Recently I came across an article by Kirill Ryabov on the website "Voennoye Obozreniye" "The promising tank" Object 477A1 ": reality versus dreams" with links to the materials of a certain "expert" named Sergei Zgurets. I was amazed at the illiterate and ridiculous assumptions about the history of the creation of this tank, about which really little is known.
Immediately, I note that the article interested me for a reason. The promising boxer tank is a part of my life. The fact is that I was one of the ideologues of this tank, supervised work at the KMDB to create a control complex and organized cooperation of allies to develop it.
I had to participate in this project from the moment the concept of the tank was developed in 1979 to the termination of work in 1992 and to go all the way from the birth to the death of this vehicle. All this is described in detail in my book "The Last Breakthrough of Soviet Tank Builders" posted in 2009 on the Internet.
After three years in prison and isolation, it was interesting for me to read what people write about what we were doing more than thirty years ago. There are many legends and speculations around this tank, but what is written in the mentioned article just amazed me. The article was written based on some fragmentary information, rumors and events that took place in different years and were in no way connected with each other.
Over the years, many are trying to rewrite the history of the creation of military equipment for the sake of not entirely ethical interests. So, in Ukraine, they are trying to call the school of Soviet tank building a Ukrainian school, and in Nizhny Tagil they seriously assert that they created the T-34 tank.
For this purpose, a whole galaxy of not military experts has appeared in Ukraine, but "ukropagandists", one of which is Sergei Zgurets. They create and disseminate myths about powerful Ukrainian weapons, apparently not really understanding what they are writing about. Somehow they even referred to me that I was defending the "Ukrainian branch of tank building." This is a very dubious statement: I have always defended that there was no "Ukrainian" tank building.
Likewise, Zgurets, a person far from technology, a propagandist journalist, and even ideologically pumped in the United States, is trying to talk about things in which he is poorly versed.
After looking at some of the materials of this "military expert", I was amazed at his incompetence. For example, in one of his materials, he writes that they tried to use the Arguzin radar complex developed by the Signal VNII for promising Ukrainian tanks.
Firstly, this radar was developed at the end of the 70s at the request of Ustinov, the head of the topic was KBTM (Moscow), and the developer of the radar was the Lviv NIRTI. Secondly, VNII "Signal" (Kovrov) has never been involved in the development of radars. This is the leading developer of armored vehicle weapon stabilizers.
Distorting the facts on trifles, they do not hesitate to distort the development of the "Boxer" tank and present it as a Ukrainian development of a promising tank, which was transferred in the 90s to the "Nota" project.
The creation of a promising tank began not in 1984, but in 1979, with the research work "Rebel", and was discontinued in 1992 due to the collapse of the Union and the inability of Ukraine to independently conduct such a development. It was a competitive work, KMDB won the competition held among tank design bureaus. The tank designers in Leningrad and Nizhny Tagil lost the competition and did not participate in the development of this project. The whole country worked on the project, dozens of design and research organizations were connected to it.
When creating the car, a lot of problems arose. Some of them have not been fully resolved. Within the framework of this project, a fundamentally new tank was created, different from all existing ones, and it was supposed to lay the foundation for a new generation of tanks. Only two prototypes were made, the Union collapsed, and the work was stopped. The advantages and disadvantages of the tank, the reasons for the termination of work require a separate discussion.
More than two decades later, Ukraine is trying to create a myth that Ukraine continued to create the Boxer tank as part of the new Ukrainian Nota tank, which never existed. The article states that "the project called" Object 477 "originally had the name" Boxer ", which was later replaced by" Hammer ", as it developed, the letter A was added to the numbers."
All this is speculation about the phased development of the project. The tank originally had the name "Boxer", in the late 80s, under unclear circumstances, one secret document on this project disappeared, so we had to change the code "Boxer" to "Hammer". There was no technical reason for this.
The continuation of the Boxer project within the Nota project is also not true. As far as I know, the Nota project at the level of search work at KMDB existed many years later. In this project, the developments on the "Boxer" tank may have been used, but these are two different projects, one R&D and the other R&D, and there is a big difference between them. The Nota project ended with the development of the tank concept, and nothing more.
Statements that “work on the Object 477A1 tank continued until the beginning of the 2000s” and “the Russian Ministry of Defense was the customer for the new project” are at the level of some kind of madness. In the 90s, it was out of the question to carry out joint work with Russia on this project. No joint work was carried out, I worked at the design bureau until 1996, was one of the leaders on this project and, naturally, knew everything that was being done on it.
Joint work on tank building between Russia and Ukraine has never been carried out, because after the collapse of the Union, they became competitors, and Ukraine refused to transfer the groundwork for this tank to Russia.
And absolutely original statements: "… within the framework of the Nota project, about a dozen prototypes were collected", "several samples were transferred to Russia" and "Object 477A1 should be updated and put into series" …
The author of such conclusions should know that there is a certain cycle of development and testing of the tank, including the manufacture of mock and prototypes, their testing, then carrying out factory and state tests and only then serial production.
In such a quantity, prototypes are never made, a maximum of one or two. Work on the "Boxer" ended with the manufacture of two prototypes, the manufacture of the third was not completed and only these samples were tested. Naturally, no samples were transferred from Kharkov to Russia, they remained at the local test site.
A masterpiece of wretchedness and primitivism is the assertion of the nationally preoccupied Zgurts that "one of the mock-ups of the MBT" Nota "built in the past was planned to be shown at the Kiev parade dedicated to the Independence Day." Layout at the parade? It is difficult to imagine more delirium.
With all due respect to the KMDB, in which I worked for almost a quarter of a century, Ukraine, for many objective reasons, cannot develop and produce fundamentally new tanks, this is a topic for a separate discussion. The maximum that is possible is the further development of the T-64 line, and all Bulats and Oplots are its continuation.
Now a little on purely technical nonsense in the article. They try to present everything that was done within the framework of the Boxer project as a development within the framework of the Ukrainian project Nota.
"Some of the samples were experimentally equipped with a gas turbine engine."
This has never happened, KMDB has always been a principled opponent of a gas turbine engine on a tank. Since the end of the 70s, it was imposed on us at the request of Ustinov. With difficulty, they got rid of it on the T-80UD tank and never used it in their designs.
"A feature of the tank" Object 477A1 "was the semi-remote placement of the gun" and "a developed onboard computer".
The "Boxer" project had two highlights - a semi-extended cannon of 152 mm caliber unprecedented for a tank and not a "developed onboard computer", but a tank information and control system. It was laid as a basic element for the creation of an armored reconnaissance and strike complex using drones and fire support helicopters and a radio-controlled tank. Individual elements of this system are currently used on the Russian Armata tank.
"To maintain this parameter (mass), some of the steel parts had to be replaced with titanium ones."
All this had to be implemented in the "Boxer" project, in the late 80s we already "fell out" for 50 tons and made part of the chassis and frontal armor titanium.
“In the center of the fighting compartment there was a consumable drum for 10 rounds. Two more were placed at the sides, for 12 shells each”.
Again, this is the latest version of the automatic loader in the Boxer project. This tank had colossal problems with the placement of such a quantity, caliber and length of ammunition. The automatic loader turned out to be very complex and unreliable. As a result, we found a simple solution with three reels. But they realized it only at the stand, the tank did not reach the point.
You can still talk a lot about the absurdities in this material and the distortion of facts about the "Boxer" tank, but this is not the main thing. When covering and analyzing the developments of military equipment, it is necessary to strive for an objective presentation of the material and rely not on some speculation of "experts", but on verified facts and evidence.
Dozens of enterprises and organizations and thousands of specialists in various branches of science and technology took part in the development of the last Soviet tank "Boxer". They were all scattered throughout the country and were doing a common cause. It makes no sense to find out now who has done more or less. This is already our common history of tank building, in which we have a lot to tell and show.
