The T-34 tank is deservedly considered a legendary vehicle, one of the most striking symbols of the victory of the USSR in the Great Patriotic War. However, the beginning of the biography of these tanks turned out to be far from cloudless and was accompanied by numerous problems. Testing of the first vehicles, the deployment of mass production, the difficult history of the development of new tanks in army units and the dramatic “baptism of fire” in the summer of 1941, based on documentary materials from Russian archives - in the book by A. Ulanov and D. Shein.