Landships II

I think I've managed to piece together some definite reasons why those stories of Soviet Mk Vs used in WW2 are in the main legends and myths.

In 1930 a series of international disarament conferences were held in Geneva. They concluded that heavy tanks were "instruments of agression" and all peace loving nations should abandon them. America, Britain and Italy had no heavy tanks and they didn't fit into their current thinking so no problem there. Germany wasn't allowed tanks and Japan had no tanks worth speaking of. France publically announced that it was scrapping its heavy tanks and decommisioned all the old obsolescent Mk V and V*s it still had (and quietly commenced development of the Char B2). Stalin wanted to make a public gesture (whilst still developing heavy tanks) and so ,as in France, all those Mk Vs left over from the civil war were shipped off to towns deemed to have played a key role in the Revolution, rendered inoperable and coverted into public memorials (and generally allowed to rust). Thus in theory there were no working Mk Vs in the Soviet Union after 1930. However in 1940 the Soviet Union had annexed the Baltic States and aquired some further Mk Vs. It seems that four working tanks were  stored at Tallin. These were deployed in 1914 in defence of Tallin in the role of mobile blockhouses. These were almost certainly the last Mk Vs to see action.