page_title: Object 279
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Object 279 / History
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: Объект 279
context_page_description: Object 279 Kotin was a Soviet experimental heavy tank developed at the end of 1959.
  This special purpose tank was intended to fight on cross country terrain, inaccessible to conventional tanks, acting as a heavy breakthrough tank, and if necessary withstanding even the shockwave of a nuclear explosion. It was planned as a tank of the Supreme Command Reserve.
context_section_description: One of the reasons that this tank project was abandoned, as with other heavy tank projects, was that the Soviet military stopped operating with heavy fighting vehicles of that type, tanks and similar, as of 1960. Since then, the heaviest ones are kept at about 50 metric tons of weight, that is without counting in any extra equipment such as additional reactive armor, mine clearing devices (mine ploughs, mine rollers) etc. On July 22, 1960, at the demonstration of new technology on the range of Kapustin Yar, Nikita Khrushchev strictly forbade any tanks with a weight of more than 37 metric tons to be adopted by the military, having thus written off the entire program of heavy tanks that had proven to be so successful.
  Adding to this decision was that Nikita Khrushchev himself was a supporter of an alternative – guided missile tanks, the most prominent of which was IT-1. Furthermore, the Soviet military wanted tanks with a suitable weight for crossing their own bridges, in case of homeland defence situations similar to those that occurred during World War II, which at that time seemed to be unreliable for heavy vehicle crossings. Another reason was that a number of serious deficiencies of the running gear appeared during the trials. These deficiencies included low nimbleness, efficiency loss during swampy area crossings, complex and expensive production, maintenance and repair, and impossibility of reduction in the overall height of the tank.
  One example of the tank survives as a non-functional display at the Kubinka Tank Museum
caption: An Object 279 prototype on display at the Kubinka Tank Museum
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