SVT-40 Rifle

Origins

The Red Army wanted a self-loading rifle through the 1930s and tried Simonov's AVS-36 first, a select-fire weapon too complex and too violent in full-automatic to succeed. Fedor Vasilievich Tokarev, the designer of the Tokarev TT-33 Pistol, won the competition that followed with the SVT-38, adopted in 1938 and blooded in the Winter War against Finland, where it proved heavy, long and sensitive to cold and dirt. The revised SVT-40 of 1940 trimmed the weight, shortened the cleaning rod, simplified the stock and added a sheet-metal muzzle brake. Stalin took a personal interest, and the plan was for the SVT to replace the Mosin-Nagant M1891 as the standard rifle by 1942.

Design & Construction

The SVT-40 uses a short-stroke gas piston above the barrel, adjustable by a five-position regulator for fouling and cold, driving a bolt that tilts down at the rear to lock — the same principle as the Belgian FN 49 and FAL and the SKS. The ten-round magazine is detachable but was usually charged in place with two Mosin stripper clips through the open bolt. The 24.6-inch barrel is fluted at the breech and fitted with a slotted muzzle brake, the stock is a single piece of birch with a sheet-metal handguard, and the rifle weighs 8.5 pounds. Its parts count and its machining demands were high for a Soviet weapon, and its tolerances made it less forgiving than the Mosin of neglect. A sniper version with a 3.5x PU scope on a side mount was made from 1940, and a select-fire AVT-40 was issued in 1942 as a stopgap for the shortage of light machine guns.

Combat Use

The SVT-40 went to war with the best-equipped Soviet units in June 1941 and in the disaster of that summer hundreds of thousands were lost, along with the trained men who knew how to keep it working. Conscripts distrusted it, factories were evacuated, and production shifted back to the simpler Mosin and the PPSh-41; SVT output ended in 1945. The rifle's reputation nevertheless remained high among those who understood it: Soviet naval infantry kept it, snipers such as Lyudmila Pavlichenko used the scoped SVT, and the Wehrmacht issued captured rifles as the Selbstladegewehr 259(r) and studied them in developing its own Gewehr 43. Finland captured and reissued thousands.

Legacy

The SVT-40 was the most numerous semi-automatic rifle of the war after the M1 Garand, and its gas system and locking are the direct ancestors of the SKS and of the Belgian FAL's. Postwar it was refurbished, stored and eventually sold as surplus, and Soviet and Finnish-captured (SA-marked) examples are collected in North America. It was the weapon the Red Army meant to fight the war with, and the war would not let it.