"You make us fly on "coffins"!" - Pavel Rychagov, commander of the Red Army Air Force, told Stalin in early 1941, who paid for his frankness with his life: he was arrested on the third day of the war and shot at the end of October, when the Germans were already near Moscow, - which only confirmed his innocence! Moreover, Rychagov's words can be attributed not only to the "Stalinist falcons," but also to tank troops. Contrary to popular myths about the "superiority of Soviet technology," the Red Army was inferior to the enemy in all respects, and rare successes in aircraft and tank construction were the result of theft and copying of Western achievements. Judging by the catastrophic beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet government really forced the army to FIGHT ON THE "COFFINS," paying for the glaring mistakes of military planning with monstrous losses and colossal casualties. How could this happen? Why, according to academician P.L. Kapitsa, "in relation to technical progress" the USSR turned into a "complete colony of the West"? Through whose fault Soviet science lagged behind world leaders for decades, and the troops bled without reliable equipment and modern controls, guidance, reconnaissance, communications?.. Answering the most uncomfortable and painful questions, this book proves that the catchphrase "Order in the tank troops!" is nothing more than a propaganda myth, that the Red Army was under the Stalinist monstrous state - huge, hulking, obnoxiously managed, technically backward - having demonstrated the inefficiency of the slave system in the age of technology the hard way.