Mikhail Koshkin

Mikhail Ilyich Koshkin was a Soviet tank designer, chief designer of the famous T-34 medium tank. The T-34 was the most produced tank of World War II. He started out in life as a confectioner, but then studied engineering.
In 1937, the Red Army assigned him to lead design bureau KB-190 to design a replacement for the BT tanks at the Kharkiv Komintern Locomotive Plant in Kharkiv. Koshkin imagined the T-34 tank after BT tanks tested during the Spanish Civil War proved to be under-armored and prone to catching fire.
Koshkin claimed that he named the tank “T-34” because he began to imagine designs for the tank in 1934. After the Soviet Army rejected his prototype, Koshkin began privately assembling a testable prototype that he would work on in the evenings, after long days designing BT tank improvements.
He died from pneumonia he contracted during T-34 winter tests on 26 September 1940.
Mikhail Koshkin was posthumously awarded the State Stalin Prize in 1942 and the Order of the [Red Star]. In 1990, shortly before the final collapse of the USSR, he was posthumously decorated with the highest civilian honor, Hero of [Socialist Labour |Hero of Socialist Labour].