[3][4] It stars Alexander Petrov as Junior Lieutenant Ivushkin, with Viktor Dobronravov, Irina Starshenbaum, Anton Bogdanov, Yuri Borisov, Semyon Treskunov, and Artyom Bystrov.

The film was released to generally positive reviews,[8] with critics praising the production quality and visual effects.

It is in second place on Russia's biggest blockbusters list with over 8.5 million viewers and 2 billion rubles, and is currently the tenth-highest grossing Russian film of all time.

In November 1941, just outside Moscow, Red Army Junior Lieutenant Nikolai Ivushkin is driving a ramshackle truck and trailer with a young private named Vasiliy beside him.

Nikolai and his crew lay an ambush for a platoon of German panzers commanded by Hauptmann (Captain) Klaus Jäger .

Three years later, in 1944, Jäger, now a Standartenführer (Colonel), gains permission from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and General Heinz Guderian to recruit an experienced tank crew from Soviet POWs in a concentration camp to act as opponents for training the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend.

At first, the other tankers refuse to take part, but Nikolai convinces them with a speech in Russian, highlighting his plan to escape, which is understood by Anya.

Not trusting the Soviets, Jäger orders anti-tank mines laid around the entirety of the training grounds, and this is again overheard by Anya, who informs and convinces Nikolai to let her escape with them, as only she can steal a map from Jäger's office showing a safe route out of the area, and gain a pass letting her out of the camp for a day.

Believing the T-34 is unarmed, the Germans are unprepared when the trainees' first Panther tank is knocked out, and a second shell is fired directly into the observation tower, killing most of the officers inside, except for Jäger and Guderian, who jump out at the last second.

The tankers pick up Anya at a bus stop outside the camp; with her map, Nikolai plots a course toward Czechoslovakia and back to the Red Army's lines.

!” They weave back through the woods, avoiding the gun and its crew, and cross the road again out of sight and disappear into the deep forest for a while, until they are in the clear.

After driving on for a few hours, Stepan suggests that the beast is good, but will overheat soon, so they pull off into the woods to rest for the night.

Instead of trying to pierce its front armor, Volchok fires a shot under its hull that ricochets off the pavement and penetrates its underbelly.

The Russian crew engages in a turret race, and moments before the Panther can fire, strikes a point-blank shot which detonates the German tank's ammunition rack.

Sinking their now-immobilized T-34, the crew reunites with Anya outside the town, carrying the wounded Volchok on a makeshift stretcher, and they make their way towards the Russian lines on foot.

On September 10, 2015, it was announced that the Mars Media film company would start production of the high-budget war action drama T-34.

[11][12] Later, producer Leonard Blavatnik, an investor, owner of Amedia and Warner Music Studios, joined the project and chose this film from a large number of proposals, which was also due to personal motives (as Blavatnik's grandfather was a Red Army soldier) and other reasons - the best young artists, a first-class film crew and the successful experience of a partner, Mars Media, and personally Ruben Dishdishyan.

The Ukrainian Embassy in USA called on local U.S. cinemas to ban the film because they saw it as justifying and promoting Moscow’s hostile foreign and security policy.

In Fate of a Man, Ivan's Childhood, The Cranes Are Flying, Ballad of a Soldier, and Trial on the Road, for all the differences, there was one conceptual similarity: they showed how a person retains his humanity through the desire for peace and memory about him.

[18] The critic Valery Kichin writes in Rossiyskaya Gazeta that one cannot form an idea of what the Great Patriotic War is in reality: "According to the plot, this is a legend like Bumbarash or The Elusive Avengers, restyled as a script for a computer game called T-34.

And the actors here are not so much acting as playing: at the moments of the most implausible plot somersaults, a sly spark of cheerful excitement slips in their eyes.