The Soviet T-54 Main Battle Tank

The menacing silhouette of the T-54 tank prowling down streets of Eastern European capitals or roaring across fields in massive exercises remains one of the most enduring images of Soviet power in the early years of the Cold War. Its sleek and unmistakable shape was a warning to any nation that wanted to stand against the USSR.

Yet all of this masked a flawed, outdated design, and when T-54s began to clash with the Western armored vehicles in proxy wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East they were found to be on the losing side of many of the battles.

Containing 130 stunning contemporary and modern photographs, and written by two experts on Soviet armor, this authoritative book tells the complete story of the T-54, one of the most widely produced tanks of all time, including many previously unheard of variants.

Stephen L. “Cookie” Sewell was born in New York State and is a retired US Army Chief Warrant Officer and Department of the Army intelligence analyst. He was trained in the Vietnamese and Russian languages and has been an active Russian linguist since 1974. He has also been an enthusiastic scale modeler since the age of 5 and has built numerous models of armored vehicles, specializing in Russian, Soviet and American tanks and armored vehicles. He was the founder of the Armor Model and Preservation Society in 1992. While author of numerous intelligence articles, he has also written extensively on American and Soviet armor and provided a great deal of information to other authors on topics that include Korean and Vietnamese air war activities. He lives in Aberdeen, Maryland.

James Kinnear was born in Great Britain and has researched the topic of Soviet and Russian military hardware since his first visit to the Soviet Union as a young teenager. He subsequently lived and worked in the post-Soviet Russian Federation and the other states of the former Soviet Union throughout the entire period of post-Soviet “stability”, the two decades between the Soviet Union being considered a military threat and the Russian Federation finding itself again categorized as such in recent history. James has written hundreds of articles on Soviet and Russian technology. He is a formal contributor to IHS Jane's defense yearbooks and has published books on Soviet military technology with Barbarossa, Darlington, Osprey and Tankograd. He now lives in the Algarve, Portugal.