#Avtomat

Last weekend, I took the major arguments of Kalashnikov conspiracy theorists head on, and one of those – which I hear rather frequently – is why he did not design any other weapons besides the AK-47.

Before the famous Tokarev SVT-38 and -40 rifles of World War II, a Soviet engineer who would later become famous in the West for another of his designs developed a light weight select-fire infantry weapon in the standard full-power 7.62x54R caliber. That engineer was Simonov, and his AVS-36 was set in the mid-1930s to become the foundation of the future Soviet infantry rifle squad, supplanting the aging repeating bolt action Mosin M1891 rifle. A member over at Guns.ru posted pictures of his demilled AVS-36 to the forum, a few of which are presented below:

The Fedorov Avtomat is an important milestone in the history of modern small arms. With the Federov, for the first time, an individual soldier could possess automatic firepower in a package small enough to move and fight with, while at the same time not significantly compromising the range or effectiveness of the bolt-action rifle. However, the weapon fell out of favor during the Soviet era, and was never produced in large numbers. By way of WeaponsMan.com (H/T to Hognose), we are brought yet more details of the Fedorov’s story, written by Alexander Vershinin for Russia Beyond The Headlines:

If you’ve spent any time at all in military history circles, you will have probably witnessed or been a participant in an argument about what, exactly, an “assault rifle” is, or whether a particular weapon qualifies as one. I, personally, have enjoyed this totally unproductive and thoroughly wasteful argument in one form or another more times than I could possibly keep track of. Although, maybe that says more about my memory than anything else…

The title of this article is an Anglicized version of the title of the article linked below.