T-70 — Lyogkiy Tank 

The little Soviet tank that refused to leave the war.

By 1943, every doctrine said light tanks were obsolete. Nobody told the T-70.

The Red Army learned the hard way in 1941 that light tanks couldn't survive against German anti-tank guns and Panzers. The T-60 was too thin, too slow, and armed with a 20mm cannon that couldn't scratch a Panzer III. The solution was the T-70 — still light, still a two-man crew (the driver also had to operate the engine), but now armed with a 45mm gun that could at least fight back and armored well enough to stop small-arms fire and shell fragments.

Was it a match for a Panzer IV? No. A Tiger? Not a chance. But that wasn't the job.

The T-70 did the work that nobody else wanted — reconnaissance, infantry support, flank security, exploitation. It screened the flanks of the T-34 formations during Kursk. It rolled through gaps in the line that medium tanks couldn't reach. It was cheap, it was fast, and the Soviets built over 8,200 of them. When a T-70 crew knocked out a Tiger at Kursk — and it happened — it became the kind of story that spread through the entire Red Army overnight.

The T-70 didn't win the war. But it was there for every major Soviet offensive from Stalingrad to the end, doing the unglamorous work that made the breakthroughs possible.

What you're building:

• 689 pieces in 1:28 scale
• 3 crew figures included
• The compact T-70 profile — 45mm Model 38 gun, angled welded hull, the light tank that the Red Army couldn't stop building because it couldn't stop needing
• The perfect complement to your T-34s and KV-1s — no Soviet armor collection is complete without the scout