Mosin Nagant 1891/30 Sniper Rifle

Origins

The 1891/30 sniper rifle is a Mosin-Nagant M1891 modified for sniper use. When the Red Army modernized the old Tsarist rifle as the M1891/30 in 1930, it also began building a sniper version, because the Soviet Union took sniping more seriously than any other army between the wars. From about 1932 rifles from the Tula and Izhevsk arsenals that shot unusually accurately in factory testing were set aside, given more careful finishing, and fitted with a telescopic sight. The first sight was the PE, a 4x scope that was based on German Zeiss designs and was mounted over the receiver, with a later version, the PEM, on a side mount. Production was slow, and in 1942, with the Red Army fighting for survival, the rifle was simplified to use the PU, the short 3.5x scope first made for the SVT-40 Rifle.

Design & Construction

A PU 3.5x21 optic was mounted on a bracket on the left side of the receiver, and the bolt handle was modified to allow for the new optic: it was lengthened and bent down so that it cleared the scope as the bolt was worked. Because the scope sat over the action, the rifle could not be loaded with stripper clips and was loaded one round at a time. The PU was small, light and tough, with a simple post-and-bar reticle and a wide field of view, and it was easy to make in large numbers. At 3.5 power it was modest by later standards, but it was well suited to the ranges of up to 600 meters or so at which most sniping was done. The rest of the rifle was the standard 91/30, with its long 28.7-inch barrel and 7.62x54mmR cartridge, and the whole weighed about ten pounds. Soviet factories produced hundreds of thousands of PU sniper rifles between 1942 and 1945.

Combat Use

The Soviet sniper movement made the rifle famous. Sniper schools trained tens of thousands of men and women, and newspapers published the scores of the best. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was credited with 309 kills at Odessa and Sevastopol, where she used both the Mosin and the scoped SVT-40, and toured the United States in 1942. At Stalingrad Vasily Zaitsev and the snipers he trained hunted German officers and observers among the ruins, and the story of his duel with a German sniper became a legend, later retold in the film Enemy at the Gates. Their opponents often carried the scoped Karabiner 98k. Women snipers such as Roza Shanina fought all the way into East Prussia. After the war the rifle went to Soviet allies. North Korean and Chinese snipers used it in the Korean War, and North Vietnamese snipers used it against American troops in the Vietnam War.

Legacy

The Soviet Army replaced the 91/30 sniper rifle from 1963 with the semi-automatic SVD Rifle, designed by Yevgeny Dragunov, which used the same cartridge. But the old rifle stayed in reserve stocks and turned up in conflicts into the twenty-first century. Genuine PU sniper rifles, and the many reproductions built from ordinary 91/30s, are prized by collectors. Zaitsev's own rifle is displayed in the Stalingrad battle museum in Volgograd. See also World War II.