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The founders of Sambo sifted deliberately through all of the world’s martial arts to augment their military’s hand-to-hand combat system. One of these men, Vasili Oshchepkov, taught judo and karate to elite Red Army forces at the Central Red Army House. He had earned his nidan (second degree black belt out of then five only) from judo’s founder, Jigoro Kano, and used some of the Osensei’s philosophy in formulating the early development of the new Russian art.

Sambo, however, was born of native Russian and other regional styles of grappling and combative wrestling bolstered with the most useful and adaptable concepts and techniques from the rest of the world.

As the buffer between Europe and Asia, Russia had more than ample opportunities to sift through the martial skills of various invaders. Earlier Russians had experienced threats from the Vikings in the west and the Tatars and Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde from Mongolia in the east. The regional, native combat systems included in Sambo’s genesis are Tuvan Köräş, Yakuts khapsagai, Chuvash akatuy, Georgian chidaoba, Moldavian trinta, Armenian kokh, and Uzbek Kulash to name a few.

The foreign influences included various styles of European Wrestling styles, oriental jujitsu, and other martial arts of the day plus the classical Olympic sports of boxing, greco Romand and free-style wrestling. Sambo even derived lunging and parrying techniques from Italian scherma fencing.

Sambo’s early development stemmed from the independent efforts of Oshchepkov and another Russian, Victor Spiridonov, to integrate the techniques of judo into native wrestling styles. Both men hoped that the Soviet wrestling styles could be improved by an infusion of the techniques distilled from jujitsu by Kano into his new style of jacket wrestling.

In 1918, Lenin created Vseobuch (Vseobshchee voennoye obuchienie or General Military Training) under the leadership of N.I. Podovoyskiy to train the Red Army. The task of developing and organizing Russian military hand-to-hand combat training fell to K. Voroshilov, who in turn, created the NKVD physical training center, “Dinamo.”

Spiridonov was a combat veteran of World War I, and one of the first wrestling and self-defense instructors hired for Dinamo. His background included Greco-Roman wrestling, Free style wrestling, and many Slavic wrestling styles. As a “combatives investigator” for Dinamo, he traveled to Mongolia and China to observe their native fighting styles.

In 1923, Oshchepkov and Spiridinov collaborated with a team of other experts on a grant from the Soviet government to improve the Red Army’s hand-to-hand combat system. Spiridonov had envisioned integrating all of the world’s fighting systems into one comprehensive style that could adapt to any threat. Oshchepkov had observed Kano’s distillation of Tenjin Shin’yo Ryu jujitsu and Kito Ryu jujitsu into judo, and he had developed the insight required to evaluate and integrate combative techniques into a new system. Their development team was supplemented by Anatoly Kharlampiev and I.V. Vasiliev who also traveled the globe to study the native fighting arts of the world. Ten years in the making, their catalogue of techniques was instrumental in formulating the early framework of the art to be eventually referred to as Sambo. Here, Oshchepkov and Spiridonov’s improvements in Russian wrestling slipped into the military’s hand-to-hand-combat system.

Kharlampiev is often called the father of Sambo. This may be largely semantics since only he had the longevity and political connections to remain with the art while the new system was called “Sambo”. Spiridonov was the first to actually begin referring to the new system as one of the “S” variations cited above. He eventually developed a softer, more “aikido-like” system called Samoz that could be used by smaller, weaker practitioners or even wounded soldiers and secret agents. Spiridonov’s inspiration to develop Samoz stemmed from an injury that he suffered that greatly restricted his ability to practice Sambo or wrestling. Refined versions of Sambo are still used today or fused with specific Sambo applications to meet the needs of Russian commandos today.

Each technique for Sambo was carefully dissected and considered for its merits, and if found acceptable in unarmed combat, refined to reach Sambo’s ultimate goal: stop an armed or unarmed adversary in the least time possible. Thus, the best techniques of jujitsu and its softer cousin, Judo, entered the Sambo repertoire. When the techniques were perfected, they were woven into Sambo applications for personal self-defense, police, crowd control, border guards, secret police, dignitary protection, psychiatric hospital staff, military, and commandos.