Golden Journal No. 54
Stalin’s Tanks
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2024

The Red Army won the Great Patriotic War with just a few basic tank designs, with just the T34 medium tank making up most of Soviet tank production. A few other types reached the battlefield, and many more reached the prototype stage but went no further, as the Soviets concentrated their efforts on pumping out huge numbers of an adequate vehicle rather than searching for incremental improvements.

Golden Journal No. 54: Stalin’s Tanks is all about the tanks that the Red Army studied, but ultimately did not put into mass production. A few of them, anyway.

The Golden Journal is the little publication that we bring out when we feel like it, with a small set of pieces (die-cut and silky-smooth, just like the pieces in the games) and a small book of history and usually scenarios. It’s a venue for design creativity, strange stories, and extras like, well, rejected Red Army tank design proposals.

Accepting these alternative tank designs would have changed Soviet practice on the battlefield, at least during the middle years of the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army went to war with heavy tanks: the KV-1 and KV-2 plus a handful of T35 land battleships. But these were inadequate to the task, and the T34 medium tank became the standard for all tasks from reconnaissance to breakthroughs. Late in the war, heavy assault guns and the JS series brought the heavy tank back into favor.

Stalin’s Tanks includes four different tank types; I thought about including a few more but wanted to make sure we have sufficient quantity to play with them in large-scale tank battle scenarios. There are two variations of the T34 that were considered but not accepted, one of which saw combat north-west of Moscow, and two heavy tanks that did not get quite as far (one prototype made it to the front, and was eventually destroyed there).

We included three chapters of scenarios in Stalin’s Tanks, two of them set in our Panzer Grenadier: Burning Tigers and one in Panzer Grenadier: Fire in the Steppe. In Fire in the Steppe, the two T34 models (the T34/57 and T34/95) square off against 1941-era German panzers; they are extremely effective but suffer from all the same problems as the rest of the Red Army’s armor in June 1941.

In the first of the Burning Tigers chapters, the two T34 variants equip the 1st Tank Army as it battles Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland. In the other, the heavy KV5 and KV220 go hunting for the Tigers of Army Detachment Kempf.

The T34/57 was simply a T34 Model 1940 with a ZiS4 57mm anti-tank gun in place of the standard 76.2mm L11 tank cannon. The ZiS4 had a very long barrel and much better armor penetration than the L11 or the improved 76.2mm guns that replaced it. But it also had a far smaller high-explosive round, limiting its effectiveness against soft targets. Ten of the “Exterminator,” as their crews called them, were built in 1941 and four more in 1943, modifications of the Model 1943.

Because of the 57mm round’s minimal threat to infantry and fortifications, cannon designer V.G. Grabin proposed equipping some T34 tanks with the 95mm tank gun, a variation of the F28 divisional gun he had designed in 1937. The gun had given excellent performance, but been passed over in favor of a heavier replacement for the standard 76.2mm weapon. The tank version had never been produced even as a prototype; Grabin had initially submitted it as part of a design study for re-armed the Red Army’s aging T28 medium and T35 heavy tanks. It did not have the same armor penetration as the long-barreled 57mm gun, but fired a hefty high-explosive round. When the T34/57 was passed over in favor of concentrating production on the T34/76, the T34/95 died along with it.

On the battlefield, you get to test out the two concepts: a universal tank (the T34/76) or two specialized models (the T34/57 and T34/95 combination). The long-barreled anti-tank gun is hell on the regular panzers, and not that bad against even the mighty Panther. The T34/95 has awesome firepower against enemy infantry. But neither is all that good when the roles are flipped.

Which approach would have been better? This is what I love about the Golden Journal: you can put the pieces right on the game map, and figure that out for yourself. It’s living history, in cardboard form.

The KV5 wields a massive 107mm high-velocity cannon capable of defeating any German panzer, including the Panther and Tiger. It’s not protected any better than the classic KV1, which means that it’s quite vulnerable in turn to the German Big Cats. The KV220 has a lesser cannon (the 85mm F30, a predecessor to the weapon that armed the eventual KV85 and T34/85), but much more armor. So much armor that even the Tiger’s 88mm gun might not smash through it. All of that protection comes at a price; the KV220 is barely faster than marching infantry.

Would a few of these behemoths have been worth the investment? They would have come at the price of many times their number of standard T34 medium tanks. On the other hand, they give the Soviet side the capability to shoot up the best of the German tanks, and in the case of the KV220, to do so with relative impunity. Except for that lack of speed. Once again, you can try that out for yourself and render your own judgement. A few big uglies, or a whole lot of T34’s that do nothing all that well but nothing poorly, either? Try it out and see.

This is what I like best about designing and publishing wargames: the ability to use them to test out historical alternatives. It’s not a huge, world-changing inflection point. The Red Army probably wins the war whether they choose to build these vehicles or the ones they actually produced. But it is a valid historical question that we can ask and answer through the agency of a wargame, and I find that a great deal of fun.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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