A rare exhibit has been added to the Moscow Region exposition: a replica of the Soviet T-35 heavy breakthrough tank has been delivered to the Vadim Zadorozhny Museum of Technology. Photos of the new vehicle were published in his blog by the famous armored vehicle researcher Yuri Pasholok.
The uniqueness of the delivered vehicle lies in its driving performance. Thanks to the installation of a V-2 diesel engine, the replica is capable of moving under its own power, which is considered a rarity for restored samples of this complexity.
The need to create copies is dictated by the extreme scarcity of originals. Of the 59 production T-35 tanks produced in their time, only one genuine specimen has survived to this day. It is exhibited in the "Patriot" park in the Moscow region. In this regard, museums and private collectors are forced to turn to recreating legendary machines from scratch.
Structurally, the replica repeats the classic appearance of the original. The vehicle carries five turrets: the central and two small ones are armed with guns, and two more are intended for machine gun armament. The basis of firepower is 76.2-mm guns and 45-mm guns. The machine gun armament is represented by 7.62-mm DT machine guns, the total number of which on board could reach seven units.
To understand the place of this machine in history, it is worth referring to the characteristics of the original T-35. The tank's armor protection was up to 30 mm. Production models were equipped with an M-17L gasoline engine with a capacity of 500 hp, which allowed them to reach speeds of up to 30 km/h on the highway. The fuel range was limited to 100 kilometers, and the operation of the machine required a crew of 9 to 10 people.
Before the start of the Great Patriotic War, in the period up to 1941, the T-35 did not participate in real combat operations. The production of the T-35 was curtailed after analyzing the events of the Civil War in Spain. Military experts came to the conclusion that the enemy's anti-tank artillery had become sufficiently compact, rapid-firing and cheap. This made it possible to effectively destroy tanks with bulletproof armor, to which the T-35 also belonged. Thus, the concept of a multi-turreted heavy tank became obsolete even before the start of large-scale conflicts of the Second World War.
