The 4th Centre for Combat Employment and Retraining of Personnel VVS of the
Air Forces of the Moscow Military District
for decades.
During the Soviet era the training department of the centre taught over 45,000 officers of various military specialities. Eleven Soviet
cosmonauts retrained on new types of aircraft at the base. As a symbol of the history of aviation in Lipetsk, in August 1969 an Aviators' Square was erected with a monument of an upward-pointed Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-19
aircraft.
From 1960 to 1990 the centre directed three research-instructor aviation regiments, the 91st, 455th, and 760th.
105th Mixed Aviation Division. In their place the 968th Fighter Aviation Regiment returned from Falkenberg in East Germany in 1992 and was converted in 1993 into a Research-Instructor Fighter Aviation Regiment, later a Research-Instructor Mixed Aviation Regiment.[3]
After the
military-industrial complex deteriorated, and the budget of the armed forces was significantly reduced. It was a difficult time for the Lipetsk Air Base. The 54th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment
was assigned to the centre from 2001 to 2002. A change for the better only began in 2003: the available fuel increased, and the material base began to be strengthened.
In July 2003, on the 300th anniversary of Lipetsk, a ninety-minute airshow was held. This event began with a visiting delegation of French military pilots, headed by General Jean Romuald Robert. The group arrived with two Lockheed C-130 Hercules military transport planes, Dassault Mirage F1CTs, and three Dassault Mirage 2000 fighter/attack aircraft.[4]
On 22 April 2004 the Russian president Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Italian Silvio Berlusconi visited the centre, arriving in Lipetsk on opening the Italian company Ariston. There was a demonstration of aviation technology in action, including complex aerobatics, with the personal participation of the chief of the centre Alexander Kharchevsky.