Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction Company,
and I'm taking a look at some of the guns that are coming up
for sale in their February of 2016 Regional auction.
Now, most people are probably familiar with the SVT-40,
however there was a predecessor to that rifle
which is quite a bit scarcer here in the United States,
and that is the SVT-38. So I figured there are
one or two of those here in this auction,
so why not take a look at one of them?
A little bit of background on the Russian self-loading rifles in general.
The first such experiments actually date all the way back to 1907,
and that experiment was actually with a conversion of a Mosin-Nagant rifle into a semi-auto gun.
Which is a type of experimentation that really was kind of going on everywhere in the world.
Militaries were very interested in the time at being able to adopt a self-loading rifle,
but not have to pay for entirely new rifles.
So the potential for converting bolt-actions was very much interesting to militaries everywhere.
Well, this Russian experiment, like pretty much all such experiments, didn't pan out.
It was never really possible to efficiently and effectively convert bolt actions into semi-auto.
So that fell by the wayside. And then, of course, World War One came up.
The Russians did in fact adopt the 1916 Fedorov self-loading rifle,
often argued to be the first assault rifle in the world.
I'm not sure that claim quite stands up, but that's a question for another day.
Ultimately the Fedorov was a very complex and very expensive rifle,
and not hugely successful. It was not made in particularly large quantities. And after World War One
with the Communist overthrow of the Tsar and changes to society and the military,
the Fedorov kind of fell by the wayside. Well, the Russians started another program
of self-loading rifle trials in the mid 1920s, which interestingly kind of parallels the US
trials which began in the 1920s as well in earnest. The Russians had major testing in
1928 and 1930, which is almost exactly when the US was doing the same sort of thing.
There was a large batch of designers and rifles and possible ideas that were
being experimented with at that point.
... However, to cut a long story a little bit shorter, by the end of the 1930 trials the
two designers and guns that had really come out on top were Simonov and Tokarev.
By 1936 this had been winnowed down to Simonov actually winning. Now the
Simonov rifle and the Tokarev rifle at that point were fairly similar in operating mechanism,
and Simonov won. The rifle that was adopted was the AVS-36, which stands for automatic rifle Simonov,
Model of 1936. And this was actually a select-fire rifle, semi-auto or full-auto.
Unfortunately what field trials ... had kind of glinted at, but hadn't fully appreciated,
is that the Simonov was a little bit too lightweight. It had some fragile parts.
The firing pins in particular had a tendency to break. It was causing problems,
the rifle just wasn't quite durable enough.
And Tokarev's rifle was still there, kind of in the wings, waiting as competition. The Tokarev rifle was heavier,
but it was more sturdily built and it didn't have those problems. And
by 1938 opinions had kind of changed, and the Tokarev was actually adopted in place of Simonov.
So Tokarev kind of just squeezed out a win at the very end of ... this competition trial process.
Now originally there were two different versions of the rifle adopted, there was the ... AVT- 38
which was the automatic rifle of Tokarev Model of 1938, and the SVT-38,
which was the self-loading rifle or semi-automatic rifle from Tokarev (T) of 1938.
Now what we have here is an SVT-38, those are far more common than the automatic versions.
... Again this is a pattern that repeats all over the place, in a full-power rifle cartridge like 7.62x54 rimmed,
shoulder fired full automatic in an infantry rifle is simply not effective.
Dispersion is too great. You can't hit what you're shooting at effectively.
So not many of the AVTs were made, instead they focused on the SVTs.
These went into production in 1939, and they were produced primarily at the Tula and the Izhevsk
arsenals in 1939 and 1940, just those two years.
In total 192,000 of these rifles were manufactured, which is really quite a lot.
Now I mentioned these were produced in 1939 and 1940,
and, by the way, this particular example is a 1939 dated rifle.
They were popular, but there were still a few issues with them. Primarily they were heavy.
The Russian troops wanted to figure out some way to lighten this rifle up a little bit, and make it a little more
convenient to carry in the field. Now they were popular with the Finns,
between the Winter War and the Continuation War the Finns captured about 15,000 of these rifles.
So you will occasionally find Finnish marked versions with a little SA in a square.
And hey, you know 190,000 is nothing really to sneer at. However
by 1940 people had been working on this rifle,
and they'd figured out some ways to update it and improve it and the result was the SVT-40.
Which, of course, I happen to have an example of right here.
So mechanically these two rifles are identical.
If you take them apart, the internals, you really can't tell the difference
between the internals without knowing where they came from.
They both have a tilting bolt locking mechanism. They have a short-stroke gas piston.
The gas piston was actually pretty much copied by the Germans for the Gewehr 43 which would come a bit later.
Now you can see some of the differences here with the SVT-40.
The wood stock has been cut back, this metal handguard has been lengthened,
so there's more metal and less wood.
There has been a bayonet lug added, the SVT-40 actually came with a blade bayonet,
which are also bit scarce and expensive here in the States.
The ... SVT-38 had no bayonet capacity, that was something that the Russians wanted to add.
You'll also notice this very distinctive cleaning rod in the side of the stock of the 38.
They went to a much more traditional system on the 40, put it under the barrel.
And it actually has a spring-loaded catch at the front rather than having to try
and thread the end of the cleaning rod into some sort of plug here, or
allow it to simply come loose under recoil. They have a spring-loaded catch, which is kind of a cool addition.
Beyond that, and the general shape of the stock, the stocks were lightened up.
They're beefier (especially right around here), beefier on the 38s than they are on the 40s.
Other than that, these rifles are mechanically identical.
And the Russians would go on to make about 1.5 million of these SVT-40s.
Behind the M1 Garand, they're one of the highest production self-loading rifles of World War Two.
So a lot of people think that the US was really the only country in World War Two to have semi-automatic rifles.
It's not really true, the US is the only country that had a policy of actually
issuing a self-loading rifle to every single infantry frontline soldier.
However the Russians, in particular, issued literally millions of self-loading rifles themselves as well.
They just had a lot more troops that needed guns, and they didn't
have enough production to give every single person a semi-auto.
Now interestingly, the SVT-40 was also intended to be Russia's first semi-automatic sniper rifle.
And ... the early guns all have rails on the receiver to accept a kind of a saddle, a rear mounted scope mount.
Unfortunately, Russian testing found that it was difficult to exactly predict the first round impact from these rifles.
So if you took a cold bore shot, it never quite went in the same place every time.
There was enough problem with dispersion of those that they just were not acceptable as a sniper rifle.
So the sniper program with these was abandoned by the end of 1941,
and the Russians went back to using the 91/30 Mosin-Nagant as a sniper rifle.
So you will find a very small number of these that actually have a cut back here
for a scope mount. There are rails here and then there's also a cut in the receiver
that allows the scope mount to lock in place. Those are quite rare,
what you more typically find is, in fact what this one is in this particular auction,
which is a rifle that has the rails, but not the cut. And you can still fit the scope mount on,
it just doesn't quite go all the way forward, so.
A lot of people like the look of the scoped SVT-40s. They're a cool rifle, you know, a World War Two
full-sized combat rifle with a telescopic sight. That's an interesting and neat group of rifles to collect.
At any rate, both of these are up for sale here at Rock Island.
So if you would like to have ... in fact they are in the same lot.
So if you buy one, you get the other as well. If you would be interested in adding them both to your collection,
take a look at the description text in the link below,
that will take you to Rock Island's catalogue page on the two guns.
You can take a look at their pictures, see a picture of the scope that was on this which I took off for this video.
And if you decide you just really want them, then go ahead and come down here in
person to participate in the auction, or place a bid on-line through their website.
Thanks for watching.