A highly illustrated study of the T-55 Main Battle Tank and its variants that formed the backbone of the Soviet Army during the years of the Cold War.

The T-55 is one of the most iconic weapons created by the Soviets during the Cold War and also one of the most widely deployed weapons in history. Like its younger brother, the T-54, the T-55 enjoyed a long career in the Red Army and even into the early days of the reformed Russian Army. Under their control it saw very little combat use or deployments, but it was widely sold to other nations and participated in many of the wars and combat operations from the mid-1960s to the present. The T-55 has been employed in almost every conflict in the Middle East and Africa from its introduction into service. Even today the tank is still employed by both sides in the Syrian Civil War, and they are also in service with Kurdish forces in the struggle against ISIS in the northern part of Iraq.

Containing 150 stunning contemporary and modern photographs, and written by two experts on Soviet armor, this authoritative book tells the complete story of the T-55, one of the most widely produced tanks of all time.

Stephen L. "Cookie" Sewell was born in New York State and is a retired US Army Chief Warrant Officer and Department of the Army intelligence analyst. He was trained in the Vietnamese and Russian languages and has been an active Russian linguist since 1974. He has also been an enthusiastic scale modeler since the age of 5 and has built numerous models of armored vehicles, specializing in Russian, Soviet and American tanks and armored vehicles. He was the founder of the Armor Model and Preservation Society in 1992. While author of numerous intelligence articles, he has also written extensively on American and Soviet armor and provided a great deal of information to other authors on topics that include Korean and Vietnamese air war activities. He lives in Aberdeen, Maryland.

James Kinnear was born in Great Britain and has researched the topic of Soviet and Russian military hardware since his first visit to the Soviet Union as a young teenager. He subsequently lived and worked in the post-Soviet Russian Federation and the other states of the former Soviet Union throughout the entire period of post-Soviet "stability", the two decades between the Soviet Union being considered a military threat and the Russian Federation finding itself again categorized as such in recent history. James has written hundreds of articles on Soviet and Russian technology. He is a formal contributor to IHS Jane's defense yearbooks and has published books on Soviet military technology with Barbarossa, Darlington, Osprey and Tankograd. He now lives in the Algarve, Portugal.