This year marks the 90th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding designer-gunsmith, creator of the legendary SVD sniper rifle, Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov.
Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov was born on February 20, 1920 in the city of Izhevsk. Both the grandfather and the great-grandfather of the future designer were gunsmiths, which, apparently, predetermined his fate. In 1934, after finishing seven classes of a comprehensive school, he entered the Industrial College, which trained specialists for an arms factory. There, Yevgeny Fedorovich received not only theoretical, but also practical training, in the morning the students of the technical school spent 4-5 hours in class, and in the evening they worked for 4 hours in workshops, where they mastered plumbing, learned to work on turning and milling machines. Despite the intense mode of study, there was time for hobbies: Dragunov was seriously involved in shooting sports and by the time he graduated from the technical school he was already a first-class shooting sports instructor. After graduating from the technical school, Evgeny Fedorovich was sent to an arms factory, where he began to work as a technologist in a stock shop.
In the fall of 1939, Dragunov was drafted into the ranks of the Red Army and sent to serve in the Far East. After two months of service, he was sent to the school of junior commanders of the AIR (artillery instrumental reconnaissance). Successes in shooting sports helped Evgeny Fedorovich in the further course of his service, after graduation he was appointed a gunsmith of the school. When, at the beginning of the war, the Far Eastern Artillery School was formed on the basis of the school, Dragunov became the senior weapons master of the school. In this position, he served until demobilization in the fall of 1945.
In January 1946 Dragunov came to the plant again. Taking into account the experience of the army service, the personnel department sent Yevgeny Fedorovich to the department of the chief designer for the position of a research technician. Dragunov began work in the bureau of support for the current production of the Mosin rifle and was included in the group investigating the causes of the emergency that occurred at the production site. Taking into account the experience of the war, a new type of test was introduced into the technical specifications for the rifle - firing 50 shots with the maximum possible rate of fire, while the magazine was loaded from the clip. During the tests, it was found that in most rifles, when sending cartridges with the bolt, the upper - the first cartridge engages with the edge of the lower - the second cartridge, and so strongly that it is not sent to the barrel even after two or three blows with the palm of the hand on the bolt handle.
Studies of current production rifles have not shown any deviations in the dimensions of parts from those of the drawing. We tested two rifles produced in 1897 and 1907 and received the same delay - it became clear that the rifle had nothing to do with it. Further research showed that the reason for the delays was a change in the shape of the rim of the sleeve, made in the 30s to increase the reliability of the ShKAS aircraft machine gun. On cartridges with the rim of the old form, the rifle worked without delay. This defect was irreparable and the famous three-ruler "died" with it.
The S-49 rifle designed by E. F. Dragunov brought the USSR the first world record in shooting
The first design work of Evgeny Fedorovich was participation in the development of a carbine chambered for arr. 1943, which was held in 1946-1948. The carbine passed two rounds of field tests, was recommended for the military, but in 1948 it became clear to the military leadership that the development of a more promising model - an assault rifle - would be successfully completed and the need for a magazine carbine disappeared. In an experimental carbine, Dragunov designed: an integral folding bayonet with a lower blade position, a firing mechanism, a forend and a barrel lining arrangement, and a sight sector was calculated. In addition, the young designer was entrusted with the finalization of the carbine according to the comments of the landfill after the first round of tests.
The sporting rifle TsV-55 "Zenith" had a new design of the locking unit
In 1947, Dragunov was instructed to carry out the modernization of the carbine arr. 1944 of the year. Evgeny Fedorovich successfully completed the task and in 1948 the carbine he had modernized successfully passed tests. The next development of Dragunov was the modernization of the sniper rifle arr. 1891/30 with a PU sight on the bracket arr. 1942 (Kochetova). The rifle had certain drawbacks, the main one of which was that, with the sight installed, loading was possible only one cartridge at a time, the sight interfered with loading from the clip. The sight was set high and when aiming, the head had to be kept suspended, which greatly tired the shooter. In addition, the sight bracket together with the base weighed about 600 g. Dragunov managed to solve the problem by changing the bracket design. Unlike the usual location of the sight along the axis of the weapon, in his rifle it was shifted to the left and down, which made it possible to load the rifle from the clip and created more comfortable conditions for aiming. In addition, changes were made to other parts and mechanisms of the rifle: so the neck of the stock became pistol-shaped, a trigger with a warning was introduced into the trigger mechanism, the barrel was weighted by 0.5 kg. Despite the heavier barrel, the new rifle, which received the factory designation MS-74, turned out to be 100 g lighter than the standard rifle, mainly due to the reduction in the weight of the sight bracket with a base of up to 230 g. never went. It is interesting that in these tests, the development of a young designer for the first time bypassed the design of such a weapon "bison" as SG Simonov.
The Dragunov sniper rifle (SVD) was adopted by the Soviet Army in 1963.
Option SVD with a plastic stock
The next 10 years of the life and work of Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov are inextricably linked with sports weapons. The situation with him at that time was catastrophic. Suffice it to say that even at competitions of the highest level, shooters used ordinary three-lines, selected, of course, for accuracy.
In 1949, Dragunov was entrusted with the development of a sporting rifle with high accuracy; when firing, the diameter of holes for 10 shots should not exceed 30 mm per 100 m. By December, the first batch of rifles was manufactured. Evgeny Fedorovich shot two of them himself and was amazed at the result, all holes were closed with a twenty-kopeck coin (the diameter of a Soviet twenty-kopeck coin is 22 mm). This rifle received the C-49 index and brought the USSR the first world shooting record.
Fundamentally, this rifle was not particularly different from the Mosin combat rifle. The main differences were a receiver without a magazine window with a base for installing a sports diopter sight, a heavy barrel with improved channel processing, a pistol stock with an adjustable butt pad.
Small-sized machine gun (MA) chambered for 5, 45x39
Later Dragunov created many sporting rifles, standard, arbitrary, for biathlon, but the TsV-55 Zenit rifle became a real breakthrough in the creation of high-precision weapons. The main innovation of the new rifle was the bolt with three symmetrically spaced lugs. Such a locking system more accurately and uniformly fixes the cartridge in the barrel chamber, significantly increasing the accuracy and accuracy of fire. The second "highlight" of the rifle was that the barrel with the receiver was attached to the stock only in the area of the receiver, while the barrel was hung out, that is, did not touch the stock, which saved it from deformation when heated. We can say with confidence that today no high-precision rifle can do without the use of these solutions.
In CV-55, EF Dragunov first used the shape of the box, which is now called orthopedic. In fairness, it should be noted that he was not its inventor. For the first time sports rifles with a stock of this shape were produced in pre-war Estonia by the Tallinn-Arsenal plant. The trigger mechanism of the new rifle was equipped with a schneller. Its use made it possible to reduce the trigger force to 20 g, practically there was no need to press the trigger, it was enough just to put your finger on it.
The small-bore "Strela" MTsV-55 was developed in tandem with the 7, 62-mm rifle. Locking "Strela" was also carried out on 3 lugs, but they were not located in front of the bolt, but in front of the reloading handle, behind the extraction window. This solution made it possible to preserve the accuracy of the three-point locking and, at the same time, to ensure the chambering of the cartridge without the risk of damaging the delicate lead bullet. New rifles received recognition not only in the USSR - in 1958, Izhevsk rifles were awarded the Grand Prix of an exhibition in Brussels.
In 1958, the chief designer's department was tasked with developing a self-loading sniper rifle. The complexity of the task was that the self-loading sniper had to be superior to the 1891/30 model sniper rifle. accuracy and accuracy of fire. In addition, the firing characteristics had to be guaranteed on a production model, instead of selecting and fine-tuning rifles, as was the practice at that time. An illustrative example is the American self-loading sniper rifle M21, which was obtained by selecting the most heaped M14s with the subsequent refinement of the barrel and mechanisms almost by hand. Attempts to create a self-loading sniper rifle had been made before in the USSR, Germany, and the USA, but none of them was successful. Due to the design features, self-loading rifles could not compete with store-bought ones. The fact is that the work of automation inevitably causes collisions of moving parts, which knock down the aiming of weapons.
Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov (sitting) with colleagues at work (from left to right): Eduard Mikhailovich Kamenev, Azary Ivanovich Nesterov, Yuri Konstantinovich Alexandrov, Alexey Voznesensky
Dragunov's rivals in the competition were S. G. Simonov and the Kovrov designer A. S. Konstantinov, who had extensive experience in the design of self-loading and automatic weapons.
Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov, in contrast to them, had experience in creating high-precision sports weapons, in particular barrels for it. It also helped that he himself was an athlete shooter. The experience of modernizing the sniper rifle mod. 1891/30 In the new sniper, many elements of sporting rifles were used: locking on three lugs instead of the then generally accepted double-rest, the design of the barrel bore and the pitch of the rifling, a convenient orthopedic butt. To eliminate the congenital defect of self-loading, the rifle's automation was designed so that the moving parts began to move only after the bullet left the barrel bore. To prevent the effect on the accuracy of barrel deformation from heating during intense firing, the barrel linings were spring-loaded and could move relative to the barrel.
The first results of field tests were natural, the samples of S. G. Simonov and A. S. Konstantinov worked like a clock, but the accuracy was one and a half times worse than the Mosin rifle. The Dra-gunov sample surpassed in accuracy even the best of the Mosin sniper rifles tested at the test site, but it missed delays and breakdowns with depressing regularity.
It seemed that Dragunov's rifle was pursued by some kind of evil fate. During one of the tests, a rupture of the locking assembly of the only prototype occurred. In order to prove that the rifle had nothing to do with it, it was necessary to unpack a whole batch of ammunition. It turned out that several cartridges from the batch were loaded with sharp-burning pistol powder, which led to a sharp increase in pressure when fired. To continue testing, the plant had to strain and produce a new sample in two weeks. Despite all the troubles, according to the results of the first field tests, the S. G. Simonov rifle was removed from the competition and only two competitors remained.
Submachine gun "KEDR"
They were competitors, they spent time at the training grounds, shared their successful developments, so Dragunov shared the trunks with Konstantinov, and Konstantinov shared the design of the store, over which Dragunov fought for almost a year. The friendship of these talented designers and just wonderful people continued until the end of their lives.
On July 3, 1963, the sniper rifle was put into service with the USSR Armed Forces under the designation "7, 62-mm Dragunov sniper rifle" (SVD). For the development of the design of the rifle and its introduction into production in 1964, Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov was awarded the Lenin Prize.
In the early 90s, the Izhmash designers developed a variant of a rifle with a butt folding on the right side of the receiver, which was put into service in 1995 under the name SVDS.
Success did not turn his head, Dragunov continued to work on new weapons designs. In 1968, under his leadership, a small-bore training sniper rifle TSV was developed for the initial training of snipers. The free bolt of the rifle, together with the return spring, was made as a separate quick-detachable block, the receiver was cast from a light alloy. The rifle was tested, an experimental batch was made, but never went into production.
In 1970, on the instructions of GRAU Dragunov, based on the SVD, he designed the B-70 sniper rifle.
Its distinctive feature was the presence of an automatic fire mode. Thus, the military hoped to get a sample that combines the qualities of a sniper rifle and a light machine gun for their subsequent replacement with a single sample. For the new rifle, a twenty-seat magazine and a bipod of an original design were designed: the axis of rotation of the bipod was located above the axis of the barrel, which significantly increased the stability of the rifle when firing. Recently, the bipod of such a device began to appear on some foreign sniper rifles. In addition, the bipod was equipped with a device that stabilizes the weapon when firing in short bursts. Thanks to him, in terms of firing accuracy, the rifle easily fulfilled the standard of a light machine gun. According to the test results, the B-70 still did not live up to the hopes placed on it and the topic was closed.
In 1971, Evgeny Fedorovich developed a sample of a small-sized submachine gun chambered for the 9x18 Makarov pistol under the designation PP-71. The submachine gun went through all the stages of testing, but the low power of the "Makarov" cartridge did not suit the military and it was not accepted into service. The weapon turned out to be in demand in the early 90s, when it began to be produced for the armament of the Ministry of Internal Affairs by the Zlatoust plant. When using weapons in urban environments, places where people are crowded, the low energy of the cartridge has turned from a disadvantage into an advantage, making its use safer. The name "KEDR" - the design of Evgeny Dragunov PP-71 received after its modernization by the son of Evgeny Fedorovich - Mikhail Evgenievich Dragunov.
At the end of the 70s, Dragunov developed a small-sized machine gun chambered for 5, 45x39. The MA receiver together with the control handle was cast in a single piece of polyamide, it housed a block trigger mechanism and a magazine. The guides for the bolt carrier were made on the receiver cover, and the front liner with the barrel was riveted to it. The cover was connected to the receiver with an axle in front and a hook at the back. In total, 5 prototypes were made, which showed good results.
It is impossible not to note the contribution of Dragunov to the creation of hunting weapons. In 1961, when the SVD was being developed, a semi-automatic hunting carbine "Bear" chambered for 9x53 was developed in parallel. It is quite natural that the most successful design solutions obtained in the design and development of the rifle were used in the new carbine. Unlike a rifle, the carbine originally had an integral magazine with a capacity of four rounds, which were loaded one at a time with the bolt open.
Later, a detachable single-row magazine for four rounds was developed for it.
The carbine was originally designed as an elite class weapon and did not go on sale. It was produced in small batches and was owned by persons who held a high position in the hierarchy of the USSR.
One of the owners of the "Bear", in particular, was Leonid Brezhnev, who highly appreciated this weapon.
In 1992, the serial production of the "Tiger" hunting carbine, developed on the basis of the SVD, began.
The prototype of the carbine was developed by Dragunov in 1969, at the same time, by order of the Ministry of Defense, a single batch of carbines chambered for the 7, 62x53 cartridge was produced. Currently, Tiger carbines in various designs are produced for cartridges 7, 62x54R, 7, 62x51 (.308 Win.), 9, 3x64, 30-06 Spring.
In total, during his work in the department of the chief designer, Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov completed 27 developments, received 8 copyright certificates for inventions. The ideas laid down by him in the design of sports and sniper weapons continue to live in many domestic and foreign models. The name of Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov takes a worthy place among the famous designers-gunsmiths of the world.
