The history of the development of Russian pistols, from the famous "Makarov" to the "Lebedev"

The press office of Russia's Kalashnikov Group, which develops the AK series of assault rifles, said that the company and the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs are preparing to sign a contract to purchase "Lebedev" compact pistols to replace the "Makarov" pistols currently equipped by the ministry.

Kalashnikov Group's "Lebedev" pistol data map

According to a report by the Russian Satellite News Agency on August 23, the Kalashnikov Group said that the current orderer of the "Lebedev" pistol is the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the pistol will replace the "Makarov" pistol it uses. The trial of the "Lebedev" compact pistol in the Ministry of Internal Affairs is nearing its end, and the Kalashnikov Group and the Ministry of Internal Affairs are preparing to sign a contract.

The report said that the replacement of the Makarov pistols of the Ministry of Internal Affairs with the new Lebedev pistols will be decided by the ordering party. Currently, the Russian force is equipped with about 100,000 Makarov pistols.

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has not yet commented on this news.

Kalashnikov Corporation has integrated a series of companies in the Izhevsk region, greatly expanding its product richness. Now it is a giant in the Russian military industry. In addition to light weapons (there are many types, and it does not monopolize Russian light weapons, but it also occupies most of the market), it also manufactures patrol boats, drones and cruise missiles.

KYB suicide drone (cruise missile)

The development of Soviet/Russian pistols has been quite successful so far. Before that, Soviet/Russian did not pay much attention to the development of pistols. Compared with the famous AK series rifles, they are not very famous.

The three major Soviet pistols

In the Tsarist era, Russia's military industry was weak, and pistols were very diverse, with pistols from all over the world. The main domestically produced pistol was the M1895 Nagant revolver, which was designed by Emil and Leon Nagant in Belgium in the 1890s. In 1898, the Tsarist Empire purchased the design patent for the gun and began full-scale production. The Tula Arsenal and Izhevsk Mechanical Plant in Russia were responsible for manufacturing the revolver, which had a capacity of 7 rounds.

This gun cannot load bullets by "swinging" out or "folding" the cylinder, but rather loading them one by one from the side. The bullets are rather peculiar, a shrunken-head bullet with the shell covering the bullet head, which is sometimes called a flush-head bullet.

The Nagant revolver has a solid structure, is reliable and durable, but is very troublesome to load and has a heavy trigger force, making it unsuitable for combat.

Others include the Smith & Wesson-NO.3 Russian revolver and the Mauser 1896 pistol. The Soviet-Russian Civil War was a mess, and with the intervention of various countries, the weapons were also a hodgepodge.

When the Soviet Union stabilized, it began to develop new pistols to replace various miscellaneous pistols. This is the famous TT30/33 pistol. This firearm first appeared in the selection of new military secondary weapons in 1930. After defeating the Luger P08 pistol, Mauser C96 pistol, Kolovin pistol and Prinostsky pistol, it was finalized as the TT-30 pistol and began small-scale production the following year. After the mass production of this model with several thousand units tried out, a small-scale modification was made. This modification was aimed at improving the simplicity of the internal structure and the processability of production. The improved firearm was redesigned as the TT-33 pistol, which became the main secondary weapon of the Soviet army before and after World War II, with a production of more than 1 million units.

The TT-30/33 pistol is a very classic pistol, with a short barrel recoil structure and a gun tail offset locking structure, using 7.62X25mm pistol bullets (this pistol bullet is developed from the 7.63X25mm pistol bullet, so that my country used 7.62X25mm pistol bullets for Mauser pistols in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China), with great power and strong penetration. As a military pistol, it was very good at the time. The production was extremely fast and the structure was extremely simple, but the internal firing structure and insurance structure of the firearm were also highly simplified, resulting in very simple insurance performance, poor safety, and easy to fire accidentally.

In addition to being equipped by the Soviet army itself, this pistol was also donated in large quantities to friendly countries. For example, my country's 54 pistol is a copy of the TT-33 pistol.

Although the Soviet Union had strong industrial capacity, during the brutal Soviet-German War, the Soviet Union concentrated its industrial capacity on the production of major military equipment. Pistols, which were dispensable equipment, had a relatively low priority. The Soviet Union did not have two people sharing one rifle like in "Enemy at the Gates". However, pistols could only be "self-sufficient on the spot".

This famous photo shows a very mixed group of pistols, including Luger and Mauser pistols.

After the war, as the Soviet Union updated its new generation of infantry weapons, it also developed a new generation of pistols, a total of two types, the Makarov pistol (PM) pistol and the Stechkin APS pistol. The former is a self-defense pistol used to equip combat units such as non-commissioned officers, officers, law enforcement departments, military and civilian crews, pilots and astronauts. It has an 8-round magazine and is widely equipped by the armies of the Warsaw Pact countries. my country's Type 59 pistol is also a replica of one of them. The latter is a large military fully automatic pistol equipped with special operations units and tank crews. Its positioning is somewhat similar to the current PDW individual self-defense weapon. It uses a 20-round magazine for semi-automatic and fully automatic shooting. Because it requires easy control during fully automatic shooting and requires a dockable buttstock, it is also called a submachine gun pistol.

Makarov (PM) pistol

The Stechkin APS pistol with a buttstock was often used as a submachine gun by Soviet special forces.

Both pistols are chambered for the 9X18mm Makarov pistol round, which has a small recoil and is easy to control. However, it is less powerful, and the Soviet army did not attach much importance to pistol-fired weapons at the time. Because the Soviet Union believed that pistols were meaningless in a world war under the background of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union did not even develop a submachine gun that used pistol rounds - if the AKS-74U is not counted.

The AKS-74U short assault rifle later replaced the APS pistol to a certain extent.

In the chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia found that the Makarov pistol, or the 9X18mm pistol bullet, was very weak. In the chaos after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a large number of Soviet body armor and other protective gear and automatic weapons were released into society. The Makarov pistol in hand was simply powerless to deal with it, and it could not penetrate the body armor at all. The Russian army and the powerful departments also found that they had to deal with a large number of counter-terrorism operations and needed to use submachine guns with pistol bullets. The 5.45X39mm rifle bullet fired by the AKS-74U was too powerful in this scenario.

The Russian army and its powerful departments even purchased some foreign pistols, such as the Glock 17. However, as relations between Europe and the United States deteriorated, this was clearly unsustainable, and the Russian army began bidding for new pistols, all of which were required to be 9X19mm Parabellum bullets.

At present, both the Yalykin PYa/M443 "Raven" pistol and the GSh-18 are in service, and the former is better evaluated by the Russian army.

The Yalykin PYa/M443 "Raven" pistol was developed in response to the Russian Army's new pistol trials that began in 1993. In 2003, it was adopted by various units of the Russian Army and law enforcement agencies as a standard pistol along with the GSh-18 and SPS.

The Russian GSh-18 pistol was developed by the Russian KBP (Instrument Design Bureau, КБП). Since 2001, the GSh-18 has been adopted in small quantities by the Russian Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Internal Affairs and special forces of the Russian Army, and began to be exported abroad in the same year. However, since the Russian military has already adopted a large number of Yarkin PYa as a new standard pistol, and there is also the Serdyukov SPS as a competitor in the special forces, the number of GSh-18 equipment has always been very low.

The SPS pistol is a special weapon with a magazine capacity of 18 rounds. It uses four types of high-speed pistol bullets, namely, SP-10 steel core armor-piercing bullet, SP-11 lead core ordinary bullet, SP-12 hollow point bullet and SP-13 steel core armor-piercing tracer bullet. Among them, the steel core of SP-10 and SP-13 are exposed outside the lead sleeve, and the surface is painted black to distinguish them.

However, due to the tight military budget of the Russian army, the number of new pistols equipped is not large. Perhaps only special units can complete the replacement of all equipment.

Russian special forces experiment, three people with three types of guns, from far to close: MP443, Glock 17, Makarov.

This time, it is estimated that only a partial purchase will be made for some special departments and law enforcement departments. Russia is poor.