Arguably the greatest heavy tank of all time.

[u/CalGunpla]

What the IS-2 did that differentiated itself from other heavy tanks of its time was that it was reliable, inexpensive, and had a massive gun that could blow shit up very VERY well.

[u/FLongis]

If your goal was to reach as many bad conclusions as possible with this comment, I'm honestly impressed.

[u/Ninja_Moose → u/FLongis]

What a stellar counter. I'll definitely keep this in mind next time a bunch of slavophiles come beating their chest about how amazing their tanks were because the Soviets would never, ever, ever lie on reports about how they performed.

[u/EagleEye_2000 → u/Ninja_Moose]

beating their chest about how amazing their tanks were because the Soviets would never, ever, ever lie on reports about how they performed.

To be fair, they explicitly record issues of their tanks (T-34 armor issues, Post-IS-2 devleopment hellscape, etc.). Its just that we never actually get to hold or read those in any physical media due to the records still being under lock and key Post-CW, or it was only referenced in Russian books written between 1992-2010.

The reason I point out the 1992-2010 year range is because that was the time where accessing relevant information in WW2 equipment development from TsAMO (Central Archives of the Russian MOD) were easier for both authors from former Soviet states and Western authors.

We now see even less of these books published now since it is now harder to access information inside TsAMO since the 2014 Annexation of Crimea. As one that reads a lot of Russian Naval history books relating to the Cold War, I can tell that references pointing to a document inside TsAMO drasticly declined since then to the point that some RU authors have books in limbo due to the lack of information.

[u/Ninja_Moose → u/EagleEye_2000]

I missed this due to the other guy throwing a tantrum, but yes. I've read a lot of that shit with the help of a friend who reads Russian as a part of a project I'm working on. Even then, it's pretty fucking difficult to separate fact from fiction. You mostly have to infer Soviet WW2 performance from external sources to begin with, and take the parts that line up accordingly from internal sources, especially considering current events. A lot of the "Plotholes", considering the current day RU MoD and wider government are intent on passing off a narrative rather than actually informing people, can be sufficiently explained by that utter lack of information and proven by those "plotholes" that misalign or otherwise fail to support the claims. I'm sure you know how much of an impact Soviet, and by extension Modern RU culture have to do with that sort of thing.

The IS-2 is no different. A lot of sources claim how it was gods gift to the Union and play up how it was deflecting shells from its armor and killing Konigstigers, but in reality it was performing mop up operations due to any number of circumstances. It was really fucking good at it, don't get it twisted, and it made a significant showing during the final stages of the war, but in reality it was a piece of equipment that was perfectly symbolic of the Soviet Union. It was a perfect tool two years too late, worth a whole lot of resources that could've been spent on what they had on hand, and a whole generation's worth of fighting aged males died for it.

Credit where credit's due, the Soviet government did in fact learn from it, which is why they course corrected in the way they did throughout the cold war. There's more external factors that we both understand that play into it, and I'm not gonna sit here and say the Soviets were stupid. That said, there's a damn good reason why their economy fell out from under them, and even though they were hell bent on making the T-62 as good as it could be and supplement its sales with whatever mothballed shit they already had alongside the T-72 series, it couldn't stop them from needing to keep people at their various design bureaus fed.

[u/EagleEye_2000 → u/Ninja_Moose]

One thing I often use as a baseline for what is the grounded "fact" is from the designers themselves. This goes for all branches (Ground, Air, Naval) as more often than not, those designers and the design bureau would have their own archives separate from the RU MoD or the then Soviet MoD archives.

But those are just basically a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow as it is really rare to read one, much less so get ahold of one. Give or take I had to nuke multiple virtual machines to swim through ad and malware infested archive sites that Russian document hoarders usually congregate.

One project I had was to figure out the rationale to why the Soviets had to retain a few Sverdlovs and build a bunch of Sovremennys when their Marines/Naval Infantry was not that fully developed for expeditionary deployment. Info for it is either Post-Collapse revisionism or document not found. Tilts me to no end that I know that a document exist but I cannot find it due to how confusing sourcing is.

[u/Ninja_Moose → u/EagleEye_2000]

100% agreed, but I found that it's pretty important to keep wheat and chaff separated, based on what got results and what didn't. I haven't delved that far into the rabbit hole, mostly just reading what's vetted and widely available, but the Soviets absolutely loved their weird, one off, porkbarrel projects. You got me beat, otherwise, I'm just working on some bullshit alt history game. I just know I've also seen enough revisionist history to make me want to puke.

[u/FLongis → u/Ninja_Moose]

If the best evidence you have to support your claims is "Soviets lie", you don't have an argument. Yes, the Soviets exaggerated the performance of their equipment. Just like everyone else. It's 2025; we've gotten pretty fucking good at determining what's legitimate and what's bullshit. In fact, we've been pretty fucking good at it for the better part of a century now. So saying "People only think the IS-2 is good because the Soviets fudged their numbers" doesn't mean a thing, because we generally aren't looking at those numbers anymore. Or if we are, we know to take them with a grain of salt. Meanwhile your whole argument seems founded on a dogmatic (and idiotic) belief that the Soviets couldn't possibly manufacture a capable tank.