In Russia, the first models of personal protection were created for the officials of the city police. After the 1905 revolution, during searches, arrests, clashes with strikers, police officers were wounded, and sometimes died at the hands of revolutionary elements and ordinary criminals. The most perfect at that time was the proposal of the captain of the engineering troops Avenir Avenirovich Chemerzin.
Armor designed by A. A. Chemerzin
Chemerzin's carapace
Engineer A. A. Chemerzin was fond of chemistry and metallurgy, which helped him to make samples of a special alloy, which turned out to be three times stronger than ordinary steel. In the summer of 1905, a breastplate was made and tested at the Ust-Izhora test site in the presence of Nicholas II himself. As a result, from a distance of 300 meters, not a single bullet of almost all known calibers could penetrate Chemerzin's invention, but the police leadership nevertheless asked to strengthen the structure with another layer of steel. By May 23, 1906, about 1300 impenetrable shells had been made for the St. Petersburg police alone. The command of our Manchurian army requested about 2,000 Chemerzin's shells for the front, but later came to the conclusion that such protection was unsuitable for operation in war conditions. With a high intensity of enemy fire, numerous joints overlaying plates (12 pieces) significantly weaken the protective properties of the equipment. For this reason, and also because of its significant weight, it was not accepted into service. As a result, they signed a contract for the supply of 100 thousand French shells, but they turned out to be even worse, the French were sued and the litigation dragged on right up to 1908. On the eve of World War I, Lieutenant Colonel of the 137th Infantry Regiment of the Nizhyn Regiment, Frankovsky, proposed the design of an armored knapsack, which is a wedge-shaped wooden box, mounted on an axle and placed on two small wheels. The weight of an empty knapsack reached 16 kilograms, and when personal and 330 cartridges were stored in it, in this case an incredible 39.4 kilos were achieved. On the campaign, it was proposed to roll it behind you, like a cart, and in the offensive, push it in front of you, hiding behind armor. On trials, sowing a crazy idea fell apart literally a mile away, which put an end to further fate.
There were in the Russian army portable rifle shields designed by retired lieutenant Gelgar and the Technical Committee of the Main Military-Technical Directorate (GVTU), the weapon shield of Dr. Kochkin and Esaul Bobrovsky, as well as experimental shovel shields and wheel shields. All shields were made of high quality armor steel with manganese, nickel, chromium, molybdenum or vanadium additives. There were projects of specialized shields for certain branches of the armed forces - for example, the shield for bombers by V. G. Lavrent'ev, made in December 1915, but remained experimental. But the shield of Lieutenant V. F. Gelgar, designed to protect the scouts, was ordered by the leadership of the III and XI armies to equip engineering units in the amount of 610 copies. It is noteworthy that the General Staff had previously refused to accept this invention into service. Separately, it is worth mentioning the individual shield of Major General Svidzinsky, which is a gable sheet with an embrasure and a latch. It was carried on a belt and had dimensions - 840 mm wide and 712 mm high. Doctor Kochkin's shield had smaller dimensions (470x480 mm) and was quite versatile - it could be worn with an embrasure on a rifle in defense, and in battle it could be worn with a strap on the chest. The thickness of the armor plate, made of chrome-nickel steel, ranged from 5, 5 to 6, 3 mm, and the weight in the maximum configuration reached almost 7 kilograms. The main requirement in the manufacture of the shield was guaranteed impenetrability with a rifle bullet from 50 steps, which posed a lot of difficulties for manufacturers - Izhora, Petrograd metal and mechanical. On average, the need of the Russian division at the front was estimated at 1000 copies of Kochnev's armored products, which, of course, could not be satisfied under any circumstances. However, not a single army of the world of that time was capable of such a feat.
Shooting shield, sample 1915
Shooting carapace of the Sormovo plant in prone position, 1915
In 1915, Russia adopted another personal protective equipment - a rifle shell developed by the Scientific and Technical Laboratory of a specialized Military Department, created by decree of Emperor Nicholas II in 1912. The armor was manufactured at the Sormovo plant, but the production volumes were small, so it did not receive much distribution among the troops. With the armored shovels of Bobrovsky and the aforementioned Kochkin, a sad story also turned out - they turned out to be heavy, due to the use of alloy armored steel, expensive, and ridiculously ineffective as protection against bullets.
The proposal of Major General Svyatsky to equip the infantry with wheel shields of his own design turned out to be a dead end. A heavy shield with a thickness of 6 mm with dimensions of 505x435 mm was supposed to be equipped with wooden wheels and covered by them in battle, and on the march used as a cart for equipment. Apparently, the Major General did not know about the unenviable fate of a similar armored knapsack, Lieutenant Colonel Frankovsky, rejected before the start of the war. Lieutenant-General Filatov also fell into a similar delusional design. As a result, thoroughly tired of the ideas of individual wheel shields, the Main Directorate of the General Staff in early February 1917 was forced to specially note: “The defender widely uses, in addition to artillery and machine guns, mortar and bomb fire, which have a very significant destructive power. Under such conditions, it is difficult to expect that in a modern battle, during the assault on a fortified enemy strip, there would be a case of using such a shield curtain, especially if we take into account that the terrain … pitted with heavy shells and cluttered … a shield curtain, hardly passable for movement by people. " And on February 9, TC GVTU decided: "1) do not order carts for shields in the future and 2) stop, where possible, orders for shields on carts that have not yet been completed (quote from Semyon Fedoseev's book Cannon Fodder of World War I. Infantry in battle").
German soldiers test captured Russian collective defense wheel shield
Not quite individual protection was the fortress shields, which were supposed to protect 5-6 people during the assault on the enemy's fortified position. The requirement for protection was the same - non-penetration by a rifle or machine-gun bullet from 50 meters into a frontal projection 8 mm thick and holding the shrapnel with a steel two-millimeter cover. They developed such a colossus even before the war and managed to deliver more than 46 thousand copies to the troops! Our army used similar designs back in the Russo-Japanese War. Of course, the soldiers had to move such a technique on the battlefield at the expense of their own muscular strength, which determined the entire futility of the idea.
In the post-war period, Russia, like many other powers, for a long time did not engage in the development of new models of individual protection for infantrymen. There was a naive opinion about the impossibility of repeating such a grandiose massacre again …
Illustrations: Semyon Fedoseev "Cannon Meat" of the First World War. Infantry in battle "; Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Rocket and Artillery Sciences.
