The Russian Lebedenko or ”Tsar Tank”, is without doubt the most strange Armoured Fighting vehicle ever constructed. It should, however, not be dismissed purely as another hare-brained scheme, but must be seen against the backdrop of the early tank development that was taking place at this time, and that in all countries was very experimental, and leading to many curious and non-functional designs.
The history of the Lebedenko starts in 1914 with the engineer N. Lebedenko, who was at that point employed in a private firm, that worked for the Russian War Department, designing artillery devices. Lebedenko himself, with the aid of N. Zhukovskiy and his nephews, B. Stechkin and A. Mikulin, came up with the idea (originally thought as a sort of enlarged gun-carriage) of a motordriven battle machine, weighing some 40 tons, running on one small double-wheel, and two very large spoked wheels, almost 9 meter in diameter, in a tri-cycle arrangement. The big wheels were attached to the hull, shaped like a tuning-fork, which tapered down to the double wheel, mounted in the rear, which provided the means for steering the vehicle. The designers hoped that this original configuration would make it possible for the vehicle to cross practically all obstacles. They initially called the vehicle Nepotir, but came to be known as the Lebedenko, after the designer. (Sometimes it was nicknamed “The Tsar “, after the financier.)
But who would finance this project? A small working wooden model of the Nepotir was made, driven by a spring motor taken from a gramophone. Then the model was demonstrated to Tsar Nikolaj, who was much impressed when the toy made it across some scale obstacles, i.e. a number of thick books. He promptly ordered the designers to go ahead with the project, and allocated the needed funds himself. Construction of the full-scale Lebedenko started.
The picture below shows how big the tsar tank was. It was about of the size of a large tree!
This design had never experienced fighting due to its disadvantages in battle. One of the reasons is when the tank is on the mud, the back wheel sunk so fast and deep that the enormous front wheels couldn’t pull it out. This tank never moved after it sunk on a patch of mud. Entirely the tank prototype version was disassembled to scrap,presumably so Russian tank designers could get to work on a weaponized Hot Wheels track.
Knowledge Speaks 