[ Estonian M1935 Mosin ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today
we are going to take a look at an extremely
rare version of a Mosin-Nagant. This is an
Estonian Model of 1935 Mosin-Nagant.
And a big thanks to Texas Guns and Ammo
for loaning me this particular rifle to film for you.
Now the backstory here is Estonia was a part of Russia,
it was a province of Russia under the Tsars up until the end of World War One.
And rather like Finland when the Russian Revolution takes place,
when Imperial Russia falls apart, Estonia takes the opportunity to declare independence.
They declare this in 1918, they end up having a two year war of independence
until in February of 1920 the new Soviet Union
formally recognises Estonia as an independent sovereign state.
... By the way, going into 1918 the Estonians didn't have any standing army.
Of course their military needs were taken care of by Russia.
So come 1920 they now need to form a military,
they need some sort of state-based defensive organisation.
And they take a look at what small arms are in the country, and they have a mixture
of four different things, which is pretty common for this area of the world at this time.
They have Mosin-Nagants, this is the biggest batch of guns they have.
And this is because the Russian troops who had been stationed in Estonia
basically ... largely had Mosin-Nagants.
They had Arisakas that had been floating around.
The Finns had acquired a bunch of Arisakas, some of those got into Estonia fairly early.
They had German Mausers, there are of course 8mm Mausers
floating around all over the place in the aftermath of World War One.
And they had British Model P14 Enfields.
Now the Estonians really wanted to standardise on .303,
largely because the machine guns that they had ... available in their inventory at that point
were primarily Lewis guns and Madsen light machine guns in .303 calibre.
And ... the ideal solution would have been to standardise on the British P14, everything was in .303.
The problem was they just didn't have enough rifles or enough money to make that happen.
So they would try. They eventually kind of just discarded the Mausers,
they didn't bother with those very much.
And some of the stuff goes to the police or prison guards,
or people who don't really need a standardised rifle.
The Army and the KL, which is like the Estonian ... version of the Finnish Civil Guard,
the National Guard, the Defence Union, those guys would sometimes get second line weapons.
But the Arisakas are as much as possible
eventually exchanged for more British Pattern 1914 Enfields.
But the Mosin remains the most common rifle pattern in Estonia.
So in the early 1920s, looking at the defensive arrangements,
the ... new Estonian military figures, "Well, what we need to do is take all of these Mosins,
because we've got like 80,000 Mosins, and we need to like make sure that they all work.
Because a lot of them are in bad condition, they're maybe broken."
And so they take the next couple of years and basically inventory, clean and repair
all of the Mosins in service, we are talking 10,000 or 15,000 rifles per year.
The guns that are not serviceable they strip down for parts.
And by about 1924 they have about half of those guns,
about 40,000 Mosins, in good, actually really good serviceable condition.
However, they are doing a lot of military training and ... that starts to take a toll on the guns.
And by 1926 or so, like they've got five figures of guns now
that are not so much in really top-line condition, and so something again needs to be done.
And in the late 1920s the Estonians set about developing an improved pattern of rifle.
Because they look at the Mosin, because ... like they inherited this thing,
which is too big for me to even fit all in the screen,
they inherit the M91 from the Russians, and it's long, and its sights kind of suck.
And they're also by the way graduated in arshins,
which is ... at this time an archaic Russian measurement that no one in Estonia uses.
And the bayonet on this thing is this gigantic pig sticker.
And you put that on the end of the rifle and now man, ... just it's nuts.
And by the way, the sights are zeroed with this bayonet on,
which the Estonians don't really see any point for.
So how do we take this and improve it?
And frankly what they do at ... first is look to what Finland did.
And they have a program of modernising the M91s very similar to ...
what would result in the Finnish Civil Guard rifles, the 91/24s.
These essentially are we are going to remark the sights in metres.
We are going to improve the triggers, we're going to re-barrel them when necessary.
... Basic minor sort of upgrades.
We're not going to do anything really revolutionary, but that's the next step.
So they rebuild a bunch of M91s in sort of an improved pattern.
And then they start looking at, "How can we make this thing into actually a better standard rifle?"
And once again they turn to Finland and they look at what Finland is doing.
Finland of course at this point is starting to field the m/27 army rifle and the m/28 Civil Guard rifle.
And these are dramatically shortened, they've got better sights, they've got better triggers.
The Finns in particular put a lot of emphasis on individual competition marksmanship.
And the Estonians kind of look over and they're like,
"Hey, can we maybe take a peek at your homework over there?"
And the Finns not only let them take a peek, the Finns go,
"Absolutely you can. Tell you what, here's an m/27, go ahead and take that.
And you can just have that one and you can copy it.
And here's our "D" bullet (
here's our improved version of the Russian ammunition, you can take that, have that.
They hand them over technical details on the cartridge and the m/27 rifle,
and some machine gun stuff like, "Take it. Do your best."
And so the Estonians, ... what they do first actually is they develop a marksman's rifle.
The raw translation is like a "hunter's rifle".
And this is a shortened, heavy-barrel Mosin, much better trigger, better sights.
And it's intended to go to like the best shooters in every particular unit.
It's not really a sniper's rifle, it's still iron-sighted, but
it is a jaeger rifle, a designated marksman's rifle.
And they do that, ... the first ones come out in '31 and '32, and there's a formal pattern in 1933.
And they use the lessons of that to then develop a new shortened army rifle.
And it really is in the style of the Finnish m/27 or m/28, and that is the Model 1935.
So let's go ahead and take a closer look at this guy.
Everyone loves Mosin-Nagant barrel chamber markings, so let's kick this off right here.
This is pretty distinctively Estonian, we have "ARS", which is the Estonian arsenal mark.
And then "39D", that indicates that this rifle was rebuilt
in 1939 and it uses the Finnish D cartridge.
There's a serial number on the bottom there, and honestly
I have no idea what the mechanism is for that serial number.
They did not make ... a million of these rifles,
and I don't know how they figure out what serial number to use.
It doesn't match anything else that I'm familiar with.
Now moving on to some of the features here.
We have a slot in the stock, ... obviously copied from the German Mauser carbines.
A sling runs through this side onto this side, and then there's a buckle that holds it in place.
This is again a pretty common sling system for the era,
the Germans did it, the Germans were very influential at the time.
So the Estonians would copy it, the Finns also copied this for their cavalry rifles.
If we move to the action, there's not much going on here.
Still chambered for 7.62x54 rimmed, 5 round standard Mosin magazine.
In some of the literature there are references
to improved reliability magazines, which is something that the Finns did.
This appears to be a totally standard magazine, and it's unclear to me
if the 1935 guns were supposed to have modified mags, or if that was just experimental in Estonia.
Perhaps this one has been replaced, it doesn't match serial wise,
but that's what you've got going on here.
We have a reinforcing bolt in the stock, which is unusual and interesting.
The one other thing in the action that the Estonians did was to improve the trigger.
They really didn't like the original Russian M91 triggers (that is in fact empty)
and they wanted to improve it, they wanted to give these rifles a two-stage trigger.
And remember that this rifle comes off of the lessons
learned from their development of marksman's rifles.
So they have a two-stage trigger here with a pretty long first stage, it's just a light take up.
And then you hit a wall right there and then you have a really nice, crisp, clean break.
It's a fantastically nice trigger, something that the
Estonians may very well have taken some clues from the Finns on.
Moving forward again, we took a look at the receiver markings already.
And now we have the rear sight.
So on this side we have metric markings.
There is a new sight base here, this is ... similar to
but different from the original Russian M91 sights.
If we take a closer look and compare them, you can see that the Estonians
reused the rear sight leafs here, but they remarked them.
So you have markings out to 2,000 metres on the top of that leaf.
So you would move this back to an appropriate position,
lift the sight up, and then that becomes your long-range rear sight.
You can actually see the original Russian markings are still on the bottom of the sight.
Those are in arshins and they're kind of irrelevant,
the Estonians didn't bother to scrub them off.
But they did redesign the sight base here, so you have a different set of notches.
The Russians went every 200 arshins, the Estonians have 100 metre increments here.
And the "M" is for metric or metre.
They continued to use Russian barrel bands, no handguards.
Sorry, my M91 is missing its handguard.
The Estonians didn't bother to put an upper handguard on the gun
because they didn't bother to use a bayonet on it.
This will not fit an M91 bayonet, there's no bayonet lug.
It's like, "We just really don't need that."
They did design new front sight wings to protect their new front sight.
And these are obviously very clearly patterned off of the British P14.
That's the rifle that the Estonians really wanted to be using,
so it kind of makes sense that they would go with that.
And again the Finns also went and put nice big protective front sight guards on their rifles
where the original Russian M91s had nothing to do that.
Interesting to note we have a Russian-style slot for the front sling ... dog collar here,
but this is an M91 stock that has been re-purposed, rebuilt for the Estonian 1935.
And this is where the sling slot originally was on the M91.
So they filled that with a little round plug,
and then put their own slot back in place and then reused the metal keeper plates there.
I should also point out, the Estonians chose to use a standard weight Mosin-Nagant barrel.
So on their DMR rifles they went to a heavier barrel,
they walked that back on the 1935 standard army guns.
The barrel is 600mm long, that's 23.6 inches,
and that is exactly the same length as a Mauser K98k.
So 600mm was kind of a pretty typical barrel length
that a lot of European powers were choosing around this time.
Then it is also important to note that the Estonians never manufactured any Mosin-Nagant receivers.
They also didn't manufacture bolts or magazines, or a lot of the small parts here.
They did make parts for the sights, they made barrels,
because they didn't have another way to really get a hold of those.
But most of the small parts that they would need for maintenance of their rifle arsenal
came from this huge supply of unserviceable guns that they had got originally in 1918 through 1920.
When they take 80,000 total guns
and turn those into 40,000 good condition serviceable ones,
they end up with 40,000 rifles worth of extra spare parts.
And that was enough to sustain them all the way through production of this
and their sniper models, and maintenance of the regular Mosin-Nagant fleet that they had.
In total, 6,970 of these Model 1935 rifles were produced between the first prototypes in 1935,
and when essentially World War Two comes to Estonia in 1940.
200 of those were for the police force, the remaining 6,670 went to the Army.
Now in 1939 Estonia receives an ultimatum from the Russians.
And the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Finns get the same thing.
It is essentially, "We are concerned about German expansionist policy.
And for your own good, because we're all one big family here,
we need to open Russian military bases in your country.
And so you should just give us permission to do that now. Like right now.
And the Finns say "No", and the Finns get invaded and the Winter War ensues.
The Latvians, the Lithuanians and the Estonians are in a position
where they really don't have the military resources that the Finns do,
and don't really see any choice but to accede to this Russian demand.
Russia then immediately uses this access, this permission, to ... occupy Estonia.
So the Estonian military ceases production of new rifles in 1940,
and essentially becomes part of the USSR as a communist ... subservient state
until they finally receive independence once again in ... 1991.
So these never really saw combat,
there wasn't ... a formal Estonian war against Russian occupation like there was in Finland.
Some of these probably got used with the various forest resistance units,
movements that were prevalent in Estonia during Russian occupation,
but no formalised combat with these. So.
They have never been imported into the United States in any commercial quantity.
There are a couple of them floating around here, but they are extremely rare guns,
and I have no idea what the specific provenance is of the couple that are here.
But fantastic to get a chance to take a look at these without having to go to Estonia to find them,
although that's a trip I would very much like to do, and hopefully will be able to do.
So a big thanks to Texas Guns and Ammo for loaning me this particular one.
I'll be sending it back to them now that this video is done, sadly it is not mine to keep.
Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.