On April 13, 1940, the SVT-40 rifle was adopted in the USSR - one of the most famous models of automatic weapons of the Second World War
One of the famous military axioms says that it is not a weapon that fights - it is people who are fighting who hold it in their hands. In other words, no matter how remarkable a particular piece of military equipment may be, all its advantages can be negated by inept use. Conversely, a skilled warrior will turn even a weak weapon into a formidable force. All this directly applies to one of the most famous and controversially evaluated samples of Russian weapons - the self-loading rifle of designer Fedor Tokarev SVT-40. It was adopted by the Red Army on April 13, 1940 by a resolution of the Defense Committee under the USSR Council of People's Commissars as a result of the modernization of an earlier modification - SVT-38, the production of which began in 1939. And thanks to this, Russia turned out to be one of two countries in the world that met World War II with self-loading rifles in service with their armies. The second country was the United States, which armed its infantrymen with the Garanda M1 self-loading rifle.
Perhaps it is difficult to find in the long list of domestic weapon systems a second example of such an ambiguous and contradictory assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of weapons, which the SVT-40 was awarded. And at the same time, it is difficult to find even in world history such a rifle that would receive extremely positive reviews. After all, as we have already said, it all depends on how experienced and competent the fighter holding the weapon in his hands, how well he mastered it and how freely and attentively he handles it. It was no coincidence that SVT-40 earned the nickname "Sveta" among Soviet fighters: on the one hand, it was loyal to the one who truly loved her and looked after her well, and on the other, this name also contained a direct allusion to the capricious nature of the rifle. … She demanded from her owner not only technical literacy, since she needed fine tuning depending on the time of year, but also careful care and constant attention, as she was a real neat. Even too thick grease could damage the SVT-40, not to mention the trench dirt.
In addition, Tokarev's self-loading was a rather complex system in terms of design: almost one and a half hundred parts, including several dozen rather small ones, and two dozen springs. Not everyone, even a pre-war conscript of the Red Army, could handle all this machinery. According to the recollections of the military leaders of the pre-war period, even in parts of the western districts, where, first of all, after the adoption of the SVT-40, by the beginning of the war, not all ordinary soldiers really took possession of it. But "Sveta", according to the pre-war plans, was to become the main weapon of the rifle units of the Red Army, completely replacing the well-deserved "mosinka" model of 1891/1930. According to the pre-war states, one third of the weapons of the Red Army rifle division should have been SVT-40, while in the rifle company most of the weapons were almost three quarters, and the rifle squad was fully armed with them. (The ratio, which is strange for a civilian, is simply explained: in subunits from a platoon and above, the number of combatant and non-combatant positions that are supposed to have simpler weapons is gradually increasing.)
In full accordance with these plans, the increase in production of SVT-40 was scheduled, starting in July 1940. Until the end of this month, the Tula plant, which became the main place for the production of the rifle, produced 3416 units, in August - 8100 units, and in September - 10 700 units. In 1941, it was planned to produce 1.8 million SVT-40 (the Izhevsk Machine-Building Plant also joined the production), in 1942 - 2 million, and the total volume by 1943, as planned, was supposed to be 4 million 450 thousand units … But the war made its own adjustments to these tasks. In 1941, a little more than a million rifles were produced, including 1,031,861 regular and 34,782 sniper rifles, which were distinguished by a more thorough study of the barrel bore and a special protrusion that made it possible to mount the PU sniper sight developed for it. But already in October, when the enemy approached Tula, the release of the rifle was stopped there. The production was evacuated to the Urals, to the city of Mednogorsk, where it was possible to restart it only in March 1942 (and until that time, the army's needs for self-loading rifles were satisfied only by Izhevsk).
By this time, almost nothing remained of the cadre units of the Red Army that met the enemy on the western borders. Accordingly, most of the SVT-40 rifles that were in their arsenal were also lost - according to the documents, the troops missed almost a million units of these weapons, which remained on the battlefield after retreating to the east. The losses of personnel were compensated for by mass mobilization, but the new fighters did not undergo sufficient shooting training, not to mention that they seriously master such complex equipment as the Tokarev rifle. They needed simpler three-lines, and a difficult decision was made: to curtail the production of SVT in favor of expanding the production of Mosin rifles. So in 1942 the factories produced only 264,148 units of conventional SVT-40 and 14,210 sniper units. Small batches of the rifle continued to be produced later, until January 3, 1945, the GKO decree was issued to discontinue production. At the same time, curiously, the order to stop production of the rifle in all its variants - both self-loading and automatic, as well as sniper - was never followed …
Sniper SVT-40. Photo: popgun.ru
The self-loading rifle brought its creator, the legendary Russian gunsmith Fyodor Tokarev, the Stalin Prize, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor and the degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences, which were awarded to him in the same 1940. She was highly regarded by experienced Red Army soldiers, especially the Marines. Traditionally, young men who were more educated and technically literate were called to the Navy, who, moreover, during their service received even richer experience in handling complex mechanisms, and therefore, being in the marines, they did not experience difficulties in handling the capricious "Sveta". On the contrary, the "black jackets" greatly appreciated the SVT-40 for its firepower: although the Tokarev self-loading was inferior to the "Mosinka" in firing accuracy, the ten-round magazine and the ability to fire at a higher rate made it a much more convenient defense weapon. And the dagger-type bayonet SVT was more convenient both in bayonet combat (although it also required certain skills), and as a universal cold weapon: unlike the integral tetrahedral bayonet "Mosinka", Tokarevsky was worn on a belt in a sheath and could be used as a regular dagger or knife.
It is noteworthy that a significant part of SVT-40 small arms until the end of the war was in units that fought in the Far North. And it's clear why. In the Arctic, hostilities were mainly positional, and their intensity was noticeably lower than on other fronts. Accordingly, the percentage of regular soldiers who remained in the ranks who met the war with SVT in their hands and kept their weapons, which earned them respect and love, was significantly higher. But among snipers, regardless of the theater of hostilities, the Tokarev rifle was not in high demand: the work of automation had a very noticeable effect on accuracy and effective firing range, and firepower was not the indicator that is important for sniper work. Nevertheless, the SVT-40 was used in sniper units until the end of the war, and there were many well-aimed shooters who destroyed dozens or even hundreds of fascists and refused to change it to a more accurate and less capricious three-line.
By the way, SVT-40 has also gained respect from our opponents - the Germans and Finns. The latter got acquainted with the SVT during the Winter War in the SVT-38 version and took it as a model for their own version of the self-loading rifle. In the Wehrmacht, the SVT was generally adopted, albeit limitedly, under the name Selbstladegewehr (literally: "self-loading rifle") 259 (r), where this letter meant the country of production - Russia. German soldiers, experiencing a shortage of automatic weapons, appreciated these rifles from the first days of the war, noting with obvious envy that the Russians, in contrast to them, are almost without exception armed with light machine guns (as, in particular, one German soldier wrote to his relatives, who happened to be on the Eastern Front). The SVT-40 gained the same respect from American specialists, who compared it with their M1 - and argued that the Russian rifle surpasses it, in particular, in terms of the convenience of loading and magazine capacity, and these are very important indicators for an ordinary soldier.
But no matter how contradictory the experience of the combat use of SVT-40 was, it became the same symbol of the victory of the Russian people in the Great Patriotic War, like the Mosin three-line and the legendary PPSh. Tokarevskaya self-loading can be seen in many photographs, paintings and posters of that time. And civilian versions of this weapon are still in use today: on the basis of rifles decommissioned from the arsenal, arms factories produce several modifications of hunting weapons that are in stable demand. Finally, the recognizable features of SVT can also be seen in its successor - the famous Dragunov sniper rifle, SVD: the design developed by the self-taught gunsmith, former Cossack centurion Fyodor Tokarev in the distant 1940 turned out to be very successful.
