A cargo train loaded with tanks chugs along under the crisp, spring sun. “Wow,” a woman says, pointing her camera phone at the convoy. “This is the second train, there was one like it just before.”
The video, seemingly filmed in late March, shows old Soviet tanks being transported, somewhere in Russia. Moscow has been known to bring out older military equipment from storage to help it prosecute the war in Ukraine, but these are different.
The tanks are T-55s, a model first commissioned by the Soviet Union’s Red Army in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II.
They’re so old, you can find them in museums.
“This the first main battle tank used by the Soviet Union in the Cold War era,” said historian John Delaney, a senior curator at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in Duxford, Cambridge, as he shows one to CNN.
“Up until that point, you’d had three very distinctive types of tanks, light, medium and heavy, which had different roles on the battlefield,” Delaney said. “From the mid-50s onwards, there was this concept that tried to come up with a tank that could do a bit of everything and that became known as the main battle tank.”
For the Red Army, that was the T-55 and its many variants, which later became the most widely produced tank in the world, with more than 100,000 units built. Cheap, reliable, easy to use and easy to maintain, it was a military mainstay from Egypt to China to Sudan, where they are still in use.
In Eastern Europe, they were used to quash uprisings in the former Warsaw Pact countries, rolling through the streets of Hungary in 1956, and then Prague, capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, in 1968.
But in following decades, when deployed against Western-built tanks — in some Arab-Israeli conflicts, and then in the Gulf War — they were no match.
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