The SU-152 and Related Vehicles

Author’s Introduction

During the Great Patriotic War the SU-152 SP gun was nicknamed Zveroboy, or “Beast Killer,” in reference to the threat posed by Tigers and other beasts in the German menagerie. According to some accounts, the monster from Chelyabinsk was developed literally over a twoweek period in response to the fielding of heavy tanks by the Germans.

It is true that the first battlefield appearance of the SU-152 coincided with Germany’s extensive use of heavy tanks and tank destroyers. This brainchild of the design bureau headed by Zh. Ya. Kotin proved to be a highly effective weapon against enemy armor from its first engagements. But in actual fact, the history of the Soviet Union’s first mass-produced heavy SP gun began not in late 1941, as some authors have stated, but much earlier. The idea of developing a heavy SP gun for combating reinforced concrete bunkers was born during the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939–1940 and got underway in early 1940. The development of “bunker busters” continued for the next two years, even during the early part of the Great Patriotic War, when the preliminary efforts were transferred from Leningrad to Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk. The SU-152 was an act of desperation, because the first chassis for a heavy SP gun had failed to enter mass production. In addition, instead of being used against fortifications, the SU-152 was employed primarily to combat armored vehicles.

This book addresses all of the ups and downs in the history of the development of domestic heavy SP guns based first on the KV tank chassis and then on the KV-1S chassis. A large number of the documents contained in this book are published here for the first time. Documents from the Central Archive of the Ministry Of Defense of the Russian Federation (TsAMO RF) in Podolsk served as the primary sources for the book. Other important sources were documents from the Russian State Archive of Economics (RGAE), the Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History (RGASPI), and the archive of Factory No. 9 (Yekaterinburg). Materials from the archives of Igor Zheltov, Maxim Kolomiets, Vyacheslav Len, Gennady Malyshev, and Nikolai Shashmurin were also used in the book. The author would also like to thank Sergei Ageyev (Yekaterinburg), whose efforts made it possible to fill in a large number of blanks in the history of the SP guns developed in Sverdlovsk.