T - 28 The Soviet T – 28 was a multi - turreted tank that was among the world ' s first medium tank s . The prototype was completed in 1931 , and production began in late 1932 . It was an infantrysupport tank intended to break through fortified defences . The T – 28 was designed to complement the heavier T – 35 ( also multi - turreted ) , with which it shared turret designs . The type did not have much success in combat , but it played an important role as a development project for the Soviet designers . A series of new ideas and solutions were tried out on the T – 28 which were later incorporated in future models . Design history . The T – 28 was in many ways similar to the British Vickers A1E1 Independent tank , which greatly influenced tank design in the period between the wars , even though only a single prototype of this trendsetter was manufactured , in 1926 . The Kirov Factory in Leningrad began manufacturing a tank which was based on the design of the British Independent in 1932 . The T – 28 tank was officially approved on 11 August 1933 . The T – 28 had one large turret with a 76 . 2mm gun and two smaller turrets with 7 . 62mm machine guns . A total of 503 T – 28 tanks were manufactured over a period of 8 years from 1933 to 1941 . Combat history . The T – 28 was deployed during the Invasion of Poland and the Winter War against Finland . During the initial stages of the Winter War , the tank was used in direct fire missions against Finnish pillboxes . In the course of these operations it was found that the armour was inadequate and programs were initiated to upgrade it . Frontal plates were upgraded from 50 mm to 80 mm and side and rear plates to 40 mm thickness . With this uparmoured version the Red Army broke through the main Finnish defensive fortification , the Mannerheim Line . According to Russian historian Maksim Kolomiets in his book " T – 28 . Stalin ' s Threeheaded Monster " , over 200 T – 28s were knocked out during the Winter War , but only 20 of them were irrecoverable losses ( including 2 captured by the Finnish Army ) . Due to the proximity of the Kirov Plant , all other knockedout tanks were repaired , some of them over five times . The Finns nicknamed the T – 28 " Postivaunu " ( " mail coach " or " post train " ) after a lone Soviet T - 28 tank commander was captured with his knocked out tank that carried the monthly salary of and mail addressed to the 91st Tank Battalion ( this occurred 19 – 20 December 1939 , during the battle of Summa ) . The T - 28 was also nicknamed " Kivitalo " ( " stone building " ) by the Finns due to its large size . The Finns captured two T – 28s during the Winter War and five in the Continuation War , for a total of 7 vehicles . The Finns did not have tractors that could tow away vehicles as heavy as the T - 28 , and so captured T - 28s that could not move under their own power were stripped of anything useful ( machine guns , radios etc . ) and left where they were . The Soviets had 411 T – 28 tanks when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 . A large majority of these were lost during the first two months of the invasion , many of them abandoned after mechanical breakdown . Some T – 28s took part in the 1941 winter defence of Leningrad and Moscow , but after late 1941 , they were rare in Red Army service ; a few were operated by enemy forces . Today three T – 28s remain , two in Finland and one in Moscow . One restored T – 28 is on display in Finnish field camouflage in the Parola Tank Museum , Finland . A further wreck is stored at Parola , now awaiting restoration and a hull previously used as a bunker was discovered near St . Petersburg . Assessment . Although the T - 28 was rightly considered ineffective by 1941 , it is worth remembering that when the Red Army was fielding the first T – 28s in 1933 , the French Army was still largely equipped with the Renault FT , the British Army had some inferior Vickers Medium Mark I & II and the German Reichswehr had no tanks at all . No army had a seriesproduction medium tank comparable to the T – 28 for several years . The T – 28 had a number of advanced features for the time , including radio ( in all tanks ) and antiaircraft machinegun mounts . Just before the Second World War , many received armor upgrades , bringing its protection on par with the early Panzer IV , although its suspension and layout were outdated . The T – 28 had significant flaws . The plungerspring type suspension was poor , but many of the better suspension designs used in World War II tanks had not yet been developed . The engine and transmission were troublesome . Worst of all , the design was not flexible . Although the T – 28 and early versions of the Panzer IV were comparable in armour and firepower , the sound basic design of the Panzer IV allowed it to be significantly upgraded , while the T – 28 was a poor basis for improvement . All multi - turreted tanks shared the same problem ; the commander , who gives the order to open fire , could only focus his attention in one direction at a time and therefore the advantage of having weapons that could be fired in many different directions at once was nullified . Unfortunately for the Red Army , by the time the T – 28 saw combat in 1939 , events had overtaken it . The 1930s saw the development of the first reliable highspeed suspensions , the first purposedesigned antitank guns , and a gradual increase in the firepower of tanks . The Spanish Civil War showed that infantry units with small , towed antitank guns could defeat most contemporary tanks , and made the underarmoured tanks from the early 1930s particularly vulnerable . Despite heavy losses , in the Winter War the Red Army ' s 20th Tank Brigade , equipped with T - 28s , fulfilled its mission to break the defensive Mannerheim Line . As an infantrysupport tank , designed to support infantry in breakthrough operations , the T – 28 in general was successful for an early 1930s design . Variants . Experimental models . Several selfpropelled guns , the IT – 28 bridging tank , and an engineering vehicle with mine roller s were tested on the T – 28 tank chassis , but none was accepted for production . The T – 29 was a prototype medium tank , a modernized T – 28 with Christie suspension – a later version of this vehicle was considered for the competition of prototypes which led to the T - 34 , but by then it was outdated ( not to be confused with a Grotte tank project also called T – 29 ) . The T – 28 also served as a testbed for the KV tank suspension .