Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Rock Island
taking a look at a Czechoslovakian vz. 54 sniper rifle.
This is one component of the complete arms upgrade
package that Czechoslovakia adopted in the 1950s.
They would of course get the vz. 52 semi-auto pistol,
the vz. 52 semi-auto rifle, the vz. 52 machine gun.
There were a lot of Model 52s going on.
But they also wanted a brand-new sniper rifle.
And the guy they tasked with designing it was a gun designer by the name of Otakar Galaš.
He had gone to work in the field in 1933.
He actually spent a lot of time working in the UK,
but after World War Two he came back to Czechoslovakia.
And one of his first major tasks was in 1949
he undertook a pretty ... wide-scale study of sniper weapons.
And in the wake of this he designed what he thought would be
like the best sniper rifle for the Czechoslovakian military to adopt.
And that was a Mauser-based rifle in 8x64 necked down to 7.62x64,
which is an interesting package. That didn't really pass muster.
... Starting around 1950 it became clear that Czechoslovakia
was going to not exactly copy Soviet small arms, but wanted to have
interchangeability with them, at least with ammunition, at least in some rifles.
Not the vz. 52 rifle, but - side note.
So anyway, Galaš is still in charge of the sniper rifle development program,
and he puts together ... two different prototypes.
One that is a Mauser based system, and one that is a Mosin-Nagant based system.
These are designated the zg. 51 rifles, and they do some testing.
And ... ultimately they end up adopting the Mosin-Nagant based rifle.
Probably on the basis more of politics than of technical capability,
because it's hard to imagine a Mauser-based system not being better than a Mosin-based one.
But they adopt the Mosin-Nagant, they want to have this pseudo-compatibility with the Soviet Union.
And that eventually leads to the vz. 54.
It is chambered for 7.62x54 rimmed, that's the main thing that it gets - well one of the two.
The other is that the ... CZ factory is able to make these from
stockpiles of Mosin-Nagant rifles that they already have.
They've got like 16,000 Mosin-Nagants in warehouses and they figure,
"Hey, you know, we can save some money by building guns up from those
instead of making everything from scratch."
Which sounds great, but ... almost every time someone tries to do this it kind of backfires on them.
And it sort of would here as well.
So the rifle is adopted in 1954, production is supposed to start in '55.
There are a lot of production delays that are involved in both the prototyping
and the development of this system, as well as its actual manufacture.
And manufacture doesn't really actually get started until 1956.
Ultimately about 5,500 of these would be made, but we'll talk about that in a minute.
Let's start by taking a closer look at what Galaš came up with.
Take a quick look at the markings here on the receiver.
"she" is the Czech arsenal code, this indicates that the rifle was built
at CZ's factory in Uherský Brod, which is in south-eastern Czechoslovakia.
The 56 is the date, the "T" is the Czech proof mark on there.
The crossed swords there are the Czechoslovakian military acceptance mark.
We have a serial number of Charlie 3214.
I'm not entirely sure what the serial number system was on these rifles.
I suspect that it's very much like the vz. 52 pistols
where they deliberately obfuscated the production numbers
by giving them quasi-random serial numbers.
I have seen examples of these with "A", "C", "H" and "F" prefixes,
and ... there's one that I found online actually that had a five digit serial number.
So the idea that this is like batches of 10,000 starting at "A"
and moving up as you would typically expect,
I don't think that's the actual case here, but I don't have better data for you.
So then we have our commercial reproofing down there.
The scope mount is also serialised.
As is the scope itself, and you can see it's got its own three-letter code there.
This is a Meopta scope, it's a 2.5x power scope as you can see right there.
Czechoslovakia did not use the Russian PU scopes,
they ... got their own from Meopta, which is based in Czechoslovakia.
So it's a good little scope, not anything particularly sophisticated.
You can see the windage and elevation. It's got a bullet drop compensated
elevation cam there that's graduated out to 1,000 metres.
It has a dovetail mounting on the side of the receiver that the scope is mounted to.
So the scope can come off. I'm not going to pull this one off
because these screws are on there tighter than I can loosen by hand,
and I don't want to take a pair of pliers to them.
The rear sight is the length of a 2,000 metre rear sight, but it only goes up to 1,200 metres.
And that is because ... the adjustment notches are in 50 metre increments,
and I think that is a good indication of
how serious they were about getting good accuracy out of these rifles.
This wasn't supposed to be something capable of just harassing fire,
this was intended to be a true sniper's rifle.
Galaš himself, the designer, was not just a firearms designer but also a pretty serious marksman.
He spent a lot of time practicing, he was a good shot, and he understood
what went into making a good accurate rifle.
The stock designed for the vz. 54 has a very nice pistol grip to it,
and it has a really good cheek weld to it.
Unlike the Soviet Mosin snipers where you have kind of a chin weld,
this to me is very comfortable.
The scope is low enough and the stock is high enough that ... it works out very well ergonomically.
The receivers and the bolt components
are original Soviet manufacture ones that Czechoslovakia had in its possession.
You can see that the bolt handles have been modified so that
you can open the bolt here and not hit the scope.
These look sporterised, but, well, it doesn't count as sporterisation
when a national military factory does it on a large scale.
On a few of the parts, like right there,
you can still see the original Soviet proof marks on some of these.
Here's another example, the bottom of the magazine has been serialised to match the receiver.
As, by the way, has the trigger guard.
There are new Czechoslovakian serial numbers all over this rifle.
But you can see some of the original Soviet proof marks on there that have been
partially removed when they redid the serial number.
There are also a number of clear Mauser influences in this,
Galaš obviously liked the Mauser and appreciated what it was capable of.
So you'll see a couple of spots where locking screws have been added
in a very sort of pre-war Mauser style.
The same thing was done to the rear action screw here.
So the deal is that this small screw tightens down, and it
simply prevents the main screw from rotating under recoil, or being bounced around.
You can also see a very clear Mauser inspiration to the rear of this handguard.
If you didn't know better, that could have come straight off of a 1930s Mauser rifle.
The stock and handguard are cut nice and short to avoid putting pressure on the barrel.
The barrel itself is about 30mm, about 1.25 inches, shorter than a standard 91/30 barrel.
A little heavier in profile as well.
And it has, again, a Mauser-style hooded front sight post.
Note that the front sight is in this case a round post, but not tapered at all.
That's the backup iron sight if you don't have the scope.
And then we have one more serial number out here,
a side mounted sling, again Mauser-esque there.
So here's the iron sight picture,
and the iron sights are actually usable underneath the scope.
There you go, it's a little tight down there, but it does work.
As for the scope itself, it has the exact same style of reticle as the Soviet PU,
it's just a heavy cross bar with a pointer in the centre.
And then the elevation adjustment simply moves the reticle within your field of view.
And then just the one other thing that strikes me about these rifles
is ... that yellow light colour of the wood combined with
the black painted finish of the rifle is distinctively Czechoslovakian.
If you find a really nice vz. 52 or 52/57 they'll have this same combination of colours,
you've got the really light wood and the black painted rifles.
So I think it's ... actually a really nice looking rifle.
If you don't know what you're looking at, they appear
to simply be someone's reasonably well sporterised Mosin-Nagant,
but the reality is these are extremely capable.
So the Czechoslovakian standard for these was that they had to
make a 10 round group in a 50cm by 50cm rectangle at 800 metres.
And ... that's a little hard to convert into a typical American minute of angle grouping,
but it is pretty darn close to a one minute of angle group at 875 yards.
So a ... 50cm circle instead of 50cm square
is just a tiny shade over one minute of angle at that range.
And that's no mean feat, like that requires
a seriously good rifle, good shooter, and good ammunition.
Especially when you're talking about something that is
literally based on surplus Mosin-Nagant receivers.
So you can understand why a tremendous number of the Mosins that were available as
donor rifles failed to pass inspection, and just weren't good enough for use in these.
And the product they came out with was really quite excellent.
As I said earlier, about 5,500 of these were built, as far as the best information I can find on them.
And they basically were manufactured until they ran out of donor Mosin-Nagant parts to work with.
And when they ran out of ... donor guns they just stopped making them, and that happened in 1958.
So production of these rifles only went on for a couple of years,
basically '56 through '58, and then they were done and that was it.
The rifles would be in front-line Czechoslovakian service until the 1970s,
when they were replaced with SVD Dragunovs.
At that point obviously some would stick around in the reserves for a period.
A lot of them were also transferred to police organisations,
where they would remain in service for several more decades.
In the early 1990s some of these were actually modernised a bit.
They were given new, sort of modern competition style stocks with bipods on them.
The scope mounting was revised to allow them to mount PSO scopes,
the same sort of scope you would see on a Dragunov.
That gives them a lot more magnification and an illuminated reticle,
so more capability than the original 2.5x power Meoptas here.
And those are designated either the vz. 54/90 or 54/91, depending on who's talking about them.
So some of those are also still around.
But overall I think these are a really cool example of one of the few countries
that perhaps could rival Finland in improving and, well, getting the most out of a Mosin-Nagant.
So, congrats to Galaš and Czechoslovakia on this.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. This particular rifle actually came out of the
collection of one Larry Vickers, which is a cool extra bit of provenance for it.
Thanks for watching.