Tokarev TT-33 Pistol

Origins

The Red Army of the 1920s carried the Nagant M1895 Pistol and a large number of Mauser C96 "Bolo" pistols bought from Germany, whose 7.63mm cartridge the Soviets liked for its flat trajectory and penetration. The 1929 competition for a self-loading service pistol specified a near-identical round, the 7.62x25mm, and Fedor Tokarev of the Tula arsenal won it with a design that owed everything to John Browning's M1911 Pistol and FN Model 1903 but simplified them for a peasant army's maintenance. The TT-30 was adopted in 1930; the TT-33 of 1933 simplified the frame and barrel lugs further, and it was the Soviet sidearm of the Great Patriotic War.

Design & Construction

The TT is a locked-breech, short-recoil pistol on the Browning tilting-barrel pattern, with the barrel's locking lugs machined as full rings around it to save machining time. Its trademark is the removable fire-control group: hammer, sear, disconnector and their springs sit in a single steel module that lifts out of the frame for cleaning without tools, and the magazine lips are machined into the frame rather than the magazine so a damaged magazine still feeds. There is no manual safety — only a half-cock notch — a decision that troubled every importing country later. The 4.6-inch barrel and 7.7-inch length hold eight rounds of 7.62x25mm, an 85-grain bullet at about 1,400 feet per second that penetrates helmets and light cover in a way no 9mm can. The grips are black plastic with a star; the pistol weighs under two pounds.

Combat Use

Issued to officers, tank and aircraft crews, machine gunners and NKVD troops throughout the World War II, the Tokarev was a reliable, accurate pistol with a poor trigger and a reputation for going off when dropped, and Soviet soldiers valued it chiefly as a badge of rank. Its wider service came afterward. China's Type 51 and Type 54 armed the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese volunteers in Korean War, and Chinese and Soviet Tokarevs were the standard pistol of the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong in Vietnam War, where a captured TT was the prized souvenir of an American tour. Yugoslavia's M57 added a ninth round and later a safety; Poland, Hungary, Romania and North Korea built their own.

Legacy

The Soviet Union replaced the TT-33 with the Makarov PM in 1951, preferring a smaller pistol with a safety and a blowback action, but production elsewhere continued into the 1990s and the design remains in use in Pakistan, Bangladesh and across Africa. Millions of surplus Tokarevs, most fitted with import-mandated safeties, have reached Western collectors, and the 7.62x25mm cartridge, with its extraordinary penetration, retains a following of its own.