I can't read Cyrllic - anyone know what it says on the side?

Did some digging. I believe it's "For the Motherland!"

За Родину - For the Motherland

I believe this beast is in the tank museum at Kubinka. Whether this is the original slogan on it or not, who knows? If it was "For Stalin!" that probably would have been removed after Stalin was de-emphasized following his death.

The ones I found came from this thread by Jozhik_Chernobyl'skij (nickname, obviously) over at Flames of War.

Kewl - thanks for doing the digging! Generally speaking, I find the "personal" touches on war materiel to be more interesting than the actual equipment so modified. Or, in the case of the page you linked, the *lack* of personal touched that were allowed on equipment.

I agree - hence my preference for items that were used by soldiers vice pristine examples of things.

The crewchief on one of our Charlie-model gunships painted "Sat Cong" (Kill Commies) on the belly of his ship. It garnered a lot of attention, usually in the form of green tracers...

john beat me to the cyrillic while i was off tending to my weekend warrior duties.

he hit the translation, and i would only add the pronunciation. you would shout this one out as "Za Road-in-oo" with the emphasis on the Road part of it.

i would also say that in this case, such a motto would probably fall more under the heading of "mandatory morale" rather than "individual crew pride".