Russia is famous for producing the AK rifle, an amazing design known for its reliability under adverse conditions. However, Russia has also fielded some rifles with questionable or just plain bad designs and characteristics. Here are some of the worst Russian and Soviet rifle designs to have seen the light of day.
Avtomat Shpagina Obr. 1944
While Shpagin is best known for his submachine gun, the PPSh-41, he also entered the 1944 trials to build an automatic weapon for the new intermediate M43 cartridge. While other designs—including Kalashnikov’s successful AK predecessors—used locked breech systems that were driven by gas pistons, Shpagin’s gun [3] was a simple adaptation of a straight blowback design to the new cartridge. In order to successfully slow the movement of the bolt to allow for firing, the bolt was extremely heavy. In a 5.5kg gun, the bolt weighed 1.2 kg. When the gun was fired, the vibrations were described as extreme. Due to the poor performance of Shpagin’s rifle, no further attempts were made to make blowback guns in intermediate calibers.
