One of the mechanically interesting guns that is really widely available in the US for a great price (or was until very recently, it seems) is the Russian M1895 Nagant revolver. It was adopted by the Imperial Russian government in 1895 (replacing the Smith & Wesson No.3 as service revolver), and ...

Sorry for the breathing you hear in the video - this is the final video we filmed in that session. The fellow running the camera is a disabled vet with serious lung problems who owns this rifle (among others). If I had realized his breathing would be audible I would have used a different mic setu...

We're still working on an extended write-up on the DShK heavy machine gun, but thanks to our friend Leszek in Poland, we have some nice HD video of one firing.

The Russian counterpart to to Browning M2, the DShK uses the same flapper-locking system as the DP and RPD machine guns, and is chambe...

We had the opportunity to disassemble and reassemble a Russian Fedorov rifle. The footage is a bit on the dull side, but I don't know when we'll have a chance to recreate it, so I edited this video together for the time being.

During World War One, the Russian Government purchased some 51,000 Colt 1911 pistols. These were standard commercial production guns, chambered for .45 ACP, and were shipped in 1916 and 1917, with JP Morgan acting as purchasing agent. They have serial numbers between about C21,000 and C89,000. Th...

For a long time, Russian small arms were patterned closely after French designs - the Russian 1809 family was based on the French 1777 muskets, and the Russian 1828 model - like this one - were taken from the French 1822 model. This is a .69 caliber (7-line) smoothbore musket, manufactured at the...

The Russian M1910 Maxim was clearly obsolete in the 1930s, and the Soviet military developed a replacement for it – the Degtyarev DS-39. These performed well in testing, but several major flaws were revealed when they started seeing field use (including in the Winter War) and production ceased af...

Prior to World War Two, the Soviet Union had a rather lackluster interest in antitank rifles - a series of guns were developed, but slowly and without all that much success. The Barbarossa invasion gave a very immediate need for just this sort of weapon, however, to give Soviet infantry units an ...

One of the really interesting variations on the AK to come out of Russian military development and testing is the balanced-recoil system, as exemplified on the military AK-107 and the commercial Kalashnikov SR-1 rifles. Contrary to common assumption, this is not a system to counteract to recoil c...

This is a very interesting WW1 heavy machine gun. It is a Russian M1910 Maxim that was repaired at some point using the brass jacket from a 1905 Russian Maxim. This may have been done by Russians or buy Germans, as the gun was also captured by German forces at some point and refitted to use Germa...

The AVS-36 was the first self-loading rifle adopted by the Soviet Union to be a standard infantry rifle, and it was not just semiautomatic, but also capable of fully automatic fire. Designed by Sergei Simonov over the course of about ten years, it would only last a short time in service before be...

During World War Two, both German and Russian soldiers often thought that the other side's weapons were better than their own. In particular, both sides often preferred their opponents' SMGs. In late 1941, a group of German officers formally requested that Germany simply copy and produce the PPSh...

Developed by the Soviet Union primarily as an antiaircraft weapon (and used to good effect in that role through World War Two), the DShK heavy machine gun was modernized almost immediately upon adoption. The first batch of new DShKM guns entered production in February of 1945. The final pattern w...

Yesterday we looked at the history and the mechanics of the Soviet heavy machine guns from World War Two, the DShK-38. Today, we are taking it out to the range!

The Soviet Union recognized the need for a modernized machine gun to replace the Maxim, and in the late 1920s Degtyarev began work on a “universal” type of gun. This would be air cooled, use standard Maxim belts and 7.62x54R ammunition, and used as a tripod mounted infantry gun, a vehicle mounte...

Today we are looking at a Chinese Type 56 RPD, but we will be focusing on the basic design and why it was adopted in the Soviet Union rather than the details of its use in China. The RPD was the result of research into reduced-power cartridges to replace the 7.62x54R for infantry use. While that ...

Despite having early experience with the Madsen LMG prior to World War One, the Soviet military opted to follow the German path of machine gun development after the war. Valuing the sustained firepower of belt-fed guns like the MG08-15 and MG08-18 over the portability of guns like the BAR or Lewi...

The Soviet Union began to take an interest in military suppressors in the early 1930s, and experimented with things like suppressors for the DP light machine gun. Through the 1930s a variety of different designs were tested, but none were found really suitable. Everything they tested was deemed t...

In 1925 the USSR began a program to develop a heavy machine gun for antiaircraft use. After some initial experimentation with a converted Dreyse machine gun, they brought in Degtyarev to scale up his recently-adopted light machine gun to the task. Degtyarev’s first design was ready in 1930, and u...

The Kholodovskii Mosin was the result of a Russian ordnance project begun in 1912 to improve the M91 Mosin Nagant rifle. Lieutenant-General Nikolai Kholodovskii and the Tula Arsenal were to cooperate to develop rifle that was lighter, more accurate, and more shooter-friendly than the M91. This wo...

The creation of a short and handy Mosin Nagant carbine to complement the standard M891 was prompted by the Russo-Japanese War. Lots of Russian troops with roles other than infantry - machine gun and artillery crews in particular - were unnecessarily burdened with full length rifles, and the Model...

Today we are taking a look at an early production M1891 Mosin Nagant rifle. This one has had quite a busy history...it was originally manufactured at the Izhevsk Arsenal in 1894, with several of the features of a very early M91 (like the palm rest on the trigger guard and the sling swivel on the ...

After finishing his work on the PPSh-41 submachine gun, Georgiy Semyonovich Shpagin was tasked with creating a simplified flare or signal pistol for the Red Army. They had entered the war with a 1930 pattern type, which was quite nice, but more expensive than really necessary. Shpagin first creat...

How did people determine chamber pressure in the years before computers and fancy electronics? Well, by squishing a calibrated slug of copper. Factories would convert rifles specifically for pressure testing use by adding a pressure ring around the chamber, drilling a hole in it, and then threadi...