Design on the KV-1 heavy tank began in 1938, with the intention that it should be the successor to the T-35 heavy tank. The first models of the KV-1 were field-tested during the Red Army's disastrous 1940 campaign in Finland. Despite the military setback, the KV-1 set the standard for Soviet tank design for several years to come, regularly used to spearhead breakthroughs or accompany infantry on the assault. While it was certainly a formidable vehicle, the KV-1 was not particularly mobile, routinely suffering from a number of automotive problems. It was also uparmored progressively without any concomittant changes made to the power plant, which resulted in a poor power-to-weight ratio and continual degradation in performance. Nevertheless, many historians view the KV series as an important achievement for the Russian military-industrial complex because it paved the way for more successful designs, including the "Josef Stalin" tanks.

Pictured here is a 1:72 scale replica of a Soviet Kliment Voroshilov KV-1 heavy tank that saw action at Stalingrad. Sold Out!

Dimensions:
Length: 3-1/2-inches
Width: 1-1/2-inches

Release Date: February 2016

Historical Account: "Here is Stalingrad" - Josef Goebbels, Germany's Minister of Propaganda, arrived at the Sportpalast at noon, February 18th, 1943, in his bulletproof Mercedes, more tense than usual. He knew that he had to make the patently impossible sound possible. The German Sixth Army had just suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad. For the first time, Germans were losing faith in their Fuhrer en masse. All 15,000 seats in the Sportpalast were filled, mainly with party members and functionaries. As Goebbels mounted the podium, his dark eyes glowed with the fanaticism of the born demagogue.

Goebbels called the Stalingrad debacle the "great alarm call of destiny," and a symbol of the heroic struggle against the "storm from the Steppes," that "horrific historic danger," which relegated "all former dangers facing the West to the shadows."

Behind the onrushing Soviet divisions, Goebbels saw "the Jewish liquidation commandos," whom international Jewry were using to plunge the world into chaos.

Again and again during this diatribe, thunderous applause broke out. But Goebbels was just getting warmed up. Terror must be fought with terror, Goebbels cried. There could be no more bourgeois prudishness. Goebbels asked his now hysterical audience whether they believed in their Fuhrer and the total victory of German arms. An ear-splitting Ja! was the reply. "Do you want total war? Do you want it, if necessary, more total and more radical than we could even imagine today?" he screamed, whereupon pandemonium broke out in the Sportpalast. "Now, Volk," Goebbels screeched, "arise and storm; break loose!" The Sportpalast had turned into a raving madhouse, and German radio transmitted the mass hysteria throughout the county. Goebbels rightly ranked the speech as the rhetorical masterpiece of his life. Cynical as always, he wrote in his diary, "This hour of idiocy! If I had said to the people, jump out the fourth floor of Columbushaus, they would have done that too."