OKMO
soviet tank design bureau of the 1930s
OKMO (Opytniy Konstruktorsko-Mekhanicheskiy Otdel, 'Experimental Design Mechanical Department') was the tank design team in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s. Located in Leningrad, it produced the design of the T-26 infantry tank, of which about 12,000 would be produced. Most other designs from the bureau never saw the light of day, but it was here that Mikhail Koshkin, designer of the famous T-34 medium tank, gained his early experience. The bureau was gutted in the Great Purge and broken up by the beginning of the Second World War.
History
Organizational
In 1930 the Bolshevik Factory No. 232 became home to the AVO-5 tank design bureau, soon renamed OKMO. In 1932, the tank department of the Bolshevik factory, became the new Factory No. 174 (K.E. Voroshilov). This new, independent enterprise was dedicated to the mass production of T-26 tank.
Janusz Magnuski says that in 1932 one of the former departments of the Bolshevik factory became a base for the new independent entity, named in 1935 as Factory No. 185 (S.M. Kirov), under the direction of N. Barykov and Semyon Alexandrovich Ginzburg.
The public source identifies “OKMO” as soviet tank design bureau of the 1930s. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around OKMO, soviet and tank.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7072608. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1930, 1932 and 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “OKMO” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.