List of Soviet Weapons of the Great Patriotic War (WW2/Second World War)

Soviet Weapons of the Second World War stand out as most crude, yet very technological and effective small arms of the era. As we now have first book from the series published and in stock, with second one completed and coming this year, our research and work is now pointing towards the new title - Soviet Weapons of the Great Patriotic War.

In this list, just like in the book, we will focus only on those weapons that were produced and used in huge numbers. All pre-war small arms that never gained popularity or experimental units are reserved for further work.

Pistols

Pistols were truly a weapon of choice for the first half of the twentieth century. While they carried on to be an important part of the equipment in many countries, in the Soviet Union their use peaked during the Second World War. Well, at least in military capacity. But during the Great Patriotic War pistols were very common and actually used in combat on daily bases. We are going to cover only two pistols, which were actually used in millions - Nagan Revolver and TT-33. There were, of course, many more, including experimental and captured ones, but their numbers were insignificant.

Nagan revolver M1895
TT-33

Submachine guns

This class of weapon was designed at the end of the First World War and mysteriously didn't fascinate military officials. Throughout the interwar period, most major powers did not order submachine guns for the Armed Forces is any significant numbers, leaving them for the specialized or even police role. The wake up call for the Red Army was their own invasion to Finland. During the Winter War, Soviets lost hundreds and thousands of their soldiers and officers to submachine gun fire. Armed mainly with Mosin rifles, Soviet platoons and companies often found themselves shredded to pieces inside of an ambush organized by just couple of submachine gunners. So, the view on these weapons finally changed. During the course of the Great Patriotic War, Soviet industry produced unimaginable numbers of submachine guns. We are going to cover the main ones.

PPD-40
PPSh-41
PPS-43

Bolt action rifles

Bolt action rifles were represented almost solely by products of Mosin design. This included carbines and full length rifles. While being the main weapon of the Red Infantry, these manually operated rifles started to feel obsolete as the war progressed. During the later stage of war, in the process of occupation of the Eastern Europe and Germany, many infantrymen could actually choose an automatic weapon if the situation dictated.

Mosin rifle 1891/30
Mosin carbine M1938
Mosin carbine M1944

Self-loading Rifles

This type of weapon was the most desired for the Red Army in the interwar period. A lot of work was put into making a good, reliable self-loading rifle. This made perfect sense, but soviet designers could never come up with the rifle that fully satisfied the Armed Forces. Even a well known and widely available SVT-40 was not universally loved. Again, as we are only focusing on those weapons that were produced in massive numbers, we will only cover this one.

SVT-40
AVT-40

Sniper rifles

Soviet Union was preparing itself for using sniping as an important part of infantry combat and this work came to its fruiting during the Great Patriotic War. There was a number of problems associated with the optics industry and its application to the infantry rifles. Yet, after a while Soviet engineers came up with a weapon that is still used to this day - Mosin with PU scope.

Mosin with PE scope
SVT-40 with PU scope
Mosin with PU scope

Machine Guns

Machine guns are the backbone of any infantry unit. And Soviet Union knew this all too well - plenty of practice during trench warfare of the WW1 and then more maneuverable experience of the Civil War in Russia. The Red Army learned its lessons and had an impressive arsenal of both outdated and modern machine guns during the Great Patriotic War.

Maxim gun
DP-27
SG-43

Heavy weapons

Since the First World War the average load of each infantrymen was growing every decade. More powerful weapons and more threats to face dictated the choice of firearms. And the lack of rocket technologies during the Second World War meant that infantrymen had to carry very and very heavy weapons with rather limited firepower against the targets they were designed for.