Aircraft MGs
Vintage Saturday: Wingshooting
The guns are aircraft Degtyarevs (DA-2), and appear to not have the drums mounted when the photo was taken. Note the vane-type front sight, and the distinctive muzzle brakes.
Russia
General Purpose MGs
Pulemet Kalashnikova
Shortly after the stamped-receiver AKM rifles went into mass production, Mikhail Kalashnikov and his bureau of technicians and engineers produced what is arguably best general-purpose machine gun in use today. It was adopted into service […]
Select-fire Rifles
AK and StG – Kissing Cousins
When people see the AK-47 and the StG-44 side by side an know nothing about their internal mechanisms, the nearly universal assumption is that one is a copy of the other. The overall layout of […]
Heavy MGs
Vintage Saturday: Desperation
Tomorrow is Armistice Day, and we should all take a few quiet moments to reflect on the nature of war. For all its glamorization, war is the tragic and cruel destruction of life and we […]
Light MGs
Vintage Saturday: Maxim-Tokarev
Reader Ruy has sent us this great photo of a very unusual gun in action in the Spanish Civil War – a Maxim-Tokarev “light” machine gun.
Handgun
The Obrez and its Cousins
I’m not sure where it started, but the “obrez” has gained a decent bit of recognition among gun folks (particularly gun folks on the internet). The concept is a Mosin-Nagant rifle with the barrel cut […]
Book review
Russian Hand-to-Hand Combat Manual
It has come to our attention that our friend Boris Karpa – who helped us out translating a batch of test reports on the Dror LMG – has released his first work on Amazon. It’s […]
Anti-Tank Rifles
Vintage Saturday: PTRD-41 in Russia
“Fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is ‘Never get involved in a land war in Asia.’” I think the other was “Don’t count on an anti-tank rifle to […]
Vintage photo
Vintage Saturday: Shivering with an AVS-36
Invading Russian never goes well, for any of the parties involved. These two certainly don’t look they’re having such a good time.
Semiauto Rifles
Russian AVS-36 Rifle
Russia (or the USSR, for these purposes) had an early self-loading rifle in the 1916 Federov, but it was not a satisfactory combat weapons, for several reasons. The Soviet military held a number of trials […]