Origin
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was one of the two dominant military powers of the 20th century. Soviet arms designers produced the AK-47 (Kalashnikov), RPG-7, T-34 and T-54 tanks, and the Mosin-Nagant rifle — weapons that were exported globally and remain in use in conflicts worldwide.
Soviet Union Arms & Weapons
Overview
The Soviet Union (1922–1991) was born from the chaos of WWI and civil war, and spent its entire existence preparing for the next great conflict. Soviet weapons philosophy emphasized simplicity, reliability, ease of mass production, and suitability for use by minimally trained soldiers in extreme conditions. These priorities produced some of history's most widely distributed and durable weapons.
The Soviet arms industry, centered on factories relocated east of the Urals during WWII, produced weapons in quantities that staggered Western analysts. During WWII alone, Soviet factories produced over 6 million PPSh-41 submachine guns.
WWII Weapons
- Mosin-Nagant M91/30 — The standard Soviet infantry rifle; 7.62×54mmR; bolt-action; over 17 million produced during WWII alone
- SVT-40 — Semi-automatic rifle; technically excellent; complex; production limited vs. the simpler Mosin
- PPSh-41 — The iconic Soviet WWII submachine gun; 900 rounds/minute; 71-round drum or 35-round box; simple and reliable in extreme cold; entire Soviet units were armed exclusively with PPSh-41s
- PPS-43 — Simplified SMG; even cheaper to produce; used by Leningrad factory workers during the siege
- DP-27 — Light machine gun; pan magazine; gas-operated; the Soviet squad automatic weapon
- PTRS-41/PTRD-41 — Anti-tank rifles; 14.5mm; effective against early German armor
- T-34 — The tank that won WWII on the Eastern Front; sloped armor; reliable diesel engine; 76mm gun (later 85mm); produced in 57,000+ examples
- IS-2 — Heavy tank; 122mm gun; could destroy a Tiger at battle range
- Katyusha (BM-13) — Multiple launch rocket system; truck-mounted 132mm rockets; devastating area weapon; feared by German forces
Cold War Weapons
- AK-47/AKM — The most produced weapon in history; see AK-47 entry
- RPG-7 — The world's most widely used anti-tank weapon; shoulder-fired; reusable; simple enough that any soldier could be trained quickly
- PKM — 7.62mm GPMG; belt-fed; the Soviet/Russian standard medium machine gun; widely exported
- Dragunov SVD — Semi-automatic 7.62×54mmR sniper/designated marksman rifle
- 9M14 Malyutka (AT-3 Sagger) — Wire-guided ATGM; used devastatingly against Israeli armor in 1973
- SA-7 Grail — First widely exported MANPADS
- T-54/T-55 — The most produced tank in history (100,000+); the standard Cold War Soviet tank
- T-72 — Main Soviet battle tank from the 1970s; widely exported; still in use in dozens of armies
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AK-47
The AK-47 is the most produced firearm in human history: Mikhail Kalashnikov's gas-operated assault rifle in 7.62x39mm, built around loose tolerances, a long-stroke piston, and an almost contemptuous indifference to mud, sand, ice, and neglect. Adopted by the Soviet Army in the late 1940s and manufactured with its descendants in the tens of millions, it armed the Warsaw Pact, both sides of dozens of insurgencies, and became a literal flag emblem — the weapon as twentieth-century geopolitics.
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Cossack Shashka
The shashka is the guardless saber of the Caucasus and the Cossacks — a slightly curved, single-edged blade carried edge-up in the scabbard so it leaves the sheath already cutting. Borrowed by the Cossack hosts from the Circassian mountaineers they fought, it became regulation Russian cavalry issue in the nineteenth century and, in its Soviet 1927 pattern, was the last sword ever carried in large-scale cavalry combat, in the Second World War.
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Mosin-Nagant M1891
The Mosin-Nagant was Russia's service rifle for over sixty years: a five-shot bolt action in the powerful rimmed 7.62x54R cartridge, adopted in 1891 and built — through empire, revolution, and the Soviet state — in numbers approaching 37 million, more than any other bolt-action rifle in history. Crude beside a Mauser and loved anyway for working when frozen, muddy, or neglected, it armed the Red Army through the Second World War and its snipers made it legendary at Stalingrad.
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Nagant M1895 Pistol
The Nagant M1895 is the seven-shot Belgian-designed service revolver of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, unique among military revolvers for its gas-seal mechanism: on cocking, the cylinder slides forward to press the cartridge's extended brass mouth into the barrel's forcing cone, sealing the gap that lets every other revolver leak gas. Adopted in 1895, made at Liège and then at Tula, it served through the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Revolution and the Second World War, and the seal made it one of the few revolvers that can be usefully suppressed.
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PPS-43
The PPS-43 is a Soviet submachine gun introduced in 1942, designed by Alexei Sudayev and first built in besieged Leningrad. Made almost entirely of stamped steel with a folding stock, it used about half the metal and a third of the machining time of the PPSh-41 and is often judged the best submachine gun of the Second World War. About two million were made by 1945. It served with tank crews, scouts and paratroops, and after the war armed North Korean and Chinese troops in Korea, while copies were built in Finland, Poland and China.
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PPSh-41
The PPSh-41 was the Soviet Union's war-winning submachine gun: a stamped-steel design by Georgy Shpagin firing the 7.62x25 Tokarev cartridge at 900 rounds a minute from a 71-round drum. Cheap enough to make in furniture factories and rugged enough for the Eastern Front, it was produced in some six million examples and issued to entire battalions; Soviet tank riders with 'papasha' in hand are the defining image of the Red Army of 1943-45.
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RPG-7
The RPG-7 is a Soviet shoulder-fired, reusable anti-tank grenade launcher adopted in 1961 and the most widely used weapon of its kind in the world. A simple steel tube fires a rocket-assisted grenade, usually the 85mm PG-7V shaped-charge warhead, which can pierce the armor of many tanks. Cheap, rugged and easy to use, it has been built by the millions in the Soviet Union and many other countries, and it has fought in nearly every war since Vietnam — from Afghanistan and Mogadishu to Iraq and Chechnya.
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SKS
The SKS is Sergei Simonov's semi-automatic carbine for the Soviet 7.62x39mm intermediate cartridge, adopted in 1949 and made obsolete in Soviet service within a few years by the AK-47. A gas-operated, tilting-bolt rifle with a fixed ten-round magazine loaded by stripper clip and a folding bayonet, it was simple, accurate and easy to train on, and its second life was vast: China built millions as the Type 56, Yugoslavia, Romania, East Germany, Albania and North Korea produced their own, and it armed the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army throughout the Vietnam War.
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SVT-40 Rifle
The SVT-40 was the Soviet Union's semi-automatic infantry rifle of the Second World War: Fedor Tokarev's gas-operated, tilting-bolt design for the full-power 7.62x54mmR cartridge, feeding from a detachable ten-round magazine, adopted in 1940 as a lightened and simplified version of the SVT-38. About 1.6 million were built before the demands of war returned the Red Army to the Mosin-Nagant, and the rifle was prized by Soviet snipers and marines, by the Germans who captured it, and by the Finns, who considered it the best weapon they took from the Russians.
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Spetsnaz Trench Shovel
The Russian small infantry spade, the MPL-50, is a short, all-steel-bladed entrenching tool of nineteenth-century design that became a weapon in the hands of Soviet special forces. About fifty centimeters long with a square-tipped blade sharpened on its edges, it was issued to every rifleman from the 1870s onward and carried through both World Wars. Spetsnaz units made close combat with the spade — striking, blocking and throwing it — a formal part of their training, and it has become one of the most recognizable pieces of Russian military kit.
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Tokarev TT-33 Pistol
The Tokarev TT-33 was the service pistol of the Red Army from the 1930s until the Makarov replaced it in the 1950s: Fedor Tokarev's stripped-down Browning short-recoil design, chambered for the powerful bottlenecked 7.62x25mm cartridge derived from the Mauser C96's, with no manual safety and a hammer-and-sear assembly that lifts out as one unit for cleaning. About 1.7 million were made in the Soviet Union, and China, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and North Korea built millions more, arming communist forces in Korea, Vietnam and every Cold War proxy conflict.