Mosin-Nagant Rifle Provides a Path from Modernity to a Mysterious, Violent Past By: Randy Tucker
Sometimes history finds you in the most unexpected ways.
During the summer of 2013, my son, Brian, my son-in-law, Adam, and I were working our way through the Bloedorn Lumber garage sale. As we checked out tools, hinges, trusses, and other bits of carpentry bargains, our friend Clay approached us from across the parking lot.
Clay’s arrival always livens up the scene. After his usual comments on the impending global oil shortage, he made a quick segue to firearms. “You guys want to buy a World War II Soviet combat rifle?” he asked.
You don’t just make such a statement to anyone. Some people would construe it to be the opening dialogue of a group of “gun nuts,” but there is much more to it than that. Clay knew a gun collector in the tiny Wyoming ghost town of Jeffrey City who ordered a crate of these rifles from another collector back east, and he was taking orders.
Mix a bit of tangible history, a little gunpowder, and some high-velocity, full-metal jacketed bullets, and you have the entry point from modernity to a mysterious, violent past.
30 Wars in 120 Years
The Mosin-Nagant bolt-action combat rifle takes its name from its co-inventers Captain Sergei Ivanovich Mosin of the Tsar’s Army and Leon Nagant.
The rifle entered production for the first time in 1891 and served as the Russian Army’s primary infantry weapon in World Wars I and II. The rifle is still in use today, with American soldiers and Marines taking hostile fire in Iraq and Afghanistan from rebels armed with the deadly 7.62 x 54 mm relic. In all, it has served as the weapon of choice for 120 years in more than 30 wars spanning from France to Indochina.
A combined four kilograms of Siberian hardwood with some industrial grade Ukrainian steel produced literally by the tens of millions made the weapon incredibly inexpensive, yet supremely lethal.
The rifle gained brief notoriety as the weapon of choice for the Soviet Union’s premier sniper, Vasily Zaytsev, when his story was retold in Enemy at the Gates (2001). Zaytsev killed 225 German soldiers, including 11 Nazi snipers, during the first three months of the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43.
Zaytsev’s Mosin-Nagant claimed the life of Nazi officers up to 800 meters away. Just the thought of Zaytsev taking aim on exposed troops hampered the movement of hundreds of thousands of paranoid German soldiers. The effect on German morale of this single shooter, with his already antiquated rifle, is hard to appreciate fully.
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Poster Comment:
I worked with an old Sudeten-German. When Germany annexed the Sudetenland, he volunteered for the Waffen SS. His father protested to the camp Commander that his son was being treated too harshly in boot camp. He was arrested and sent to the camps in Germany as a "dissenter". The last I heard his son still had not found a trace of him. A lot of people disappeared in those camps.
But the old guy I knew was captured by the Russians. He was riding on a wagon with a female guard. She fell asleep and dropped her rifle. He jumped off the wagon and retrieved the rifle and woke her up. He told me she gave him a big kiss and told him if she had lost her rifle they would have killed her.
He was one of the few to be repatriated. Many of them died in the Gulag as late as 1952.