Compared with the British original, the hull was larger, the running gear was improved and the weapon mount was modified to take a Soviet 7.62 mm DT machine gun.

The T-27 saw active service in the Soviet republics of Central Asia during the 1930s, where the tankettes were used in campaigns against basmachis.

The Red Army found them reliable and simple to operate, but the T-27 coped poorly with swampy and snowy terrain due to the narrowness of its tracks.

[4] Some experiments were also made to equip T-27s with more advanced weapons, such as flamethrowers and recoilless guns, but these did not prove successful.

It was also the first Soviet tracked vehicle transported by plane (a single tankette could be mounted below the fuselage of the TB-3 bomber).