Intended to strengthen the offensive capacity of the
infantry while offering protection from enemy fire, the Russian tank battled
many teething troubles before making its mark in military history, though it
arrived too late for WWI.
The First World War was a catalyst for new ideas in military
engineering, including armored technology. Russian engineering minds were
already grappling with the idea of mobile armor long before the tank made its
battlefield debut. The driving force, figuratively and literally, was the
modern tank’s fundamental component, the caterpillar track.
In 1878, Fyodor Blinov, a Russian peasant from the Samara
Region, patented a “wagon with endless rails for transportation of goods by
main and back road” that was based on the principle of caterpillar motion.
With the outbreak of the First World War came a gamut of
armored vehicle projects.
The closest to the contemporary tank with caterpillar drive,
an armored body and a turret with weapons, was put forward by inventor
Alexander Porokhovschikov in 1914.
His vezdekhod, or ‘go-anywhere vehicle’, was fitted with 8
mm multi-layer armor consisting of three parts: an external 2 mm-thick cemented
steel sheet, and shock-absorbing layer containing hair and algae, and finally a
steel inner sheet.
A key design feature was the system of combined movement,
with wheels for the highway and caterpillars for cross-country use. The vehicle
was also watertight.
The vezdekhod was equipped with a 20-horsepower engine that
gave a road speed of 26.5 km/h, the record for First World War tanks. There
were no weapons or armor, however, these being simulated by adding equivalent
weight to the prototype.
The 3.5-ton vehicle was ready for testing in May 1915. But
it quickly ran into problems in caterpillar mode when the tracks came free from
their guide blocks. A further problem was that the vehicle would not move at all
on loose snow.
Final adjustments were made in 1916, but the design was
abandoned, as funding dried up.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Nikolai Lebedenko was also working at
the elusive breakthrough tank design. In early 1915, the army engineer created
a machine that could feasibly breach barbed wire and enemy trenches.
The
‘Tsar Tank’ was named after Lebedenko’s unswerving
belief that these machines could “break the entire German front in one night,
and Russia will win the war,” as he told the emperor at a personal audience.
A special design feature was the chassis consisting of two
large driving wheels and a rotating rail trolley. Overall, the design resembled
an oversized artillery gun carriage, driven by two 240-horsepower Maybach
engines.
Construction of the prototype was completed in 1917, and it
was immediately clear that the vehicle was underpowered when it got stuck fast
in the first ditch during trials.
But while unsuccessful, the Tsar Tank project saw the
involvement of such future stars of Soviet engineering science as Zhukovsky,
Stechkin and Mikulin.
Another 1915 prototype also came from the Rybinsk plant,
which mainly reproduced French designs. Crewed by four men and weighing 20
tons, the tank’s 200-horsepower engine allowed sufficient maneuverability
despite its heavy cloak of 10-12mm armor.
The tank carried a rear-firing 107-mm gun inside the
housing, while a heavy-machine gun was placed in the front beside the driver.
But despite its practical design features, the design did
not impress the country’s military-technical chiefs and received no support.
Another contender was the concurrent project by Vasily
Mendeleev, son of the famous chemist and inventor Dmitry Mendeleev, which was
presented to the Ministry of War in August 1916.
Developed since 1911 on Mendeleev’s personal initiative, the
tank was equipped with anti-shell armor and other technical innovations that
would find application in later years.
Mendeleev proposed pneumatic suspension units for the
chassis, while the vehicle was steered with a servo motor. Since the main gun
was a 120 mm cannon, he wanted to build a body that could be lowered during
firing in order to reduce the load on the chassis and also protect the
caterpillars from enemy fire.
The tank was supposed to be transported on railway
platforms, thereby increasing mobility and ensuring swift delivery to the
front.
But the cost of the various innovations was its 170-ton
weight, as well as the production demands for such an ‘armored vehicle’, as
Mendeleev himself called it. This all deterred the ministry from pursuing the
design.
Ultimately, Russian tanks did not fight on the battlefields
of the First World War. Despite the best efforts of engineers to equip the army
with modern weapons, these attempts mostly failed to get beyond the test phase.
Nevertheless, many of the proposed ideas found later
application, with many becoming embodied in the tank battlefield’s combatants
of the future.
