SVD Rifle

Origins

The SVD Rifle is a Soviet sniper rifle. The letters stand for Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova, the "Dragunov sniper rifle". In 1958 the Soviet army asked for a self-loading sniper rifle to replace the bolt-action Mosin Nagant 1891/30 Sniper Rifle. The last attempt, the scoped SVT-40 Rifle, had been dropped in 1942, partly because it was less accurate than the Mosin. Yevgeny Dragunov, a designer of target rifles at the Izhevsk arms factory, competed against designs by Sergei Simonov and Alexander Konstantinov. His rifle was judged the most accurate and reliable, and the Soviet Union adopted it in 1963.

Design & Construction

The SVD is gas-operated, with a short-stroke piston and a rotating bolt. Its mechanism is broadly similar in principle to the AK-47, but it is a different design and few parts are shared. It fires the rimmed 7.62x54mmR cartridge of the Mosin-Nagant from a ten-round detachable magazine, and a special sniper load was later introduced for it. The rifle is long and light, with a skeleton stock of wood (later polymer), a cheek rest and a slotted flash hider. Unusually for a sniper rifle it can take a bayonet. The standard sight is the PSO-1, a 4x scope with a lit reticle and a simple rangefinder scale based on the height of a man. Early versions could also detect infrared searchlights at night. The SVD is not as accurate as a good bolt-action sniper rifle, but it is accurate enough for its intended ranges of up to about 600-800 meters.

Combat Use

The Soviet army did not use the SVD like a Western sniper rifle, issued to small specialist teams. Instead it gave about one SVD to each infantry platoon, to a designated marksman who fought with his unit and picked off machine gunners, officers and other key targets beyond the reach of rifles. The SVD spread widely to Warsaw Pact armies and Soviet allies during the Cold War. Its use in the Vietnam War was at most very limited. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong snipers mostly used the older Mosin sniper rifle, and reports of SVDs in their hands are few and hard to confirm. In Afghanistan after 1979, Soviet marksmen valued the SVD in the mountains, where fights often opened at long range, and captured rifles passed to the mujahideen. Both sides used it in the Chechen wars of the 1990s and 2000s. Iraqi soldiers and insurgents fired it at US and coalition troops after 2003, during the Global War on Terror, and both Russian and Ukrainian forces have used it in the war in Ukraine.

Legacy

The SVD has several variants. The SVDS of the 1990s has a folding stock and shorter barrel for paratroops, the SVDK is a heavier version in 9.3x64mm, and a modernized SVDM followed later. China copied the rifle as the Type 79 and the simplified Type 85. The Romanian PSL is often mistaken for an SVD, but it is a different rifle based on an enlarged Kalashnikov action. The American counterpart of the same era was the semi-automatic M21 Sniper Weapon System, but the US Army moved to the bolt-action M24 Sniper Weapon System in the 1980s, while the Soviet and Russian armies kept the semi-automatic SVD. More than sixty years after its adoption, the Dragunov remains in wide service.