ZiS stands for Zavod imeni Stalina (Russian Завод имени Сталина, 'Factory named after Stalin'), the official title of Artillery Factory No.

In the beginning of 1940 the design office of V. G. Grabin received a task from the artillery department to develop a powerful anti-tank gun.

[4] The head of this department, Marshal Kulik, and his subordinates estimated that the use of heavily armoured tanks by the USSR in the Winter War would not have gone unnoticed in Nazi Germany and would lead to the development of similar fighting machines there.

There is also a chance that the department was influenced by German propaganda about the experimental multi-turreted "supertank" NbFz, i.e. heavier armour was attributed to this vehicle than it actually carried.

Production began on 1 June 1941, but on 1 December 1941 it was stopped by marshals N. N. Voronov and G. L. Govorov, their explanation being that ZiS-2 shells penetrated straight through weakly-armoured German tanks from one side to the other without doing much damage internally.

[6] In 1941, in an attempt to improve the anti-tank performance of the T-34 tank members of the Morozov Design Bureau experimentally equipped it with the ZiS-4.

Only a limited number of the T-34 equipped with a slightly modified version of the ZiS-4M gun with a new breech to simplify production were produced.

Although the high-velocity gun had superior armour penetration to the F-34 the small weight of its shell meant that it could not fire an adequate high-explosive round for general use.

On 15 July 2013 a North Korean cargo ship, the Chong Chon Gang, was intercepted smuggling weapons from Cuba while transiting the Panama Canal.

[8] Although no longer in active service, ZiS-2s remained in storage as part of the reserve stocks of various national armies as late as 2008.