Model 1845 musket

Origins

The Russian army of Nicholas I was the largest in Europe, and arming it was a slow business. Its infantry still carried flintlocks in the 1830s, most of them the Model 1828 musket built on French lines at the state arms works of Tula, Izhevsk and Sestroretsk. The percussion cap, which fired in rain and misfired far less often than flint, was by then standard in Britain and France. From 1844 Russia began converting its flintlocks to percussion, and in 1845 it approved a new musket built from the start with a percussion lock. This was the infantry musket Model 1845, in Russian measure a 7-line gun, since the bore of about 17.8 mm was measured in "lines" of a tenth of an inch.

Design & Construction

The Model 1845 was a conventional muzzle-loading smoothbore of its generation. It had a barrel of about 42 inches held to a full-length walnut or birch stock by bands, a percussion lock with a side hammer, a simple notch rear sight and a socket bayonet. The barrel was iron, the furniture brass or iron, and the whole gun weighed around ten pounds. The cartridge was a paper tube holding a round lead ball of about .70 inch and a charge of black powder. A trained soldier could fire two or three rounds a minute, and a company volley was dangerous to perhaps 200 to 300 paces. The musket was a sound design, comparable to the smoothbores of other armies, and it was made in large numbers. The problem was not the gun but the timing.

Service

Within a decade the smoothbore was obsolete. The Minié Ball, a hollow-based conical bullet that expanded to grip the rifling, let an ordinary infantryman fire a rifled musket as fast as a smoothbore and hit at four or five times the range. The British Pattern 1853 Enfield and the French rifled muskets used it; the Model 1845 did not. The Russian gun fired a round ball from a smooth bore and had no need of a Minié bullet, which only works in a rifled barrel. Russia had a rifle in service, the Model 1843 "Luttich" or Liège rifle that fired a belted ball, but only a few hundred per regiment went to skirmishers. The rest of the infantry carried the Model 1845.

In the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 this gap decided battles. At the Alma in September 1854 British and French riflemen shot Russian columns apart before the Russians could reply, and at Inkerman in November the dense fog that let the Russians close in was their best weapon. Russian accounts of the war return again and again to the "shtutser," the enemy rifle, and to the frustration of standing under fire from men out of reach. The army tried to catch up during the war. Some Model 1845 muskets were rifled in 1854 to fire a conical bullet, and in 1856 Russia adopted a new 6-line rifle-musket, of 15.24 mm caliber, that used a Minié-type bullet. The old smoothbores went to garrison and reserve units and, later, to the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Legacy

The Model 1845 is remembered less for what it did than for what it showed. The Crimean War convinced the Russian government that its arms industry and its army had fallen a generation behind Western Europe, and the military reforms of Alexander II that followed reached from conscription to rifle design. Russian infantry went from the 7-line smoothbore to the 6-line rifle, then to breech-loaders in the 1860s and finally to the magazine Mosin-Nagant M1891, all within fifty years. Surviving Model 1845 muskets are scarce outside Russian museums, and most that reach the market are the later rifled or converted guns. Other Russian arms of the period are covered under Russian Arms & Weapons.