Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and today, thanks to the very cool people at Legacy Collectibles,
we have an NKVD model of the Nagant revolver to take a look at.
This is the little baby version of the revolver that was adopted by the Russian Imperial Army
in 1895 as their standard service sidearm. This is a post-war model.
I've got a separate video about this if you're interested in it. It's a very old video,
but it is linked at the end of this one if you want to know more about the standard Russian 1895 Nagant.
They made like more than a million of these things, a ton of them.
However, production ended in approximately 1917 with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution.
There were several years of internal civil war, strife, the Tula factory stopped building guns for a number of years.
And it wasn't until 1924 that they restarted production.
And when they did they started making standard full-sized revolvers as well as this,
which they, I believe, called the Commanding Officer's Model.
So let's dig in and take a closer look at this.
These are kind of iconic pug-looking little revolvers,
they kind of remind me of some of the short grip Webley revolvers that are out there.
But in comparison to the standard Nagant
there are only two differences: the barrel length and the grip length.
Both of which have been shortened. The mechanisms for the two are identical.
So the baby Nagants still have the same gas seal system. As you can see when I cock the hammer,
the cylinder is going to cam forward just slightly. That will seal the brass cartridge
into the barrel so that you don't have any flash, any pressure loss, out of the cylinder gap here.
That was something that they put a lot of energy into doing
that doesn't really have that much practical effect, but that's neither here nor there.
The actual specific barrel lengths here, by the way, are 114mm, or about 4.5 inches, on the regular 1895,
and 85mm on the Commanding Officer's Model, which is about 3.25 inches.
So they cut a little over an inch off the barrel length.
And even less than that,
maybe a centimetre, 3/8ths of an inch, off the grip.
The idea was in fact to make a more concealable version of the gun.
And these were in fact issued to agents of the NKVD, Soviet State Security.
And they were also issued to some other people like customs agents,
apparently legitimately people who were intending to carry these guns
concealed under civilian clothing, instead of in a flap holster at one's side like a military officer.
These are marked like any regular Nagant revolvers.
So this particular one is 1929 production, the star with the arrow indicates the Tula Arsenal, who did all of the NKVD models.
The marking ... methods changed a little bit during the 1920s,
so you will find these with earlier dates that actually say CCCP for Soviet Union.
You'll see the same thing in Mosin-Nagant rifles, the standard marking styles varied over time.
In fact, kind of interesting here that my comparison model is 1930 from Tula with the exact same marking.
And then just as my standard model has a serial number right there on the front of the frame,
so does this baby model.
One of the interesting kind of neat things about the Russian Nagants is they had
checkered wood grip panels not just on the sides, but also
inlaid into the back strap and even the front strap there, just a short little bit.
Well when they made the short, more compact, version of the gun same thing.
We've still got a checkered wooden strip in the back strap.
And we now have this little tiny square section in the front strap.
Which I would presume is there because the trigger guard is interchangeable with the standard model,
and so rather than change the tooling to make this,
it was easier just to put a little teeny spacer in there and then maintain the same butt cap,
same style of ... lanyard attachment. ...
... Like this looks really goofy until you realise it's basically just a spacer between other standardised parts.
The style of the rear sight here is just slightly different. You can see there's just a tiny bit more material
up on the rear sight of the standard model there,
where the NKVD model is just a little bit better rounded off.
Presumably to make it a little less likely to snag on the pocket when you draw the gun.
Notice that they also rounded the top of the hammer there, where it's not rounded on the standard gun.
The checkering on the hammer is still the same though.
And of course the loading and unloading procedure is the same.
The Nagant does not have a half cock notch because it does have a rebounding [hammer].
So to load it you just pop the loading gate open, you can then
rotate the cylinder to load cartridges.
To unload them, you have a nice, tedious, slow, manual ejector rod here.
Pull it out, and then you can use that to punch out your cases one at a time.
And when you're done, this goes back through the centre and rotates to lock in place.
Pop the loading gate up, and it's ready to go.
Now I've said that the NKVD model is mechanically identical to the standard 1895 Nagant.
And it is mechanically, but there's a little bit of a change that had to be made.
Because when the grip was shortened you can see that the grip panel now comes a little bit higher up the frame.
And the two screws that hold on the loading gate spring and the side plate are now hidden underneath this grip panel.
So the disassembly method is just slightly different.
On the standard 1895 the two screws that hold the grip panels in are actually running from the inside out.
So you can't remove them from the outside.
On the NKVD model here we can, and this is actually how we disassemble the revolver.
So if I pull that screw I can take off the grip panel.
Now I have access to these two screws,
and I can remove this one,
and I can take the side panel off gently.
So we have a block of wood that spans the inside of the grip,
and that's what gives you this little teeny bit of what looks like wood inlay on the front strap.
Notice how that's cut away for the mainspring.
And mechanically all of our internal components are identical.
So you can see that the trigger guard is the same,
Trigger guard removal is the same. The mainspring is also the same.
And when the grip was shortened you lose a bunch of this space, so the internal panels
look like this. You get rid of this big screw holding the wood in place because the whole thing has to come up.
There's just not room for it any more. You see the same basic style of cutout for the mainspring.
After a few years of production of these guys,
someone had the idea that perhaps they should be issuing this to everybody.
Like did they really even need the big version?
This is smaller, it's lighter, it's handier, it's
the same cartridge, same number of rounds in the cylinder, but it costs less, it uses less material.
Like why? Maybe we should just give these to everyone?
And so in 1929 they set up a trial to kind of answer that question.
It was a trial based on accuracy, and they found that at 25 metres, remarkably,
there was no substantial difference in effective accuracy between the small version and the full size Nagant.
They extended it out 50 metres, and that's where they found this thing dropped off remarkably.
It became very difficult to hit stuff with this at 50 metres.
Frankly, I'm impressed anyone could hit anything at 50 metres with one of these guys.
However, as a result the answer to this question was, "We should probably focus on semi-automatic pistols."
Which is probably the best possible answer to that question. So they did.
This was not chosen to be given any wider adoption, but it didn't immediately go out of production.
These would stay in production until 1932.
And ... when it shut down there after eight years of being made, there were about 25,000 of them total
that had been produced, which is a fairly substantial number here.
So they remain of course very rare today, especially here in the United States.
So a big thanks to Legacy Collectables for giving me access to this one to show to you guys on film.
If you're interested in cool firearms or firearms collecting, definitely check out their YouTube channel.
I will link to it down in the description text below here.
And of course if you don't know anything about the Nagant at all,
check out my earlier video on the standard Nagant. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]