Mark Urban

And the soldiers who are sent there

actually work on the production line.

And what they try to do is that if you're going to be a driver, you work on the gearboxes or the engine.

And if you're going to be the gunner, you put that part of the tank in and adjust it and set it.

So they had this extraordinary system, which none of the other major World War II powers copied.

in which the soldiers almost were born with the tank they were going to fight on.

And that, I think, helped them as well in terms of it was a simple piece of kit to start with, but in terms of giving them confidence to maintain it in the field and keep it going, it was a big help.

So, yeah, I think what the T-84 ends up summing up is the sort of triumph of production and kind of Soviet-Russian defiance and grit, I suppose, to keep it all going in the face of such horrendous losses.

Look, I think it's a sort of very fitting emblem of the machine age, isn't it?

And you think of those sort of images of Charlie Chaplin in modern times getting sucked into the machine he's making, and then you think of the poor old tank crewman who sometimes does get mangled by the traverse of the turret or the tank turning over or whatever, but they're inside this huge machine, and the machine ends up symbolising...

Certainly when it's being used by the Germans and the Russians in the late war, brutality and invasion and dominance.

And I think particularly when the tank is advancing, but the hatches are closed and the crew are ready for battle in that sense, it's a sort of dehumanisation, isn't it?

I think when it's festooned with smiling soldiers waving and rumbling past, which is more what you see in the liberation scenes,

imagery from Paris or Bruges or somewhere like that when the Allies liberate those places.

There you see it has a very different meaning.

And it is a symbol of liberation.

But I think in its kind of battle state, without the people visible,

I think people ascribe almost an intelligence or machine-like being to some of these tanks.

And they end up representing, in one sense, national personality.

You know, the Tiger as that sort of huge instrument of German brutality and T-34 sort of dogged Red Army.