January 20, 2014. This January, Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant (a member of Uralvagonzavod Corporation) celebrates the 70th anniversary of the day the heavy tank IS2 was launched on an industrial scale. Tankograd's long-service employees are giving talks on the event at the local schools, and tours are being offered at the plant museum that are dedicated to this special date, Uralvagonzavod Corporation's press service reports.

The new heavy tank was designed by a team headed by such outstanding engineers as Joseph Kotin, Nikolay Kotin, and Ivan Trashutin. All the organizational issues were handled flawlessly by Tankograd's legendary director Isaac Saltzman. The result was a combat vehicle that was 10,000 kg lighter than the German Tiger and yet had a stronger armor coating and was 1.5 times more powerful. A 122-mm gun that was installed on IS2 could easily penetrate the armor of the enemy's steel 'beasts'.

Chelyabinsk residents said the new IS was 'a breakthrough tank'. Having watched a demonstration of the pilot samples at work, the Commander-in-Chief I.V. Stalin said, 'This is the tank we will use to put an end to the war.'

'The first few IS2 tanks were made at the plant in the late fall of 1943, in only 51 days, and as early as the beginning of 1943, the mass production of the tank was launched. The South Ural plant's workers were the first people in the world to start producing heavy tanks through an assembly line. 127 IS 2 tanks left Chelyabinsk for the front in January 1944. By the end of the year, thousands of tanks had been produced. In the battlefield, 'the breakthrough tank' soon came to be called 'the Victory tank'. This was the name by which Chelyabinsk Tankograd's child was remembered in the history of the Great Patriotic War,' the corporation reports.