK-47. The AKM was introduced in 1959, but it took awhile before they had enough to issue them to second line units like your dad's.
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