Yakov Grigoryevich Taubin (Russian: Яков Григорьевич Таубин; 1900 – 28 October 1941) was a Soviet weapons designer. He is best known for creating the first successful automatic grenade launcher. He also designed a prototype gun for the Ilyushin Il-2 which lost in trials against the Volkov-Yartsev VYa-23. He was later arrested and executed.

Taubin was born in 1900 in Pinsk in the Russian Empire (present Belarus). The date of his birth is not known. His father, an accountant, died in 1915.

In 1929 Taubin entered the Odessa National Academy of Food Technologies (then called the Odessa Institute of Grain and Flour Technology) in the Faculty of Design. While there, during student military training at the academy in the summer of 1931, he encountered a grenade launcher, the single-shot Dyakonov. He set himself the task of creating an automated version.

In the fall of 1931, he sent a draft of a design, which used regular 40.8 mm (1.61 in) MG Dyakonov rifle grenades, to the Red Army artillery leadership, and it was accepted for development at the Kovrovsky Tool Plant Number Two. Taubin left the Odessa Institute of Grain and Flour Technology to head the development effort. Later, a group of experts led by Taubin continued this work in Moscow, being organized in the spring of 1934 as an independent design office under OKB-16 of the People's Commissariat of Arms of the USSR. Here, in the period from 1934 to 1938, under Taubin's direction, the world's first infantry automatic grenade launcher was developed and perfected.

This weapon, the AG-2 Taubina [ru], used a 40.6 mm (1.60 in) round with a fragmentation grenade based on the standard Dyakonov, fitted with a flangeless sleeve. The Taubina was magazine-fed and could fire single shots or bursts in either direct or indirect fire. The rate of fire of earlier models, already substantial at 50 to 60 rounds per minute, was later increased to about 436 rounds per minute, although the magazine was initially just five rounds.

The prototypes used a small powder charge which did not provide reliable operation, so the weapon had to be substantially redesigned. Initially gas-operated, in 1936 it was changed to recoil operation. The Taubina originally had a tripod mount and was later mounted on a light wheeled machine-gun carriage. Barrel heating and wear was small due to the small charge, so the maximum rate of fire could be maintained, but the charge was large enough to achieve a maximum range for the weapon of 1,200 m (3,900 ft).

The Taubina had some shortcomings. The extractor and ejector springs were of poor quality, leading to 7.2% of shots causing a failure. The machine was also inaccurate, with rounds scattering in azimuth. After each clip, it was necessary to re-lay the weapon.^{[citation needed]}

The idea of an automatic grenade launcher was opposed by Grigory Kulik, chief of the Main Artillery Directorate, and other military leaders. In 1937–1938, the Taubina was rejected as a company-level support weapon in favour of a mobile, cheap, and well-tested 50 mm (2.0 in) mortar, based on a 1938 design by B. I. Shavyrina.^{[citation needed]}