Russian Tank Troops

Russia's first every armoured unit, the 1st Machine Gun Automobile Regiment of the Imperial Russian Army, was raised on 19 August 1914 on the basis of a training mobile company. It was already on the first weeks since the First World War began, and Russia's first armoured vehicles were a number of Russian-produced Russo-Balt armoured cars with British engines from the Austin Motor Company, the first ever to be produced in the country and the first also to see combat, marking the beginning of an era of armoured warfare in Russian lands.

By 1917 and the aftermath of the February Revolution came yet another, the Austin-Putilov armored car, also produced with British support, which saw action in the war and in the events following the October Revolution. These two cars, by the time the Russian Civil War began in 1918, would form the Red Army's first ever armored components - a number of armored companies and battalions. Joined by captured Mark V tanks and a number of armored vehicles of both local and Western manufacture and trucks fitted with cannons and machine guns the small armored park grew on to form part of the growing force, with a seventeen Renault FT tanks - called the "Russian Reno", all remanufactured by the Krasnoye Sormovo Factory No. 112 in Nizhny Novgorod[2] with a locally produced derivative, the "Freedom Fighter Lenin", the first true tank ever to be made - becoming thus the pioneer locally produced armoured vehicles produced by the young Russian military industry. Their appearances in all national parades in Red Square in Moscow beginning in 1921, alongside a number of foreign armoured vehicles made under license to assist the young army, showed the Soviet government's priorities on making armoured warfare part of the national strategy for the Soviet Armed Forces as a whole in its modernization and expansion to keep up with the times.

The formation of the Tank Bureau under the People's Commisariat of Defence in 1924, with the existence of a armoured car battalion under the Technical Directorate of the WPRA (today the Main Agency of Automobiles and Tanks of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation) marked the formation of the modern day Tank Troops, which would materialize in the raising in the summer of 1929 within the Moscow Military District of the first ever Soviet mechanized regiment, the Joint Mechanized Regiment.[3] With its T-18 tanks, the first to be designed by Russians, among its inventory of equipment, the regiment's tank battalion was but the first of many to be raised in the coming years.

At the time of the Fall of the Soviet Union there were five tank divisions stationed on the territory of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic: the 1st Tank Division (Kaliningrad), the 4th Guards Tank Division; the 5th Guards Tank Division; the 21st Guards Tank Division; and the 40th Guards Tank Division (Sovetsk).[4] In September 1993 the 1st Tank Division became the 2nd Tank Brigade; then a weapons and equipment storage base in 1998; and then, finally, was disbanded in 2008.[5]

In the twenty-first century, a tank brigade is the second largest, after the tank division, of the formations of the Russian Tank Troops. According to the shtat (Table of Organization and Equipment), on average, there are about two to three thousand personnel in a tank brigade. In the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation the specified tank brigade commander's rank is colonel (major general being the minimum for a division). There are also a number of MBT battalions in the motorized rifle brigades and independent battalions.

Today the formations of the Tank Troops include:

 This article incorporates text by Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation available under the CC BY 4.0 license.

• V.I. Feskov, Golikov V.I., K.A. Kalashnikov, and S.A. Slugin, The Armed Forces of the USSR after World War II, from the Red Army to the Soviet (Part 1: Land Forces). (В.И. Слугин С.А. Вооруженные силы СССР после Второй Мировой войны: от Красной Армии к Советской (часть 1: Сухопутные войска)) Tomsk, 2013. Improved version of 2004 work with many inaccuracies corrected.