Zhozef Iakovlevich Kotin

Born Feb. 26 (Mar. 10), 1908, in Pavlograd. Soviet tank designer; colonel general of the engineering and technical service (1965); doctor of technical sciences (1943); Honored Scientist and Technician of the RSFSR (1968); Hero of Socialist Labor (1941). Member of the CPSU since 1931.

In 1927, Kotin entered the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. In 1930 he was sent from there to the F. E. Dzerzhinskii Military Engineering Academy. After graduating from the academy in 1932, he worked as head of the design bureau of the research division of the Military Academy of Mechanization and Motorization of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. In 1937 he became chief designer at the Kirov Plant in Leningrad. During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 he was deputy USSR people’s commissar of the tank industry of the USSR and chief designer. The heavy KV and IS tanks, the self-propelled guns built on their frames, the PT-76 amphibious tank, the KT-12 skidding tractor, and the powerful K-700 wheeled tractor were built under Kotin’s direction. He was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR at the second and seventh convocations. He has been awarded the State Prize of the USSR (1941, 1943, 1946, 1948), three Orders of Lenin, nine other orders, and various medals.