Redut is an unusual vehicle built on the basis of a four-axle MAZ-543 chassis. The ginormous vehicle is now rusting in the open air on the territory of the Military Engineering Academy named after V. V. Kuibyshev, near the village of Nikolo-Uryupino in the Moscow region. On the Internet you can often come across talk that the unusual exhibit is a command and staff vehicle (KSM), but this is not quite true. In front of us is a sample of mobile fortification: a real bunker on wheels, unique in its kind – a protected vehicle for control points “Redut”.
In the 20th century, together with the extensive mechanization and motorization of troops, mobile fortification shone with new colors. Indeed, maneuver warfare dictated its own conditions: the military required fortification facilities that could be quickly relocated from place to place during operational movement or redeployment of troops. In the Soviet Union, work in this direction began in the late 1950s.
Technical progress also played its role. In the second half of the 1970s, the armies of many countries adopted new firing and reconnaissance-impact complexes, allowing to effectively and accurately hit point objects located on the ground. High-precision weapons, which posed a threat to command and control centers of the troops, became increasingly important. Against this background, the relevance of defense of command and control points only increased. The result of work in this area was the creation of a protected vehicle for command and control centers “Redut”, the base for which was an eight-wheel chassis MAZ-543 produced by Minsk Automobile Plant. (Until 1991, MAZ included an enterprise specializing in the production of heavy off-road equipment with a large payload. Today it is MZKT – Minsk Wheeled Tractor Plant).
A rare prototype chassis MAZ-543B was used for the “hopper on wheels”. The new chassis differed from the previous models by a fundamentally different layout, the payload was 19.6 tons. In the future, the chassis MAZ-543B became the basis for the mass MAZ-543M, the peak of production of which came in 1987. The layout presented by the designers of Minsk Automobile Plant allowed to extend the mounting part of the frame, facilitating and simplifying the process of installing larger equipment on the chassis. In total, MAZ assembled 233 copies of this chassis, one of them served as a base for the protected vehicle “Redut”.
The appearance of a new multi-axle off-road vehicle was directly related to the development of the Soviet missile program. Back in the summer of 1959, the USSR began work on the development of a solid-fuel operational-tactical missile “Temp”, which could hit targets at a distance of up to 600 kilometers. Initially, the designers planned to launch the missile from a launch pad located on the semi-trailer of a four-axle MAZ-535V tractor-trailer, but in the course of design it became clear that the military technical capabilities of such a system can not satisfy. For this reason, it was decided to develop a completely new multi-axle vehicle, designated MAZ-543, to accommodate the Temp-S missile launcher.
The first prototype of the new car was presented in 1961, and the next year the serial production of MAZ-543 and its triumphal march in the army, and then in civil service began. All trucks of the family had the same wheelbase size – 7.7 meters, and the total length of MAZ-543 was almost 11.465 meters. The heart of the four-axle vehicle with the wheel arrangement 8×8 was a V-shaped 12-cylinder diesel engine D12A-525A, which developed a maximum power of 525 hp (386 kW). The engine power was enough to accelerate the vehicle with a gross weight of 39 tons up to 60 km/h when driving on the highway, fuel consumption was 80 liters for every 100 kilometers of travel.
Considering the length of the vehicle, the turning radius of 13.5 meters does not seem to be such a big value. Ground clearance of the 8-wheeled vehicle was 440 mm. MAZ-543 could easily overcome fords up to 1.1 meters deep without preliminary preparation, as well as ascents up to 30 degrees. All four axles of the truck were driving, the wheels were single-skate, to improve cross-country ability on various soils they were equipped with wide-profile tires with developed tread.
Having decided on the choice of the chassis, the developers of the Central Research Institute of Military Engineering of the USSR Ministry of Defense began to create a reliable mobile well-protected control center for troops, the work on this topic received the code “Redut” and began in 1975. The concept of the project was to create a protected vehicle, built on the basis of a chassis of increased payload and cross-country ability. The new development of the Soviet designers met the tasks of protection of operational level control points from modern means of defeat of the probable enemy and ensuring the operation of the main elements of the PU. The designers envisioned the possibility of using the protected Redut vehicle on the surface, in a shelter and in an excavation with soil cover to provide additional protection with the possibility of independent exit from it.
According to the idea of the developers, the maximum level of protection was provided when the protected Redut control point vehicle drove into the excavation pit dug for it in advance, after which it was additionally backfilled with earth using engineering means. Soil backfilling is one of the simplest and most common methods of defense in fortification. The soil is unique in that it has natural properties that allow it to intercept the impact force of bullets and fragments of shells and mines, reduce the pressure of the shock wave of a nearby explosion, reduce the effect of penetrating radiation, etc. According to the magazine “Technics and Armament”, the time of placing the “Redoubt” in the excavation already prepared for it with the subsequent piling of soil was half an hour, the same amount of time it took the car to get out of the earth shelter, which turned the car into a full-fledged bunker.
The usable area of the protected body was 26 square meters, the capacity was estimated at 10 people, the vehicle crew consisted of two people. In early May 1979, the experimental vehicle arrived from Nakhabino to Minsk on its own. For the commander inside the protective body was installed a separate table – 204×130 cm with three aviation chairs. Special sliding shelves with telephones were placed on the officers’ desks, and radios appeared in the communications compartment. After completion of the installation of new equipment and furniture, the vehicle moved to the training center, where it was repeatedly demonstrated to representatives of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union.
It is believed that the cross on the project was put by the USSR Defense Minister Dmitry Fyodorovich Ustinov, who was present at the demonstration of new engineering equipment. Marshal believed that the launch of such a car in series would involve large capital expenditures. At the same time, the fate of the car could be influenced by the fact that there was no visual demonstration of the abilities of the “Redoubt” in front of the top officials of the Ministry of Defense, the car did not get out from under the ground cavings. Perhaps this also had the most negative impact on the fate and development of mobile fortification in the Soviet Union. The last time the protected vehicle for control points of operational troops “Redut” participated in military equipment shows in 1987, and the further sad fate of this unique vehicle is already known to you.
