A range of highly-specialised all-terrain vehicles were built by the Russian company ZiL – James Kinnear looks at their development
In the 1960s the Soviet Union developed a whole range of multi-axle all-wheel-drive vehicles for service with the Soviet Army and in civilian roles. Two design and manufacturing organisations would come to dominate the development of specialised military vehicles, MAZ in Minsk and ZiL in Moscow.
The lead in multi-axle military vehicle development at ZiL was taken by a new specialised design bureau (SKB) under the command of Vitaly A Grachev, located within the Moscow ZiL plant. Series production of the larger all-terrain designs was however undertaken at BAZ in Bryansk, hence the frequent conflation between the ZiL and BAZ nomenclature in Western publications.
The choice of ZiL for the development of a new range of strategic military vehicles was not incidental. ZiL and its designers had significant previous experience of all-terrain military load carriers such as the ZiL-151 and ZiL-157, and specialised vehicles such as the ZiL-485 amphibian, the Soviet domestic variant of the US DUKW. Coordination of these developments between the State, ZiL and other manufacturing plan…
