Imperial & Royal Panzers:
Vasily Mendeleev’s Bronkhod
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2023

Vasily Mendeleev came from a family of big ideas. His father, the chemist Dmitri, developed the periodical table of the elements. His half-brother, Vladimir, developed plans to dam the Kerch Strait and raise the Sea of Azov to make it fully navigable. His sister, the actress and writer Lyubov, married the poet Alexander Blok and was known as the most beautiful woman in Russia. His twin sister Maria became a leading expert in dog breeding, and his brother Ivan a prominent physicist, meteorologist and philosopher.

Against all that, Vasily’s quest to build a mobile, heavily armored assault gun seems rather mundane.

Vasily, the product of Dmitri’s second marriage (following the already-married, middle-aged chemist’s relentless pursuit of the then-16-year-old Anna Popova), entered the Kronstadt Naval Engineering School at the age of 17 and graduated five years later directly into a job drafting submarines for the Imperial Russian Navy.

In 1911, then 25 years old, Vasily began work on a mobile, armored cannon he called a Bronkhod. The Bronkhod would not be an armored vehicle so much as a mobile land battleship, drawing on his experience as a naval architect.

Work proceeded slowly, as Vasily remained busy drafting minelayers and more submarines. When war broke out in 1914, he continued with the design, finally submitting it to the War Department on 24 August 1916. This was no simple sketch, but a lengthy, detailed report addressing every aspect of the proposed vehicle.

The Bronkhod would weigh in at 170 tons, and feature a 120mm Canet naval gun on a pedestal mount, a weapon that had since been replaced on new Russian warships with a newer weapon licensed from Vickers. But plenty of the Canet model were available in Russian depots and this likely influenced Vasily’s choice of main weapon. The big gun would fire through an embrasure at the front of the vehicle, with an armored mantlet providing added protection. It had an arc of fire of up to 16 degrees, which Vasily considered more than adequate for its role of destroying enemy fortifications rather than engaging moving targets.

A crew of eight would man the Bronkhod: a commander, mechanic, driver, machine-gunner, and four men to operate the main gun. The commander did not have a station, but would wander through the hull checking on various functions and issuing orders. The driver had three separate stations: one at the bow, another at the stern, and one atop the roof that could be dismantled when the Bronkhod went into battle. Two more auxiliary posts could be used in an emergency (one forward, one aft) and all eight crew members would be trained to use them. Vasily did not intend for the Bronkhod to be easily stranded.

For defense against enemy infantry, the Bronkhod had a small turret with a single Maxim machine gun, that could be pneumatically retracted into the hull in case the Bronkhod came under artillery fire. The machine-gun turret had considerable “dead zones” where its fire could not reach, and to address this the armored hull had a number of loopholes, through which the commander could look and fire his pistol.

The Bronkod would move on a pair of caterpillar tracks, with unique pentagonal drive wheels. The chassis included an innovative pneumatic suspension that would give the vehicle a smooth ride even over rough ground. When the main gun fired, that system could also lower the hull to the ground (much like the abortive MBT70 design of the 1960’s) to spare the tracks to shock of recoil. The tracks could also be replaced with railway trucks for transport, and these could be driven by electric power from the Bronkhod’s generator. The generator also powered the 14 lightbulbs within the hull, and the sophisticated trolley system that delivered shells from the magazine to the main gun’s crew.

Vasily intended the Bronkhod to be essentially invulnerable to enemy fire. It would be built around a series of frames, much like a submarine, but with thick armored plates: 150mm at the bow, 100mm on the flanks and stern, and 76mm on the roof. That would be enough, the designer calculated, to repel the fire of 152mm naval guns. The floor would have been a weak point, with only 10mm of armor. The driver had view ports protected by thick glass and armored shutters. The machine-gun turret had just 8mm of protection, and the tracks were also partially exposed. To protect them during artillery bombardment, the pneumatic shocks could lower the hull close to the ground and still allow the vehicle to creep along slowly.

Power came from a 250-horsepower liquid-cooled engine, leaving the 170-ton behemoth hopelessly underpowered for its weight. Vasily claimed a projected speed of 24 kilometers power hour on roads and 10 kilometers per hour cross-country, but the Bronkhod would have been fortunate to make one-tenth of those figures. The engine had four speeds forward and one in reverse, but the crankshaft could be reversed (this required the mechanic to exit the vehicle and crawl underneath, an operation Vasily estimated would take 20 to 30 minutes). The fuel tanks, located in the center of the vehicle under the armored floorboard, would give a range of about 50 kilometers.

Even without wartime conditions, Vasily had designed a machine well beyond Russian industry’s manufacturing capabilities: shipyards could easily build the hull, and the armament was readily available off the shelf, but the engine and electrical equipment were another story. The Bronkhod would never even reach the prototype stage, which would have exposed its crippling power shortage. A much more powerful engine would have been needed to achieve even minimal mobility, and it would then have been fantastically vulnerable to the enemy infantry it could not hope to out-run.

Vasily’s wonder weapon also ignored the realities of Great War battlefields. The tracks carried enormous weight, giving the vehicle extremely high ground pressure. It would have had great difficulties making its way over shell craters and the churned-up ground left in the wake of artillery bombardments and likely have become easily stuck.

Just what purpose Vasily saw for his machine wasn’t detailed in his proposal. While the Bronkhod is usually described as an early tank or assault gun design, for battlefield use, it might have had better success as a heavily-armored coast-defense gun. That would explain the need for heavy armor, and the ability to back away relatively quickly.

With his Bronkhod rejected, Vasily continued his more mundane engineering tasks, and died of typhoid fever in 1922, just 36 years old.

As far as we know here at Avalanche Press, the Mendeleev Bronkhod has never appeared in a wargame. We correct that oversight in Golden Journal No. 44: Imperial and Royal Panzers. You get the Bronkhod, two versions of the Austro-Hungarian Motorgeschütz, and yet another Imperial Russian tank design. Plus, special rules and scenarios so you can play with them in Infantry Attacks: Fall of Empires.

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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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