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Tore’s Tuesday – The incredible journey of a single rifle through history.

One can safely assume that weapons used in a long and brutal war will have some dramatic history, but the wheres and whens are almost always lost. Now, more than a decade later, we mostly find weapons that we know were used, but nothing of its individual history. Not so in this case.

To start with this is a fairly common rifle, a Mosin-Nagant model 1891. This was the standard rifle for the army of the Russian empire, and a huge number was made. It was made in 1915 in the Izhevsk weapons factory, and with the dire needs of those days it will probably have been sent to the front immediately. So far a totally standard rifle, there are tons of them.

But, at some point between 1915 and 1917 this rifle was captured by the Austro-Hungarian empire. They used captured Russian rifles with captured 7,62X54R ammunition.

Come 1917 the A-H stores of captured ammunition ran out, but they could not afford to discard useable weapons, so they sent them behind the front to modify them. The chamber was reamed to take the 8X50 A-H ammunition. They did not modify the barrels, so they actually fired an 8mm round through a 7,62 barrel, which will generate an insane pressure before the bullet is compressed enough to pass through the barrel. However, the over engineered Mosin-Nagant can take such pressure. The AFZ stamp on the lock shows that this has been modified that way. We know this modification was done in 1917.

Then the rifle returned to the front, only to be recaptured by the Russians the same year… As it no longer could fire the Russian standard round it was sent to Finland (still part of Russia) to be repaired at the Helsinki arsenal.

The repair done in Helsinki was ingenious. The entire chamber was drilled out and an insert with a new chamber put in and soldered in place. It is well done and hard to see, but one can make out the line where the insert was put in. So, now it again was a Russian standard rifle in 7,62X54R. This was also done in 1917.

But, the Russian revolution broke out, Finland claimed independence and this gun, along with the rest of the repaired ones, stayed in Finland. Then, in 1918, Finland had its revolution and, of course, the first thing the revolutionaries needed was arms, so they took the arsenal and seized the guns.

There was an intense and bitter civil war, with Finnish Jäger troops that had been in German service sent to Finland under the command of the former Russian officer Carl Gustaf Mannerheim.

The civil war was brutal, as was its aftermath…. this rifle fell into the hands of the White forces and was stamped SA in a square as property of the Finnish army.

In the interbellum Finland developed their own versions of the Mosin Nagant, but these Russian M91 rifles remained the workhorse of their army, so one can safely assume that this one will have seen service through the Winter war of 1939 (against the Soviet Union), the continuation war of 1941-44 (against the Soviet Union, this time the Finns were allied with the Germans), the Lappland war 44-45 (Against their former allies, the Germans) and into the Cold War…

So, a rifle with quite some history in it…