Противотанковое ружье РЕС: инженерная неудача, ушедшая эпоха или сбой системы управления?

Abstract

The article is dedicated to one of the rare exhibits of the Museum of Domestic Military History: experimental 20-mm anti-tank rifle RES which had been designed and tested for the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. Development, testing, and introduction to military service of this anti-tank rifle is a good sample of decision making in the Soviet State military management system. The task of research is to formulate a scientific answer to the question about the causes of delays in launching mass-production of a high-performance anti-tank rifle RES despite the Red Army infantry urgent needs for an effective anti-tank weapon. There are some hard-toexplain delays in the RES life-cycle that prevented its transition from army testing to massproduction. Teething problems of the RES were the same as in case of the mass-produced PTRD and PTRS. Insufficient armor-piercing capabilities of the PTRD and PTRS were clear for the Main Artillery Directorate that was responsible for anti-tank rifles in the Red Army. Despite the interest of high-ranking and well-known as a soviet repressive machine leader L.P. Beria in the RES project, until the war ended the high-performance rifles did not reach the battlefields. The article describes a few factors that influenced decision making. The first one is bureaucratic delays due to the Main Artillery Directorate desire to follow the prescribed weapon life-cycle procedures after the 1941 crisis was over. The second one is objective factors connected to armor protection development of German tanks. German engineers' and military leaders’ steps to increase tanks and self-propelled guns armor-protection were really effective in view of anti-tank rifles performance. The third influence is the presence in the USSR of alternative anti-tank weapon projects by other engineering teams. The research is based on a wide range of documents.