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 TK, or a Tula-Korovin.
This is the first Soviet produced semi-automatic pistol,
which is kind of cool. It was designed by a guy
named Sergei Korovin. He was Russian born, and until 1905
he worked/studied at the Kharkov Technical Institute
... working on firearms design and manufacturing.
And he got himself thrown out of Kharkov in 1905 for revolutionary political tendencies.
So he left Russia at that time and emigrated to Belgium,
where he ... made residence in Liège.
Which is of course a fantastic place for people interested in being involved in the gun industry.
Got himself a job in a Liège gun shop making/designing firearms,
and actually had a pretty decent career until 1914, when World War One broke out.
Of course Liège is in danger and is quickly overrun,
and Korovin decides to go back to his home in Russia.
And he tries to get a job at the Tula Arsenal, but they're still not interested in him.
They probably still have a file on him.
And it's not clear exactly what he does during the war,
but in 1920/1921 he finally manages to get himself hired at Tula.
And by this point his politics are probably now working in his favour instead of against him.
Well, once he gets into Tula he starts working on handgun designs.
The Soviet Union is looking for a new pistol, they would eventually
adopt the Tokarev the ... TT-30, designed by Fedor Tokarev.
But in the lead up to that there are a lot of pistols being designed.
And Korovin in 1923 came up with a short-recoil operated .32 ACP pistol.
It showed some promise, but it was a smaller calibre than they wanted.
Eventually, by the way, in 1929 they would scale that gun up to 7.62 Tokarev
or .30 Mauser calibre, but it would ultimately lose out to Tokarev's design.
What did end up happening is they simplified it, they scaled it down.
So this is kind of a new design, because it's now simple blowback and now chambered for .25 ACP.
And the Tula factory decided to market this on ... sort of a commercial scale.
Now, they weren't selling these guns to just ordinary ... civilians in the Soviet Union,
but it did see purchase by a lot of security agencies.
So on the one hand you have like the really governmental like the NKVD purchased a bunch of these.
But then the military also purchased them to issue to people like officers
and other folks who didn't necessarily need a service sidearm,
but ought to have some sort of weapon.
So .25 ACP is ... this is a sort of a pocket pistol style of defensive weapon,
not intended to be a military weapon, just personal protection sort of thing.
So let me show you the details of it up close.
What we have is a simple-blowback, single-action pistol here.
It is striker fired, so you can see the tell-tale sign right there of a striker fired pistol.
This is the safety. Forward is the fire position.
180 degree rotation to the rear is the safe position, that locks the trigger.
We have an open slide here, vaguely reminiscent of a Beretta.
Now there's a heel magazine release, and the magazine currently in this pistol is not a Korovin magazine.
So, the proper magazine would be blued, it would have 7 witness holes here,
it would have a square toe to it.
And some of them actually have the Tula commercial arsenal stamp,
which I'll show you (it's on the pistol here) in a moment.
But that's what the magazine ought to be.
We have a manual bolt hold open, right back here the form of a little button.
So you open the slide until that button lines up with that scalloped cut, and that will hold it open.
Looking in a bit closer, there's our commercial Tula Arsenal mark.
We have a serial number here on the slide and the frame, and we'll see it internally as well.
Just under 41,000, which makes this a first pattern Korovin.
There would be three separate patterns, and we'll go through those in just a moment.
There's your sight picture.
What I ... like about this pistol is I think it makes a really good compromise of size.
Now the top end is a little bit tall, but in general this is a pistol where you can
get two really good fingers wrapped around the grip.
The trigger is in a reasonably comfortable position, the sights (for a .25 ACP pistol) are reasonably good.
It's a balance between being very compact and easily ... tucked away,
you can see it's a very thin pistol,
but also being large enough that you can actually get a reasonable grip on it.
And you could probably shoot this quite accurately.
So, a lot of the little .25 calibre pocket pistols are just so tiny
that you find yourself like trying to kind of hold onto them, and you just can't do it effectively.
This is a nice compromise, I think.
Now I mentioned that there are three different versions.
I'm going to go ahead and take the grips off of [this].
This one of course has wood grips on it, you will also find these with ... hard rubber vulcanised grips.
... So the first pattern has these scalloped cuts in the frame underneath the grip panels.
The second pattern gets rid of those, but otherwise externally looks pretty much the same.
One of the other things the second pattern will do is replace these screws.
So on the first pattern the grips screw directly into the frame.
On the second pattern they would have a little crossbar,
there would be a grip screw in the centre that holds on a crossbar that pivots.
And it locks into position under the sides of the grip frame.
And that's something that's been done on a lot of other pistol designs of the teens and '20s and '30s.
So about 230,000 they add plastic grips. At about 400,000 they'll move to the third pattern,
which is distinguishable because it doesn't have this lightening recess on each side of the slide.
In general the gun's made a little bit heavier, the slide in particular.
... The research is a little bit murky on this, but it appears that at this point
Tula, or the Russian arms complex, decided to start making its own ammunition for these pistols,
and they ... increased the pressure, the power, by about 20%.
So they pumped up the velocity on it. Think of this as .25 ACP +P.
They called it 6.3mm Tula instead of what would have been 6.35mm Browning.
And apparently the third pattern Korovin was made for this with a heavier slide,
which in a blowback pistol of course will delay the opening to a safe time.
Alright, we can disassemble this pretty easily.
The first thing I need to do is take out the safety, that's this pin,
and it's ... actually held in by the mainspring guide rod acting as a little spring-loaded detent.
So I just pop that in a little bit, I can then pull the safety lever out.
Then we're going to lock the slide open, right there.
And then to disassemble it we need to take the barrel out.
So the barrel comes backward. This one's nice and tight, so I'm actually going to use
the plastic end of a ... hammer.
Tap that back, and then that lifts out.
So you can see the little grooves on the side of the barrel,
those lock into the frame, right in there.
And then you can see the ... semi-circular cutout,
that is where the safety lever locks the barrel in place, to ensure that it can't move when the gun's together.
Once the barrel is out, then we can deactivate the slide lock.
You want to be careful here, because as soon as the slide goes forward
that will come springing out if you let it. That's the slide lock button.
And then we just pull the slide off the front of the gun.
Oh sorry, I probably should have de-cocked it first, but...
There's our striker and its spring, here's our main guide rod and the main spring,
and there's the frame.
So the mechanics here are really pretty conventional. There's an extractor at the top of the breech face.
The striker is going to sit in here. And you can see the little tail on it, right there.
The trigger is connected to a stirrup here that wraps around both sides of the magazine,
and when I pull the trigger it's going to pull this down.
That is going to release the striker, right there.
So once that goes down, the striker gets pushed forward.
Of course, ... what I introduced at the beginning is the distinctive feature of a striker fired pistol,
that's because that's where the striker spring sits to be held and compressed against.
Now these two stirrups are our semi-auto disconnector.
So once I pull the trigger, this comes down, which will allow the striker to go forward.
The slide will then come back on recoil, and it's going to push that stirrup down,
which is going to reset the sear, so it will catch the striker
and prevent it from firing a second time until I release the trigger and pull it again.
And then each time, pop, it resets for semi-auto.
We've got the main spring and its guide rod here.
Unfortunately, the spring on this one is broken in half. We'll just wind it up a little bit like that.
This sits inside the frame, like so.
And when it's all the way in place, the end of the guide rod pops through there,
where it will interact with the safety lever.
So that little detent on the safety lever there lines up with the guide rod
in this position. And that gives you a little force to keep the safety in that position.
And there's a matching detent on the other side to keep it locked in the forward position.
The way the safety actually functions as a safety is
when I pull the trigger, you can see that these two legs of the trigger come up into that cutout.
Well, if the safety is in the fire position there's a ... flat cutout there that allows
the trigger to go forward.
If the safety is in the safe position,
those two legs hit the body of the safety lever and can't move.
So really it's a simple pistol, but very effective.
Between all three of its variations, the Tula-Korovin was produced from 1927 until 1935.
And it appears, according to the literature,
a really quite remarkable 500,000 or more of these were manufactured.
Where they all are today is something of a question.
There's some discussion that perhaps they were basically rounded up and destroyed after World War Two.
Who knows? Maybe they're in a salt-mine stockpile somewhere still.
A few of them still survive, they still show up from time to time in collector circles
both in the US and Europe and more so in Russia today.
But I think a really interesting, and really under-known and under-appreciated pistol.
Now after doing this, Korovin would remain in the arms industry until his death in 1946.
During World War Two he continued to work at Tula,
and did a lot of design work on extremely simplified submachine guns and mortars.
The sort of thing that they would build, and then like issue to troops 100 yards out the back door
of the factory during the height of the German advance into Russia.
So that's where his work took him, and like I said he died in 1946.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, it's a very neat little pistol.
Thanks for watching.