Original subtitles

In the winter of 1942, in a plant in the

Kirov region, hundreds of kilometers

behind the front line, workers were

sawing rifle barrels in half.

The barrels were 7.62 mm blanks made for

the Mosin-Nagant, the standard rifle of

the Russian and then the Soviet Army

since 1891.

Cut one in two, machine a new chamber

into each half, and one rifle barrel

becomes two submachine gun barrels.

The weapon they were building was the

PPSh-41.

It had 87 parts against 95 for the gun

it replaced, and it took 7.3 machining

hours to build against 13.7.

>> [music]

>> Every one of them left the factory with

two 71-round drum magazines stamped with

that gun's own serial number because

those drums would not reliably work in

any other gun in the Red Army.

That was not a defect.

It was the price of something, and it

takes [music] most of this story to say

what was bought.

This is not a story about a submachine

gun.

It is a story about a country that

stopped designing weapons and started

designing the factories that made them.

The problem began on the 30th of

November 1939

when the Soviet Union invaded Finland

with roughly three times the men and

overwhelming superiority in armor and

aircraft,

and then spent the next three and a half

months being humiliated in the forests

north of Lake Ladoga.

Finnish ski troops operating at ranges

of 50 m and less were carrying the Suomi

KP/31,

a submachine gun chambered in 9 mm, fed

from a 71-round drum, and built to a

standard of machining that would not

have embarrassed a watchmaker. Soviet

infantry, trained for volley fire at 400

m with a bolt-action rifle designed in

the 1890s, could not answer it. Finland

was a country of under 4 million people.

It had put automatic weapons into the

hands of enough ordinary infantrymen

[music] to matter, and the Soviet Union,

with an industrial base an order of

magnitude larger, had not. The Red Army

did have a submachine gun of its own,

the PPD improved by 1940 into the

PPD-40.

It was a good weapon. It was also

assembled from 95 parts and required

13.7 machining hours each.

And every one of those hours meant a

trained man [music] standing at a lathe

in a purpose-built arms factory. The

Soviet Union had a finite and countable

number of both. The design was not the

bottleneck.

>> [music]

>> The design was fine.

The bottleneck was that the weapon could

be only be made by the kind of factory

the country could not build quickly and

could not afford to lose.

The People's Commissariat of Armament

did the arithmetic and did not like the

answer. In 1940, it issued a brief to

Soviet gunsmiths that was unusual in the

specificity of its constraint.

Design a submachine gun equal or

superior to the PPD-40

in tactical and technical terms.

Then make it cheap and make it fast.

The man who answered was Georgy

Semyonovich Shpagin. And almost nothing

in his background suggested he would be

the one to do it. He was born on the

17th of April, 1897

into a peasant family at Klyuchnikovo, a

village near Kovrov, east [music] of

Moscow.

He had 3 years of schooling.

At 12, he was working as a carpenter.

>> [music]

>> He came to firearms sideways through a

regimental armory in the First World War

and then into the arms plant at Kovrov,

where he spent two decades as [music] a

shop floor engineer rather than a

theoretician. His contribution to the

DShK heavy machine gun in the late 1930s

was not the gun itself, but the belt

feed mechanism that made it usable.

He was not the man who designed the

weapon.

He was the man who solved the part of it

that had to work every time in the hands

of a tired soldier without adjustment,

by September 1940 [music] he had a

prototype.

It fired the 7.62 by 25 mm Tokarev

[music] pistol cartridge, which the

Soviet Union already made in enormous

volume. It fed from a drum copied in

principle from the Finnish design that

had caused all the trouble in the first

place.

It fired from an open bolt with a fixed

firing pin.

No gas system and no locking mechanism,

and it had a crude sheet metal

compensator formed into the end of the

barrel jacket that vented gas upward to

hold the muscle down. The last piece was

Shpagin's own, and in trials it improved

group sizes by about 70% compared with

the PPD.

In the autumn of 1940, the state trials

were held and Shpagin's design was

tested against the submachine gun

submitted by Boris Gavrilovich

Shpitalny.

This mattered more than the name

suggest. Shpitalny was one of the most

powerful designers in the Soviet

armaments establishment, co-creator of

the ShKAS aircraft machine gun, a man

with a design bureau, a reputation, and

political weight behind him. Shpagin was

a former carpenter with 3 years of

school.

>> [music]

>> Shpitalny's gun was, by several

accounts, the more refined of the two as

a piece of mechanical design.

It lost anyway.

It lost because the trials were not

really about the gun.

What the commission was measuring,

underneath the accuracy tables and the

endurance firing, was how many of these

a country could make in a year with the

factories it already owned. Shpitalny

had built a weapon for an arms industry.

Shpagin had built one for a war economy.

That distinction was about to be worth

more to the Soviet Union than any other

technical decision it made before June

1941.

The Shpagin design passed state trials

in November 1940, and on the 21st

[music] of December 1940, it was

accepted into Red Army service as the

Pistolet Pulemyot Shpagina, the PPSh-41.

[music]

That was 6 months and 1 day before the

German invasion.

On the 22nd of June, [music] 1941,

the Wehrmacht crossed the Soviet

frontier along a front of roughly 2,900

km,

and within 6 months, the Red Army had

lost the overwhelming majority of the

small arms it had begun the war holding.

Rifles, machine [music] guns, and the

entire pre-war stock of submachine guns

were captured, abandoned in

encirclements, or destroyed in the

retreat. The Soviet Union was not in a

position to arm its infantry with

anything that required a skilled

machinist. Production had started at

factory number 367 at Zagorsk, a plant

created more or less for the purpose.

It was not enough, and so the People's

Commissariat of Armament did something

no other combatant power did on that

scale in 1941.

It handed the drawings to factories that

did not make [music] guns.

The Moscow Automobile Plant, Zavod imeni

Stalina, which built trucks and cars,

was put onto PPSh production. So were

enterprises across [music] the country

whose common qualification was that they

owned a press, a welding set, and a wood

[music] shop.

Then the front moved.

By October 1941, the German advance had

reached the approaches to Moscow, and

the Zagorsk operation was pulled apart

and put on trains heading east along

with its machinery, its workers, and

Shpagin himself.

It came back together at Vyatskiye

Polyany, a town on the Vyatka River in

the Kirov region, at a plant that had

until then been doing nothing of the

kind.

From that winter until [music]

production ended after the war, it was

the primary source of the PPSh-41.

It is worth being clear about who was

actually building them.

The men who had staffed Soviet heavy

industry were by that winter at the

front encircled, [music]

dead, or captured.

The workforce that assembled the PPSh in

its first full year was

disproportionately women and teenagers.

Many of whom had never handled a firearm

before they started making one.

That is [music] not color.

That is the design specification.

Roughly 98,000 were built in 1941, most

of them in the second half of the year

under evacuation in temporary buildings

in a Russian winter. The first of them

reached the fighting around Moscow in

time [music] to matter in exactly the

conditions the winter war had been lost

in, and the Red Army discovered that the

thing worked. Soldiers named it the

Papasha, which translates roughly as

[music] daddy.

A car factory should not have been able

to do that.

By the end of 1942, Soviet output had

reached almost 1 and 1/2 million units

in that single year.

Peak production ran through 1942 [music]

and 1943.

And by the end of the war, the total

stood at around 6 million.

It is worth being [music] precise about

what that number does and does not mean

because the PPSh is routinely oversold.

It did not outproduce the Mosin Nagant,

built in the tens of millions across

five decades, and it did not outproduce

the Karabiner 98k, of which Germany made

something over 14 million.

What it did do was beat the standard

infantry rifles of the Western allies.

The M1 Garand reached about 3.1 million

units by the end of the war.

>> [music]

>> The Lee-Enfield number four made about

41 passed both, having started later,

while the country building it was losing

its western industrial regions to

occupation.

What that volume put in a soldier's

hands was, on paper, an unimpressive

object. It weighed about 3.63 kg empty

and had an effective range somewhere

between 100 and 200 m

>> [music]

>> against the 400 m and beyond that a

Mosin Nagant could reach. Its sights

were rudimentary. Its stock was a plank.

Its cyclic rate was around 900 rounds

per minute, which meant a full drum

could be emptied in under 5 seconds by a

frightened man. And frightened men

emptied a great many of them. None of it

mattered because the Red Army was not

trying to win the fight the Mosin Nagant

was designed for.

It was trying to win the fight in the

tree line, the trench, the cellar, and

the stairwell.

At 30 m where a bolt-action rifle gives

a man one shot and then a second and a

half of helplessness while he works the

bolt.

And the number changed what the Red Army

was. Volume of that kind is not simply

equip an existing force.

It reorganizes it.

From 1943, the Soviet Union began

fielding formations and armed with

nothing else.

Rifle regiments and tank brigades

received submachine gun companies of

about 100 men. And alongside them came

motorized submachine gun battalions of

roughly 500. The tankodesantniki,

oh, the tank riders who went into an

attack sitting on the armor of a T-34,

were built around the weapon.

In Stalingrad, in the factory districts

and the cellars and the stairwells,

a formation that could put 900 rounds

per minute per man into a room at 15 m

was not merely useful.

It decided fights.

The Soviets had not set out to invent a

doctrine.

They had set out to make a cheap gun,

and the cheap gun made the doctrine.

The weapon had stopped [music] being

equipment and started being a formation.

In late 1941,

German officers on the Eastern Front did

something armies almost never do in the

first year of a war.

They formally asked their own

procurement authorities to copy an enemy

weapon.

Captured PPShs were already in German

hands in quantity by then.

The Wehrmacht issued them officially

under the designation MP 717R in their

original chambering, supplied with

captured Soviet ammunition, which was

itself available in bulk precisely

because the Soviet Union had built so

much of it. The Heereswaffenamt, the

German Army Weapons Office, ran the

study. Its conclusion was not flattering

to the PPSh.

The German weapon, the MP 40, was judged

the better submachine gun, more compact,

better finished, easier to carry, more

controllable.

On the specific question of the

magazine, the Russian design was judged

better because a 71-round drum will keep

a man firing when a 32-round box will

not.

So, Germany did not copy the PPSh.

It converted it.

Captured guns were re-barreled in 9 by

19 mm Parabellum using MP 40 barrels

turned down to fit the PPSh trunnion,

and fitted with a removable magazine

housing that accepted MP 40 box

magazines. The result was designated the

MP 41R.

Roughly 10,000 conversions were made.

The shape of that decision is the whole

war in miniature.

The German Army concluded that its own

weapon was superior in almost every

respect a soldier would notice,

and then spent scarce industrial effort

converting captured Soviet guns to fire

German ammunition rather than simply

building more of the German gun.

Between 1940 and 1945, Germany produced

approximately 1.1 million MP 40s.

The Soviet Union produced approximately

[music] 6 million PPShs in a shorter

span from a worse position. Erma Werke

built an excellent weapon.

It simply built it the way a mature,

well-tooled arms industry builds things,

>> [music]

>> which is carefully. And Germany's never

resolved the contradiction between

building carefully and building enough.

By late 1944, it had stopped trying.

German industry began producing the MP

3008, [music]

a crude stamped submachine gun

essentially copied from the British

Sten. Germany had reached the same

conclusion the Soviet Union reached in

1940, 4 years too late, from a position

of collapse rather than of planning.

What was it exactly that the Germans

could not copy?

The answer nobody wanted was the drum,

because the drum was the worst part of

the gun.

The 71-round magazine was a genuinely

poor piece of equipment by every measure

other than capacity.

It was slow to load, requiring the

soldier to open the cover, wind the

spring, and lay the rounds in by hand, a

job that is difficult in gloves, and

effectively impossible under fire.

It was heavy and awkward to carry.

It rattled. [music] It was the single

most common source of stoppages in the

weapon.

And it was expensive in the one currency

the Soviet Union could not print, which

was factory time.

Drum production was a real bottleneck

that held finished weapons back from the

front.

Worse, the drums were not

interchangeable.

Tolerances varied enough that each gun

was issued with two by two drums

individually fitted to it at the [music]

factory and stamped with that gun's

serial number. Swap drums between two

PPShs and the result could be a loose

fit, poor retention, and failures to

feed. In an army that lost weapons by

the hundreds of thousands, in which a

man routinely picked up whatever was

lying next to [music] a casualty,

this was close to an absurdity.

Soldiers marked their drums and guarded

them. And if they took a weapon off a

casualty, they took its drums with it.

The Soviets knew.

From 1942, a 35-round curved box

magazine was available.

And in 1943,

>> [music]

>> a proper box design was formalized. It

was cheaper, faster to load, more

reliable, and easier to carry. It never

fully displaced the drum during the war,

and the drum remained the image of the

weapon, which raises the question most

retellings of the PPSh story never ask.

Why would a country in an existential

war, obsessed to the point of doctrine

with manufacturing efficiency, [music]

tolerate a component that was slow to

build, unreliable in use, and not even

interchangeable between guns?

Because the drum was where they chose to

put the compromise.

And they put it there so that it would

not have to go anywhere else.

The real mechanism behind the PPSh 41 is

[music] not the gun. It is that Shpagin

did not design a weapon, and then work

out how to build it. He designed a

production schedule, and let a weapon

fall out of it. Every choice in the

thing is a manufacturing choice wearing

a firearm's clothes. The receiver and

barrel jacket are not machined from

billet. They are formed from sheet

steel, pressed and welded. Work that a

stamping shop in a car plant [music]

already knew how to do.

The bolt is a blowback block with a

fixed firing pin. No locking lugs, no

gas piston to bore and fit. The stock is

a slab of birch that a furniture works

can cut. The machining time came down

from 13.7 hours to 7.3, and that is the

number that matters, because machining

hours mean a skilled operator at a

machine [music] tool. And machine tools

and skilled operators were exactly what

the Soviet Union had lost when it lost

its western factories. The chamber and

bore were chrome lined, not for

accuracy, but so that a conscript with

no cleaning kit could neglect [music]

the weapon for weeks and have it still

function.

And the barrel came off the Mosin-Nagant

line.

One rifle barrel sawn in two,

rechambered for the pistol cartridge.

Two guns, not a substitute [music]

barrel, not an equivalent, the literal

steel of a rifle designed in the 1890s,

already in production at every arms

plant in the country, in tooling that

already existed, [music] made by people

already trained to make it.

That is the trade, and it closes the

question the drums opened. The Soviet

Union accepted magazines that would not

fit each other in order to buy factories

that would. Every other component was

pushed down to the level [music] of

skill in evacuated tractor works already

possessed, and the one irreducible fussy

piece of the design was quarantined

>> [music]

>> inside the magazine, hand-fitted and

shipped in pairs. The gun was made

interchangeable across the entire

industrial base [music] of a continent

by making the drums non-interchangeable

across two guns.

Germany could not copy that because

copying it would have meant unbuilding

its own arms industry. Everything in

this story that looks like Soviet luck

is that one decision

compounding.

Georgy Shpagin received the Stalin Prize

second class in 1941

and the title Hero of Socialist Labor on

the 16th of September, 1945.

He sat as a member of the Supreme Soviet

from 1946 to 1950.

He did not enjoy it long.

He developed stomach cancer and died in

Moscow on the 6th of February, 1952 at

54.

His weapon had already begun to be

replaced before he died.

The PPSH-43, designed under siege

conditions in Leningrad by Aleksei

Sudayev, was cheaper still, and after

the war the AK-47 made the entire

category obsolete in [music] Soviet

service.

The PPSh was pushed into warehouses and

then out of the warehouses into the

hands of everyone the Soviet Union

wanted to arm.

The plant at Vyatskiye Polyany turned to

civilian goods, and among the things it

built in the 1950s

was a motor scooter called the Vyatka.

Stamped steel,

simple assemblies,

built in volume by workers who did not

need to be specialists. That was always

what the factory really was.

China took a license and began building

the gun in 1950 as the type 50.

North Korea built its own version, the

type 49.

Both were carried in Korea, where

American and Commonwealth soldiers gave

the sound of the thing its lasting name,

the burp gun,

>> [music]

>> and where the same close-range firepower

advantage the Germans had run into at

Stalingrad was run into again by the

same method. The design went on to

Vietnam and to nearly every insurgency

the Soviet block chose to supply for the

next 30 years, because it was the

cheapest credible automatic weapon a

state could hand out in bulk and not

miss.

And it has [music] not stopped.

In April 2022, in the second month of

the full-scale war in Ukraine,

PPSh-41s

were photographed in the hands of

Russian-aligned troops associated

[music]

with the First Army Corps in Donetsk. In

the spring of that same year, they

appeared in Ukrainian hands in Kyiv

Oblast,

both sides drawing from the same

Soviet-era depots in the same country,

pointing them in opposite directions.

Their use is limited now mainly by

ammunition, because 7.62 by 25 is a

cartridge almost nobody still makes in

quantity.

The plant at Vyatskiye Polyany is still

there and still working.

The gun was always disposable.

The method never was.

Somewhere on a front line in Europe in

the 2020s, a soldier is carrying a

barrel that began as one half of a rifle

barrel designed in the 1890s, cut in two

in a Kirov region workshop in 1942,

because that was faster than making a

new one.

One rifle barrel, two guns, roughly 6

million times over.

If you made it this far, leave the words

two guns in the comments, so I know you

stayed till the end.

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See you in the next one.