[ Yugoslav Ruby ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a humble Ruby pistol, or a copy of a Ruby.
However, this is not a normal Ruby pistol,
this is a Yugoslavian Ruby pistol.
So Yugoslavia of course was a country that was
formed in the aftermath of World War One.
It was originally the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,
which lasted for a few years before it became Yugoslavia.
And Yugoslavia had inherited all the firearms
from the component countries that made it up, among them Serbia.
Now during World War One Serbia was allied with the Triple Entente,
and the Serbian army was pretty well routed,
and lost most of its small arms in a really disastrous march out to the sea.
They were reformed, the army was refitted and re-equipped by the French,
and they were given a whole bunch of French equipment.
Berthier rifles, and they also got 5,000 Ruby pistols.
France was of course buying these things by the bucketload from Spain,
and so they had them available as military aid for countries like Serbia.
Now Serbia would use them during World War One, but then after the war
they stayed in Serbian stocks, and they remained there into the 1930s.
And this is a 1933 rebuild of the pistol, let me show you.
The Yugoslavian provenance of the pistol is pretty clear if you have a look at the slide.
The slide has been remarked in Cyrillic and this translates to Pistol,
7.65mm (this is in .32 ACP or 7.65 Browning),
hyphen 9, the hyphen is not filled in with white, but it is in there.
And then what appears to us to be "BT3", which I believe is actually "BTZ" in Cyrillic, and 1933.
Now the "-9" refers to the magazine capacity of the pistol, which is 9 shots.
There are actually at least a few short-gripped models
that were re-marked "7.65mm - 7" because they have a shorter grip and a 7 round magazine.
The abbreviation here is for Kragujevac Technical Factory.
This is the factory that did the refurbishing on these pistols,
and 1933 is when they were actually refurbished.
Now there has been some speculation that Yugoslavia bought these pistols new in the 1930s,
but for a couple of reasons we can tell that that's not the case.
First off, we know from this two letter code on the back of the grip
that this pistol was made by Francisco Arizmendi y Goenaga.
And we have the same matching "AG" code on the magazine.
These magazine codes were ... requested by the French,
because magazines didn't often interchange between manufacturers,
and they wanted a way to keep ... the right magazine with the right gun.
There were a lot of small shops that made these pistols during World War One,
but most of them did not survive through the ... early 1920s.
Business for these shops really dropped off a cliff,
the Great Depression made it even worse.
In 1931 you started to get some serious Spanish restriction on firearms production.
So this shop didn't exist by 1933.
And on top of that, in the mid-20s, the Spanish government instituted a new proofing system
which ... you will see on basically all Spanish firearms from the mid-20s to the mid-90s,
where there's a series of three proof marks, including a year code.
And we don't see those proofs on this pistol.
Where if this had been manufactured in the '30s, even if it was under contract for Yugoslavia,
it would have had Spanish proofs here as part of the production.
However, what we can see are some really visible tooling marks here
only on the left side of the slide.
On the right side you don't have those marks,
and we still have the original Spanish serial numbers there.
The 20 is new, I'm not sure if that's a rack mark from Yugoslavia, or exactly what that is.
But there's no tooling marks on this side.
You can actually see if you look at the depth of the grasping serrations there,
and compare them to the left side, it's pretty clear that what the Yugoslavians did
was grind down this side of the slide to get rid of the original markings,
and then re-stamped the gun with their own new designation.
The original safety markings are still there, although they've been defaced just a little bit.
This would have said "Feu" for fire, and "Sûr" for safe, that one's still pretty clear.
In French military service these pistols were marked
with a pair of little five-pointed stars, right down here, when they were accepted into service.
This doesn't have them, it's not entirely clear whether
maybe they were removed, although it doesn't look like they were removed.
Possibly the pistols that the French supplied to Serbia were supplied directly from Spain,
and didn't go through a French military acceptance process first.
To my mind that's probably the most likely explanation,
because those markings were done by the French upon acceptance, not at the factory in Spain.
Other than that re-marking, this pistol is still in its original configuration.
Same calibre, it still has the original grips.
Although it's missing one of the grip screws, and there's a chunk out of this grip.
But clearly these pistols were still in Yugoslav armouries.
They are very simple and frankly fairly robust little pistols, and there is no reason
why they couldn't continue to see service in the 1930s, which clearly they did.
This is another one of those examples of World War One military surplus
kind of just getting everywhere in the world, and you see a lot of this come up.
You'll see examples of World War One surplus showing up in places like the Spanish Civil War,
and of course, all over the Balkans.
So these are pretty unusual guns today. The ones that are here in the US
are primarily, I think, US World War Two veteran souvenir bringbacks from various ways.
These have never been imported in any substantial commercial fashion.
So it's pretty cool to get a chance to take a look at this, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.