The T-34 (Т-34) is a Soviet medium tank of the Second World War. Developed from 1936 and first built in Kharkov, it combined sloped armour, a welded hull, a cast turret and a diesel engine — features that, in the words of Hungary's Military History Museum, made it "one of the most successful battle tanks of the Second World War". During the war seven major Soviet plants built some 54,000 T-34s, more than 70 per cent of all Soviet tanks of every type, and almost 85,000 of all versions were produced in total; after 1945 the T-34-85 served with more than 40 countries.[11][12][10]

A large part of the T-34's story was written in Nizhny Novgorod — one of Russia's largest cities, standing where the Oka flows into the Volga, which from 1932 to 1990 was called Gorky. Its Krasnoye Sormovo (Красное Сормово) shipyard, known in the war by its number, Plant No. 112, was ordered to build the T-34 by the very first decree of the State Defence Committee, on 1 July 1941. It delivered its first tanks in September 1941 and became the only Soviet plant to build the T-34 throughout the whole war, and its second-largest producer after Plant No. 183 in Nizhny Tagil in the Urals.[1][2][3] Supplied by the Gorky Automobile Plant (GAZ) and by steel and engineering works in Kulebaki and Vyksa, the Gorky region became the country's second centre of T-34 production after the Urals.[2] Sormovo was also the first plant to master series production of the up-gunned T-34-85, in early 1944, while the tank's main gun of 1941–1944, the 76 mm F-34, had been created at Gorky's artillery Plant No. 92.[1][7]

The tank

The T-34 grew out of Soviet work on fast tanks that went back to the American engineer J. Walter Christie's M1928 design. It was created at the Kharkov locomotive plant, Plant No. 183, the lead plant of the T-34 programme; its chief designer was Mikhail Koshkin, and in 1942 Koshkin, Alexander Morozov and Nikolai Kucherenko received the Stalin Prize, first class, "for the creation of a new type of medium tank".[11][12][1] When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Red Army had almost a thousand of them.[11]

The wartime T-34 weighed about 26.5 tonnes, had a crew of four, a 500 hp V-2 V12 diesel engine and a top speed of 53 km/h, and carried the 76.2 mm F-34 gun and two machine guns. From the turn of 1943–1944, after the appearance of the German Panther and Tiger, it was replaced by the T-34-85: a larger three-man turret with an 85 mm gun (the D-5T or the ZiS-S-53) and thicker turret armour on the same hull, raising the crew to five.[11][10] The T-34-85 led the Soviet advance through Eastern Europe into Germany in 1944–1945; after the war it was also built in Poland and Czechoslovakia, served in the Korean War and in many later conflicts, and remained in the inventories of more than 40 nations for decades.[10][11]

The Gorky chapter: a shipyard that built tanks

The first Soviet tank, 1920

Krasnoye Sormovo, founded on the Volga in 1849 and known mainly for river ships, steam locomotives and submarines, had built tanks once before. In August 1919 the Soviet government chose it to copy a French Renault FT captured in the Civil War, and on 31 August 1920 the first Soviet-built tank, named "Freedom Fighter Comrade Lenin" (Борец за свободу тов. Ленин), made its first test run at the plant; fifteen tanks of this type were completed by May 1921.[5] According to the plant's own history, which quotes his reminiscences, one of the fitters who assembled these first machines in 1919–1920 was the young Mikhail Koshkin, the future chief designer of the T-34.[5][3]

Decree No. 1: from ships to tanks (1941)

The very first decree of the State Defence Committee (GKO), the emergency body that ran the Soviet war effort, issued on 1 July 1941, ordered Krasnoye Sormovo — then Plant No. 112 of the People's Commissariat of Shipbuilding — to organise mass production of T-34 tanks and ammunition, stopping work on ships and submarines.[1][4] The plan for 1941 was 700–750 tanks. Vyacheslav Malyshev, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, arrived at the plant on 2 July and that night explained the task to its managers: the first tanks, assembled from ready units and parts delivered by a specialised tank plant, were due in September, and from October the plant was to build them from its own parts.[1]

The first Sormovo T-34s left the shops in September 1941, and the first combat vehicles were sent to the defence of Moscow in October.[1][4] In its first four months the plant averaged about 40 tanks a month. Turning a shipyard used to building ships one at a time into a mass producer of tanks proved hard: suppliers regularly failed to deliver, and the plant had to master armour casting and rolling, track links and cast turrets of its own.[1][4]

Aircraft engines from GAZ and a regional supply chain

A unique feature of the Gorky T-34 was its engine. With the V-2 diesel in short supply, the decree of 1 July 1941 provided for Sormovo tanks to be fitted with the M-17T, a tank version of an aircraft petrol engine, and its production was entrusted to the Gorky Automobile Plant, GAZ. The aviation industry, including its plant in Rybinsk, was ordered to hand over drawings, tooling and ten designers and technologists; GAZ was to deliver 50 engines in September 1941 and 300 in December, but built only 150 in the last quarter of the year, and fitting an aircraft engine into the tank delayed the start of production by more than a month.[1][2] On 14 March 1942, as the Ural plants increased their output of the V-2, the State Defence Committee stopped M-17T production at GAZ, and from 27 March Sormovo switched to diesel tanks. In 1942 the plant built 465 T-34s with the M-17T and 2,115 with the V-2 diesel.[1]

GAZ was Sormovo's main supplier of other components too: from July 1941 it cast track links, later from Hadfield manganese steel, made filters and air cleaners and stamped parts, and from January 1942 it was also to supply side clutches. By the end of 1941 a self-contained T-34 industry had formed in the region: Plant No. 112 made major units and assembled the tanks; Plant No. 113, the Gorky milling-machine works, made transmission parts such as gearboxes and side clutches; Plant No. 177 in Vyksa made turret rings; and the Kulebaki steelworks, Plant No. 178, rolled armour plate and cast turrets and the nose beams of the hull. A locomotive repair works in neighbouring Murom supplied running-gear parts.[1][2] GAZ itself built light tanks and self-propelled guns, whose armoured hulls also came from the regional plants.[2]

From crisis to mass production (1942–1945)

Output grew fast until the late summer of 1942, fell in September and only steadied in the autumn. During the Battle of Stalingrad, when the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, until then the second-largest T-34 producer, had to be evacuated, Sormovo took over its programme, building an extra 50 tanks a month above plan.[1][4] Quality was a long struggle: cracked hulls, unreliable engines and complaints from the front persisted until the end of 1943, when stronger technical control and military acceptance brought the tanks to an acceptable standard. Monthly output averaged 226 tanks in 1942, 237 in 1943 and 301 in 1944, and from June 1944 the plant fulfilled its plans in full. Over the war the cost of a Sormovo T-34 fell from 286,600 roubles to 171,000, and the labour needed to build one from 14,559 to 4,423 hours.[1]

Women and teenagers replaced the men who left for the front.[4] Every finished tank was tested by firing and by road runs of 30 and 50 km; one of the plant's test drivers was Alexander Rubinchik, the 16-year-old son of the director, Yefim Rubinchik, who ran Krasnoye Sormovo from 1942 to 1949. At 18 Alexander went to the front as a lieutenant with the "Gorky Komsomolets" tank column, paid for by public donations.[3][4][6] Among the young engineers was Rostislav Alekseev, later famous for hydrofoils and the "Caspian Sea Monster" ekranoplan: hired on 24 October 1941, he spent the first part of the war in the plant's technical control department, accepting T-34s.[9] Sormovo engineers also designed and built flamethrower versions of the tank and worked on an amphibious one, and the plant repaired more than a thousand tanks returned from the battlefield.[3][4]

On 20 January 1943 the plant was awarded the Order of Lenin for tank and armoured-hull production. For 33 months in a row it won the challenge Red Banner of the State Defence Committee in the competition between the plants of the tank industry, and was finally allowed to keep it for ever.[6][3]

The first T-34-85s

The battles of 1943 showed that the T-34 needed a more powerful gun. From December 1943, under a State Defence Committee decree on T-34-85 production at Plant No. 112, Sormovo prepared for mass production of the T-34 with the 85 mm D-5T gun, and it became the first plant to master series production of the T-34-85: in the first quarter of 1944 it delivered 261 of them, while the lead plant in Nizhny Tagil completed its first T-34-85 only on 15 March 1944. During 1944 Sormovo moved from the D-5T to the ZiS-S-53 gun.[1] On 10 March 1945 the plant's 10,000th tank, a T-34-85, left the assembly line and went to the front.[6][4]

The gun from Gorky

The T-34's main weapon in 1941–1944, the 76.2 mm F-34, was a design of Gorky's artillery Plant No. 92, named after Stalin and now the Nizhny Novgorod Machine-Building Plant (Нижегородский машиностроительный завод), whose design bureau was led by Vasily Grabin. It became the most widely produced tank gun of the Second World War. During the war Plant No. 92 delivered 100,000 guns — almost a third of all those made in the Soviet Union.[7] Other Gorky factories worked for the guns as well: the city's machine-tool plant made cradles, couplings and breech parts for Plant No. 92.[1]

How many tanks

Figures for Sormovo's output differ by source. Soviet official histories gave "over 12,000" T-34s, and the plant today cites 13,887. A 2020 study of the plant's wartime records at Lobachevsky University counts almost 11,000 tanks built during the war — of 10,394 listed in one plant report by armament, 6,270 had the 76 mm F-34 and 4,624 were T-34-85s — and notes that a further 1,154 tanks were built in 1946, so that tank production ended no earlier than April 1946.[1][2][3] Tank building took 13 per cent of the plant's output in 1941 and 84 per cent in the first half of 1945, when shipbuilding had fallen to 2 per cent.[1]

Sormovo tanks in the world

Gorky-built T-34s also survive abroad. The Tank Museum at Bovington, England, owns a T-34/85 built at Krasnoye Sormovo, Plant No. 112, in late 1944. It was supplied to North Korea and was among the North Korean T-34s destroyed or captured in the Korean War by November 1950; it came to the museum in 1952. A second T-34/85 received by the museum in 2022 has a Soviet hull with features of Sormovo-built vehicles, a Czechoslovak-made turret and Czechoslovak radio equipment, showing that it served in the Czechoslovak Army.[10]

Memory

In 1970 a T-34 assembled at Krasnoye Sormovo was added to the war memorial in the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin; in 1945 it had taken part in the liberation of Vienna, and it drove onto its pedestal under its own power.[8] It belongs to the memorial "Gorky Residents in the Great Patriotic War" (Горьковчане в Великой Отечественной войне), opened in 1965, and together with the conning tower of the Sormovo-built submarine S-13 it is one of two monuments in the Kremlin to the wartime work of the Sormovo plant.[8][3]

On 9 May 1980 a memorial was opened on Glory Square (площадь Славы) by the northern gate of Krasnoye Sormovo: a full-size replica of the 1920 tank "Freedom Fighter Comrade Lenin", built from the original drawings kept in the plant museum, stands beside a T-34-85 that was built at the plant in March 1945 and took part in the storming of Berlin.[5] The plant's museum keeps the Red Banner of the State Defence Committee as its most valued exhibit.[3] In 2020 Nizhny Novgorod was given the honorary title of "City of Labour Valour" (Город трудовой доблести).[2]

See also

Sources

  1. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod — Pavel Pustyrev, The History of the Organisation of T-34 Tank Production at the Enterprises of the Gorky Region during the Great Patriotic War, dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod, 2020; based on the Central Archive of the Russian Ministry of Defence, the Russian State Archive of the Economy and the Nizhny Novgorod archives (in Russian)
  2. Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod — Pavel Pustyrev, summary (avtoreferat) of the same dissertation, 2020 (in Russian) (archive)
  3. Krasnoye Sormovo Plant — "Arsenal of Victory": production figures, facts and heroes (in Russian) (archive)
  4. Krasnoye Sormovo Plant — "The contribution of the Krasnoye Sormovo plant to the Great Victory" (in Russian) (archive)
  5. Krasnoye Sormovo Plant — "105 years of Russian tank building": the first Soviet tank of 1920 and the Glory Square memorial (in Russian) (archive)
  6. Sormovo District Library System — "Memorable dates of the Krasnoye Sormovo plant" (in Russian) (archive)
  7. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — "The rear side of the war: how the guns of a Gorky plant became the terror of the Tigers", 5 June 2020 (in Russian) (archive)
  8. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — "How the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin keeps the memory of heroes: the history of the memorial 'Gorky Residents in the Great Patriotic War'", 28 November 2025 (in Russian) (archive)
  9. Central Design Bureau for Hydrofoils named after R. E. Alekseev — "History" of the bureau (in Russian) (archive)
  10. The Tank Museum, Bovington — "T-34/85", collection page
  11. Military History Institute and Museum, Budapest — "The T-34-85"
  12. T-34 Tank History Museum, Sholokhovo, Moscow Region — "Exposition"