Yes, welcome Unix!
ANyway, on the subject of Russian tanks in late 1941 we can either assume they were obsolete or they were mostly destroyed, anyway. That is a fact. Of course it is a matter of taste as well whether they were obsolete or not but we must remember that most of these tanks were made from the beginning of the 1930īs and cannot be seen as suitable for the modern warfare in 1941, I think.
The armor was not thick, although the weapon in many tanks, 45 mm, would have been good enough in my view against the German tank, like digging the tanks into the ground, but this was not done, and the tanks were destroyed in huge numbers. There were not enough T-34īs etc and even these tanks were used with wrong tactics and didnīt have a radio or a commander cupola or the balance system for the gun like in the German tanks.Yet the T-34 was very destructive when it attacked.
Ok, hereīs some data on the Russian tanks and production in 1930īs to the start of war:
http://www.wwiivehicles.com/html/ussr/
By 1935 there were more than 10,000 tanks and by 1941, 24,000.
Many different models of tanks were being built in the late 1930s. During 1940 out of 2,794 tanks built only 115 were T-34s.
During the Spanish Civil War the Soviets sent approximately 300 tanks and crew to the Republican forces. The experience taught them that they needed thicker armor to be able to compete against the German 37 mm PaK 36s.
M. I. Koshkin was appointed chief designer at the tank factory in Kharkov (builder of BT tanks) in 1937. He was given the task of designing a "shell-safe" tank. In 1938 the design bureau worked on an A-20 tank project. Koshkin and chief engineer A. A. Morosov realized that the tank had to be completely tracked. The A-32 was designed and both were tested in 1939. The A-32 became the T-34 once it had 45 mm armor installed.
With all the tanks spread out, they became easy prey during the Russo-Finnish Winter War and the German invasion. It is estimated that 1,600 tanks were lost to the Finns, and 16-17,000 during the last half of 1941 to the Germans and their allies. The primary models of tanks in the Soviet arsenal were the T-26 (approximately 12,000), the BT calvary series (approximately 8,300), the T-28 was the primary medium tank, and there were 2 battalions of T-35 heavy tanks.
The T-34 became the standard medium tank for the war after the invasion. The KV-1 was the most thickly armored tank in the world. There were 508 KVs and 967 T-34 available in June 1941, out of a total of 23,637. However, they were spread throughout the Red Army. By August 6, 1941, 13,145 were lost.