Talk:IS-4

Undoing revision
Hopefully this citation is enough. It's by Nicholas Moran who did a in-person (interior/exterior) tour of the tank (last remaining?) at the Kubinka Tank Museum. I'm currently doing a split of the IS tank family (the text was directly from the page) and had another task come up before I could shore up the references. - MTWEmperor (talk • contribs) 05:26, 9 January 2019 (UTC)
 * is the Nicholas Moran wording appropriately encyclopedic enough? To me it seems a little odd to include. 68.229.214.195 (talk) 04:16, 10 April 2019 (UTC) (ping L3X1)

Split
This page was the product of splitting off the IS tank family page. Reasons for this split can be found in Talk:IS tank family - MTWEmperor (talk • contribs) 23:39, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

= "MDH", "Small Naval Generator" =

Nicholas Moran, while a generally good source, was misinformed about the detail regarding the nature of the IS-4's smoke generators. The letter "H" doesn't exist in the Russian alphabet. What he instead saw was "MDSh" (МДШ) - Sh (Ш) being a single letter in Cyrillic. This is an acronym for, roughly, "Naval Smoke Canister" (Морская Дымовая Шашка). These were electrically-detonated canisters able to be carried on the rear of various Soviet vehicles which would create a smokescreen. Two of these MDSh canisters could be carried by the IS-4, able to individually be remotely activated and detached by the driver as needed. Information is available here, including a scan of a letter dated January 1944 addressed to Lavrentiy Beria, part of the Russian Federation's released archives of documents from the Soviet era: https://www.tankarchives.ca/2014/05/smokescreen.html