In 1931 the Soviet Army conducted trials with the imported British Vickers-Carden-Lloyd tankette. The outcome was very promising. In 1932 the Stalingradskiy Traktorniy Zavod (Stalingrad tractor plant or STZ) decided to base two new tractor designs on this vehicle with one intended for agricultural use and the other for the all-terrain transportation of supplies and towing of artillery pieces for the military. Both designs were influenced by the US International TA-40 crawler tractor. The military design received the designation STZ-NATI-2TB - later to become known as the STZ-5 2TB or STZ-5 for short - while the agricultural version was designated the STZ-NATI-1TA. In the end the agricultural variant would also be accepted for Army use and would then received a military designation, the short version of which was STZ-3, to differentiate it from the STZ-5. However, to complicate things a little more, the full designation was different depending upon where the tractor was built. Those manufactured at STZ where known as STZ-NATI-1TA, while those built at Kharkovskiy Traktroniy Zavod (Kharkov tractor plant or KhTZ) received the designation SKhTZ-NATMTA. The two types can only be differentiated externally by the manufacturer's logo on the upper part of the radiator.
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