Customer Reviews

Russian Tanks and Armored Vehicles: 1946-To the Present an Illustrated Reference

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An all incompassing look at the progress of Russian tanks and other armoured vehicles. It also looks at unarmoured but specialised vehicles such as missile launchers, engineer's vehicles, tracked cargo carriers and tractors. It has a section of schematics and cutaway drawings to give a look inside some very interesting vehicles. The only letdown is the complete lack of colour, except for the (unusually) rather uninspiring painting by David Pentland on the dust cover. Do NOT let this put you off this book. I am sure that anyone with the vaguest interest in the subject will feel that this is a book that they cannot do without. Indulge yourself. Highly recommended.

This book is about soviet armor development after ww2 and.Book is organized very clearly in chapters, each concentrating to a different types of vehicles. Especially good in this book is that most of the pictures in the book are unseen. Author has clearly an inside view for Soviet equipment and text is reliable, and i understood that he has been working with armored vehicles in the East Germany Army in 70's and 80's.. Pictures are mostly from Warsaw Pact exercises or from Nva East Germany drills and their quality is quite a good.
Text parts are well-written and evolution of tanks is clearly represented. Especially good in this book is that it covers engineering vehicles, reconnaince vehicles and other more rare armored vehicles very well, with some rare pictures.
Schematics part is very nice, it concists of old Nva armor class teaching picture boards, which there are many pages.
Some schematic pictures might be a little unclear or not so great quality but however they are very interesting and fascinating.
Printing is fine and pages are of good paper material.
Even if the text part is not as big as in other great reference book: Zaloga etc- "Soviet armour artillery design practices", pictures here are much better and more informative.

This book is very much recommended for anyone interested in Soviet Armor, and without doubt it's very good also for more-ackowledged armor fans too. Book pictures are great for modellers also. Very recommendable.

At 182 pages, there is not enough space to do more than provide an overview. The author tries to capture all types of armored vehicles built by the Soviets - tanks, APCs, Armored cars, engineer vehicles, missle launchers, etc.

There are no color photos at all. Many of the B&W photos shown here have been released in other publications before. They are very small, some are very grainy. Published in 1999, you'd think the author would mention how badly the T-72 performed in Desert Storm. Instead, Fred Koch follows the crowd in stating how good Russian armor is. A lot of new information about Soviet weapons came out after that war, but it is not included here.

I did like the schematics at the end of the book, but again, small diagrams, dark, hard to read.

I'd recommend this for beginners, those who have not studied Soviet armor, those who want to see the wide variety of vehicles they did manufacture prior to the collapse in 1992. It is not for modelers. Books by Steven Zagola remain a better buy.