Wikipedia has this image on their website of a T-64 Tank. The T-64 would have been a competant weapon against Nato forces of the period. THe T-64 combined all those progressive and daring elements of Soviet armor engineering. It had a powerful, smoothbore cannon, improved suspension from the t-62 series using live track, auto-loader which was very fast, and advanced armor (layers and cermiamic as opposed to rolled homogenous slabs of uniform steel). Also the tank had excellent NBC provisions, which for the warsaw pact armor meant that the tank could be fully sealed.
The river fording operations were very dangerous, and proabably seldom practiced. Tanks would line up together with each attached by towing lines. A lead tank would ford followed in turn by each tank in the regiment. The flotation of a tank was a difficult matter to estimate, and a stalled vehicle could be difficult to escape should something go wrong. I don't think SCUBA systems were ever employed, but the russians probably accepted that tanks could not be safley evacuated under water under any conditions. So what's a Soviet tanker to do? Well, ideally you stayed "buttoned up" in the vehicle and ride under the water until you safley come out on dry land. I can imagine the tension that such crews must have felt, and while I have no source for numbers, I suspect such operations were rare indeed. Wheter such tactics would have been used in war time is another matter.
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