Imperial & Royal Panzers:
Aleksandr Porokhovschikov’s Vezdekhod
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2023

Some of the early designs for armored fighting vehicles aimed to create what amounts to a sci-fi style armored fighting suit, putting steel plate around a single man with a machine gun, and some sort of propulsion to move all of that weight.

Aircraft design prodigy Aleksandr Porokhovschikov, then 22 years old, designed what he called the Vezdekhod, or all-terrain vehicle, at some point in 1913 or 1914. He brought it to the Russian General Staff in August 1914, and received enough encouragement to produce a prototype.

By this point, Porokhovschikov had already obtained enough notice to walk into the STAVKA with a proposal to build a tracked gizmo. He established his own aircraft design studio in 1909, when he was a 17-year-old high school student, and two years later designed, built and flew a successful monoplane design. In early 1914 he designed and built the world’s first twin-boom aircraft as well as other successful designs. Just before the war he had visited STAVKA with a proposal for an integrated air-defense system for the Baltic coast including visual spotting stations linked by radio and telephone to one another and to airfields hosting fighter squadrons.

The inventor returned to STAVKA in January 1915 with his completed plan. As designed, the Vezdekhod was not a combat vehicle; it allowed a single driver to proceed over any terrain at a very good clip (42 kilometers per hour, or 26 miles per hours). While not as fast as a motorcycle, it could go anywhere, unlike the motorcycles of the time.

Porokhovschikov designed a very small vehicle, just 1.5 meters high and three meters long. It had a single, wide track made of rubberized canvas. Four drums pulled the track along, with a fifth drum on top of the track’s upper loop to hold it in place. A 10-horsepower gasoline engine powered the tiny vehicle, and two wheels on either side of the track, controlled by a steering wheel, provided direction.

STAVKA’s Military-Technical Directorate gave Porokhovschikov 18,000 rubles and fifty soldiers from the 22nd Infantry Regiment to provide labor for the project, undertaken at a locomotive repair facility in Riga and overseen by Russian military engineers. Work began in February 1915 and by July he had a prototype ready for testing and demonstration.

On a straight, paved road the Vezdekhod actually did move along, though it could not reach the speed the inventor had promised. Then the tests moved off the road. There, the single track repeatedly slipped off its rollers. The Vezdekhod turned out to have no all-terrain capability: its track slipped badly on mud, wet leaves and, in later testing, snow. The little control wheels had no effect whatsoever on the vehicle’s direction and the test driver was reduced to leaning over the side and pushing against the ground with a long pole when he wished to change direction.

The actual Vezdekhod prototype.

Porokhovschikov continued to make improvements and argue that the Vezdekhod could deliver on his promises, and apparently angered enough high-ranking figures to draw a direct order forbidding any further work on the project. There things remained for several months, until the inventor learned of a new British development, the tank.

The Vezdekhod could also be a tank, Porokhovschikov proposed, with a small turret placed atop the body with a single machine gun within. This tank would be protected by what Porokhovschikov called “iron armor” – two sheets of annealed iron, each 2mm thick, sandwiching a 4mm layer of hair and algae (yes, hair and algae) between them. The Military-Technical Directorate once again ordered Porokhovschikov to abandon the project and stop annoying them. The prodigy was no longer the golden boy.

Undaunted, Porokhovschikov turned to the press. In September 1916 he planted a story in the newspaper Novoe Vremya accusing the Military-Technical Directorate of stifling technological progress and thereby endangering the war effort. The first stories of British use of tanks at the Battle of the Somme had just appeared in the Russian press, and Novoe Vremya declared that the “tub” (as they translated “tank” in Russian) was indeed a Russian invention. And as proof, they cited the Vezdekhod.

A diagram of the Vezdekhod, from a Romanian magazine.

Buoyed by this new claim, Porokhovschikov returned to the Military-Technical Directorate in January 1917 with a proposal for a much-enlarged Vezdekhod II. The new vehicle would carry three machine guns, one in the body and two in a double-story turret (one revolving mount atop another), and a crew of four, plus “iron armor” for protection and a much larger engine to propel the heavier load. The single, wide track remained, with an extra roller to help move it along – and no changes to the rubberized canvas material, already proven unworkable.

The proposal sat until September 1917, when engineer L.E. Semmering wrote a report detailing the failings of the Vezdekhod II. It lacked sufficient power to move as claimed. The machine-gunners could not actually operate their weapons at the same time – there was no space for three men to reach the machine guns and fire them from inside the turret. Due to the laundry list of defects, the report concluded, the project “does not deserve any attention.”

Porokhovschikov would later serve the Red cause as a pilot during the civil war and an aircraft engineer afterwards. He was arrested in October 1940 on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and executed in July 1941 on a charge of “expenditure of public funds for unnecessary inventions.” He would be rehabilitated after the war, though this only officially came in 1955.

The Soviet propaganda version of the Vezdekhod.

It would be the Vezdekhod that resurrected Porokhovschikov’s reputation. Soviet propagandists re-discovered that Novoe Vremya article, and proclaimed the Vezdekhod to be the world’s first tank. In this telling, the little vehicle had always been intended to carry a turret with a machine-gun, and only the reactionary impulses of the overly-conservative Tsarist generals had prevented its full development.

That tale included supposed technical drawings and artwork; Porokhovschikov’s actual blueprints have long been though there is a photo of the actual Vezdekhod prototype undergoing testing So that part really existed; the tank part did not.

That doesn’t stop us from making our own Vezdekhod for Infantry Attacks, so it can trundle into combat on its singular track in Golden Journal No. 44: Imperial and Royal Panzers. The little uniped-tank represents the fantasy version, with a machine gun in a turret, with armor (thin armor, granted, but still armor including hair and algae), a track that actually can move the vehicle as advertised, and a steering system that works.

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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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