Maksim Kolomiets

Mikhail Kolomiets was born in Moscow in 1968. He is a 1994 graduate of the Moscow Higher Technical Institute. Upon graduation, he did his compulsory military service in the Soviet Army. His childhood interest in military history gradually focused on the history of the armored vehicles and tank forces of Russia and the Soviet Union between 1914 and 1950. In 1992 Kolomiets began work in the Russian State Military Archive, at a time when a large amount of the Red Army documents dating to the...See more

Mikhail Kolomiets was born in Moscow in 1968. He is a 1994 graduate of the Moscow Higher Technical Institute. Upon graduation, he did his compulsory military service in the Soviet Army. His childhood interest in military history gradually focused on the history of the armored vehicles and tank forces of Russia and the Soviet Union between 1914 and 1950. In 1992 Kolomiets began work in the Russian State Military Archive, at a time when a large amount of the Red Army documents dating to the period before 1941 were still classified. Thanks to his specialization in the institute, he was able to obtain one of its allotted access passes, so he was one of the first to become acquainted with the documents of the Red Army's Main Motorized Armor and Tank Command from the 1931-1941 period. In September 1995, he became one of the first independent scholars to receive access to the documents in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kolomiets is the author of several dozen books on the history of the creation and combat employment of the armored vehicles of Russia and the Soviet Union. See less