The AN-94: World’s Rarest Production Rifle

Welcome back guys, Jonathan here with part two of the AN-94. So last time you will have seen, if you didn't see, you're going to want to go and see it, three of these things firing in the various modes that this thing is known for. The semi-automatic fire, the hyper burst two rounds at 1800 rounds per minute in particular, always fascinating, and full auto as well where you get the same two rounds and then it kicks down to that 600-ish rounds per minute rate of fire. All of that captured on one camera there, or multiple cameras in fact, so well worth the look, pretty unique opportunity for us there. So in that episode we covered how it works, we really need to answer the question of why and how effective it is. The primary purpose of putting two rounds on target every time you pull the trigger, automating that process as much as possible, did that work and where did it come from is what we're going to try and tackle this time. Now a couple of other channels have shown this thing firing and they've assessed its effectiveness in that hyper burst mode in particular, and a bit with the automatic mode as well. What nobody has done as far as I know, not publicly anyway, is compare this directly with the AK-74. Why would you do that? Well the origin of this thing lies in the AK-74 and in the 5.45x39mm round. So introduced in 1974, the AK-74, you'll be familiar with that, it's essentially a redesign, an AKM redesigned for this, the new cartridge, 5.45mm diameter bullet, very long, it's the direct Soviet at the time, analogue to the American and then NATO 5.56mm round. Reduced weight so you can carry more of the ammo, but in terms of effectiveness it's a real step forward in terms of being flatter shooting, so it's not that arcing trajectory of the old AK round and in terms of recoil impulse. Between the design of the AK and the heftier recoil, felt recoil of the 7.62 round, you do get a bit of muzzle climb and a bit of turning as well. Pushing back in the shoulder with recoil, the trend is always whether it's a Tommy gun or an AK or even this thing, it's pushing back and up and the desire was we've got this capable round, it's already improved the weapon, we've put a muzzle brake, highly effective muzzle brake, to pull the gun forward against that recoil. Between the round and the AK-74, lower recoiling round, muzzle brake on the end, you've got a fantastic stop gap infantry rifle that is more effective in automatic fire. That's what the AK-74 really was, essentially a stop gap. Just like the, in a slightly different way, the M14 and the M16, both were sort of intended as placeholders for some new whiz-bang new weapon, the SPIW, the special purpose individual weapon. Now that was supposed to go in the direction of the flechette, which is a different thing, but similar idea, flat trajectory, where you put your sights is where the projectile goes, and they were also looking at hyperburst, just like, similar to this, so but they're already looking with SPIW at putting multiple projectiles on target, just like the Russians are, the Soviets are, in the 1970s. Also parallels here with the ACR program in coming up to 1990, famously with the G11, the other famous hyperburst weapon with a very high rate of fire, and it's the same intent. So hyperburst, why do you want to fire two rounds very fast? Well, if we think back to Soviet doctrine with the Kalashnikov and with the Papasha submachine gun before it, there's quite a bit of advancing, we're looking at potentially open field combat if the Cold War went hot, and this idea that you're putting a little bit like the BAR, even earlier than that, where you're firing automatic as you advance. In theory from the shoulder, although if you look at Soviet training films, you will see a fair bit of unsighted firing from lower down, more like firing from the chest, but the idea is you would fire on the advance in burst, so the soldier's having to control his burst length with his finger, it takes skill, it takes aptitude, it takes training. The idea with hyperburst was to automate that process as far as possible, to remove the human from the loop as far as possible. You still need him to carry the weapon, to do all the things that soldiers do, and to pull the trigger, but if you can get those two rounds going out of the weapon before his sight picture is disturbed, that's really what they're going for. Then if you do hit with those two rounds, you're increasing lethality as well. A little bit like buckshot in a shotgun, but it's much more accurate, and you can do it out to hundreds of meters. So the then Soviet designers looked at two solutions for how to achieve multiple hits on target with minimum disturbance, reducing felt recoil essentially. One is balanced recoil, so the AK-107 is one of those, the AEK-971 is another, and that's a counterweight system, so the mass of the working part, when it hits the back of the gun, that causes a lot of the disturbance of aim, and that's equaled out by a mass sent forward. That's not what this is. This is the other system. This is what was dubbed, now the literal translation is blowback shifted pulse, but that's not very helpful. What it really is, is shifted or delayed or deferred recoil impulse. It would be my translation of the Russian there. Or as Max Popyankin puts it, accumulated recoil impulse. So you have the recoil accumulates within the weapon, then you feel it, by which time the bullet's gone down range. That's what this thing is all about, and we showed you how that works in the last episode. Now to achieve all that, you are sacrificing the lightweight of the AK-74. It's a very nicely lightweight weapon, already very controllable. This thing is significantly heavier. You've got the slightly awkward, although bear in mind drills at this time, right hand does the operation. You won't see us doing that, but that was what was done at the time. So the fact that the magazine is counted off to the side, not necessarily an issue. But you would have to retrain soldiers on the selector switch with the separate safety that pushes across. There would be potential problems there. You've got a new sighting system as well. Ian covers it in his video, but it's a completely different setup. Rotates, the different ranges are marked on there. Holes in the top on the rear sight, notch in the top on the front sight. That's for a set of night sights. Completely different sight protector. This thing is so almost entirely new compared to the AK. This is really what they were going for. They're going for the weapon of the future. So the project to determine what would be the weapon of the future was Project Abakan. Didn't take place at that settlement. It was just the project name. It actually, the trials were done at Sini Tokmash, the research and development and manufacturing facility as well. And they started earlier than the US ACR, Advanced Combat Rifle Program, which is the parallel to this. It started in 1979 and they ended a couple of years after the ACR program in 1992. And it's worth noting that unlike the American ACR program, it did result in a rifle getting adopted. Maybe wasn't as successful as they might have hoped. So we have 12 entrants to this, to Project Abakan. We have a more conventional rifle, closer to the AK perhaps, designed by a team under none other than Viktor Kalashnikov, the son of Mikhail Kalashnikov. That was known as the AKB. And we had a series of prototypes from the rival design team. So these are the top two out of the 12, from Gennady Nikonov and his team. And that was the ASM. And you can actually see the different variants of what led to the AN-94, illustrated and briefly described in a Small Arms Review article by Valery Shilin. I recommend checking that out. And if you speak Russian, Max Popyanka's book covers Project Abakan really well as well. We'll put some sources for you in the description to this video so you can do a deeper dive if you want to. But ultimately, this thing is what came out on top. Now it was not without multiple iterations, as I say. Significantly, several prototypes had a moving magazine. So we showed you last time how this thing has a cartridge lifter inside to give you an intermediate feed position to be able to get two rounds down the pipe as fast as possible. Well, the other way to do that is to let the magazine slide back and forth so it's feeding from both positions. So forward for that first shot, rear position for the second shot as the recoiling parts come back. There are some pretty wacky designs there, not least because for the moving magazine they had to come up with crazy kind of shrouds and guards to stop the soldier's hands and elbows and whatever else from getting in the way of the moving magazine. But the final Nikonov prototype was assigned, was successful, and received the GRAU designation 6P33. And you can see pictures of the prototype, none of them great. Notable for having a sort of RPK style club butt on it and being basically different in every detail, but recognizably the immediate forerunner of the AN-94. So a rare treat, two episodes running, we have more shooting footage for you here. We demonstrated the different modes but we want to see the effect on target. Other people have done that of course. What we're going to do that I haven't seen done anywhere else is a direct comparison. Hyperburst from the AN-94 versus good old-fashioned trigger finger burst from the AK-74, the rifle that this was supposed to replace. So let's check that out. So if we're going to really understand what the AN-94 was all about, we need to compare it to what it was going to replace, the AK-74. Now that muzzle brake is super effective, this is a low recoil impulse round. I should be able to do pretty well with this even with my limited experience on automatic fire. We'll then compare that to the AN-94 which automates that process and we'll see really whether that was worth doing in the first place. So we have another six rounds in the magazine, same rounds of course, but we have a different weapon. We have the AN-94, it's going to automate that process for me and in theory should be able to get a much tighter overall group and you should also be able to see those two rounds landing pairs, one after the other basically, two after the other. See how we get on. Right, let's walk down, take a look. This is going to be pretty stark I think. So my AK group is low, it's off the ball, I know that, and it's fairly wide. A bit of practice, I could definitely tighten that up. Someone with some military or shooting experience greater than myself could obviously do even better than that, but that's the point. You'd have to practice, you'd have to have some some skill there and further out even more important, all those things are more important. Moving across to the AN target, immediately we can see a much much tighter group. The whole group of six rounds is way tighter and the distance between those two shots is pretty reproducible, pretty consistent. I think this thing really does do what it claims to do. Okay, so we've got the AN again, but we need to test the other feature of this, which is this heavily buffered, apparently constant recoil system, where after the first two rounds on hyperburst on the auto setting, it kicks down to only 600 rounds per minute, but it's supposed to still be very controllable and tighten your groups up. So we'll see how that does against AK burst, really very good. Obviously we'd want to move that up onto the centre of the target, but with the AN we have that super tight hyperburst there. I've aimed off to the left slightly, but I've still, for me at least, this is still pushing me back and up somewhat, and so the rest of those shots are slewing to the right. Obviously with more experience you would be able to keep that on. I dare say you could at least do as well as the AK-74. I don't know, as someone who's a relative novice on, certainly on this system, I don't know, you'll in theory be issuing this to conscript soldiers, so if I can do that and that, I'm not really seeing the added value there on the automatic mode. But the hyperburst absolutely does the trick. Well there we are, I think the results do speak for themselves there. It's hard to go wrong with hyperburst. You put the thing on the thing, you press the trigger, you get two holes in your target, at least at 10 metres, which is the distance that we're firing at. But as you will have seen from other firing footage on YouTube, you can push that out to one, 200 metres, and you'll still hit a man-sized target with that hyperburst. So you get improved chance to hit, even if you push it out further and only one's hitting, you've got more chance of hitting with what feels like one shot. It really does feel like I'm firing one larger calibre round, I don't know, 7.62x39 or something. Not even that, the 5.45 rounds out of this thing, subjectively is less for me than one shot out of an old school AK or AKM, with way more precision. So I'm super impressed with hyperburst, I have been when I've seen it done, and to do it myself is a fantastic privilege that I don't take lightly. And then with full auto, that's a weird experience with this as well. So the only other result on target I've seen filmed of the AN in full auto is Garen Thumb's video, where he's surprised, taken by surprise, I felt slightly better when I reminded myself of that footage, because he has way more shooting experience than me, and he's still taken aback by that shift from the two rounds hitting the target with very little effort, to the remaining shots in your long automatic burst, remember, you get two 1800 rounds per minute shots, and then the transition is actually a sort of middling rate of fire between the second round and the third round, which catches you out, and then the remaining shots are at 600 for however long you pull the trigger, or however many rounds you've got left, and it catches you out. It caught him out, it caught me out as well, I didn't control it as well as him, and we saw it slew across the target somewhat. Now, you can say get good, but kind of the point here is that I know enough about shooting to hopefully be equivalent to a Russian soldier of the 1990s, you see where I'm going with this. So if I can pick it up and put two rounds on target, absolutely no problem at all, at a ridiculous rate of fire, the system works, but if I'm then struggling to do as well as with an AK-74, I'm not convinced it works very well, and if Mike is as well, then yeah. I think part of the reason for that not great performance with full auto mode is this thing not hitting the back on auto, constant recoil. Great, it does reduce the felt recoil, you can definitely put, if you want to do a continuous stream of fire, you can do it well with this thing. You can't do it as well as the AK-74, and part of that, okay, we can get around some of this with experience and practice, but what I noticed in the sights, something that Ian's commented on more than once, is when you're firing automatic, the sights become a blur. So these didn't blur as much, but you still have, you'll see in the footage, it's still moving enough that my brain and eyes are losing the plot slightly, so it's harder to keep that front sight where you want it to be. You almost have to revert to instinctive, like I'm keeping the gun pointing in the right direction, whereas with the AK-74, I find it just a lot easier to put a longer burst on target. So that's just my experience of that. I think it's a compromise. I think if you want volume of fire in a controllable way, and a lighter gun, and a cheaper gun, you probably want the AK-74, which is what, of course, the Russian Armed Forces stuck with, primarily. If you absolutely, positively have to have two rounds on target at a given distance, it's this thing all day long, and I would put my neck out and say this is probably the best burst mechanism firearm ever invented. The very best there is. And as complicated as this all looks, check out the other video, it's really maybe the best way you could engineer that solution. Let's put it that way. Something that's light enough to actually use, not so complicated that it can't be understood at all, can't be taken apart very easily. That said, the field stripping, I'm sure that caused problems, and we have mixed reports of reliability, but what a fascinating weapon this is. So the prototype's kind of finished-ish in 1994, the final weapon is formally adopted in 1997. That's the same year that this thing is patented, and I think it's the same year that the conventional AK is retrospectively patented, to try and claw back some of those lost intellectual property rights over the previous decade. So, formally adopted. We remember that from the EM-2, formally adopted. Well, none of those were ever mass-produced. A number of these were, so this is successful as far as that goes. Estimates are a little difficult, because we know rate of production, so 10 years, 200 to maximum of 400 per year maybe, more like 1 to 200, it's going to go up and down year to year, depending on demand. Limited orders from the Russian government, from the Russian military, meaning that prices were high, so five to six times the cost there, compared to the AK-74. Even more important, I think, is that they had seven million AK-74s in storage. So, do you issue seven million rifles you already have for nothing, at no additional cost, or do you spend five to six times as much replacing them with this thing? So it's almost a no-brainer, regardless of how truly successful this is, that they didn't immediately buy a ton of them. They didn't try to replace them across the board. That's aside from the training issues, it would have incurred cost, time delays, and this stockpile of AKs that they already had. Now, some did make it out of Russia, not many, that's why we're so lucky to have this here today, but export sales very limited, Belorussia, Kazakhstan, within the Russian orbit, as it were. But weirdly enough, also Poland and purchased examples, no doubt, to get a good look at what this new Russian thing really was and how effective it was. There's even a photo somewhere of Hugo Chavez with one of these things. He was given one, although the order that this is kind of commemorated an order of Russian-made rifles, that order of rifles was not the AN. All the same things apply, extra cost, extra complication, maybe the question mark over reliability, but Chavez got himself a free AN. So all of that means limited export sales, limited Russian army and military purposes. We can say between 2,000 and 2,500 ever made. I would say no more than 2,500 of these ever made, which makes it maybe the rarest actual military service rifle that was actually made, so not the EM-2. So one of the rarest guns around, put it that way. Now that low quantity, then it follows that you're only going to buy a few, at least to begin with, and those few, you're only going to buy a few, they went to special operations forces, to various spetsnaz units, and that's kind of it. That's kind of all she wrote for the actual use of this thing. They cropped up in parades, unsurprisingly, over the years, they cropped up in training videos. At least one was cited in the invasion of Crimea in 2014. That video's no longer online unfortunately, but at least one showed up and I believe they were spetsnaz as well. Umbrella term, just really Russian for special operations forces, and that's kind of backwards compared to what this was supposed to be. This was supposed to automate the process of putting two rounds on target for ordinary soldiers, but instead you're giving them to much better trained soldiers, which is arguably a bit of a waste. And there's a trend in spetsnaz units, or was certainly, for 7.62x39 weapons, which were perceived to have more stopping power. So even they weren't super keen on them. There was a bit of a legacy here, although in the meantime, America had gone with the sort of Dollar Tree version of Hyperburst, which was the two-round burst on the M16A2 and the M4. Not very successful in the end, that was reverted, and they've gone back to fully automatic. It really wasn't very effective. The problem with just the burst limiter is your first shot's on target, your second shot's maybe off the target or on the edge of it, over the shoulder, and the third one is off into the stratosphere. And the Russians knew that, that's why they wanted this. America was saddled with the bargain basement option. Admittedly, this didn't get widely issued, so nobody really won there. There's a weird last gasp to the story, kind of a reflection of the AN-94, which is that the initial version of the second incarnation of the AK-12, when it appears in 2017, has a two-round burst. And they're trying to fit that on the side of the receiver on the AK. To try, again, to do a cheaper, simpler version of the same idea that's much less effective. I'm really surprised to see that, and ultimately, a few years later, it was deleted. The 2022 version of the AK-12 does away with that. Now, that ostensibly is not because it wasn't effective, it's because the selector didn't have enough real estate, and it would pop off the bottom of the receiver and stop your gun from working. So that's been deleted. So that last trace of AN in general service rifles has gone probably forever. Okay guys, there we are. As you know, as a museum, it is rare that we fire things in our possession. This thing is, it's one of the rarest production weapons in history. With the opportunity to have three in our hands, plus our bonus tapping non-functional example, we wanted to to make the most of this opportunity to fire those and bring you as much as we possibly could in a two-parter, which we also don't normally do. So we really hope you enjoyed that. We may well never fire one of these again, so hopefully we've put that footage on the record and that you've enjoyed what we've done with these two videos. So as always, we really appreciate you watching. Continue to do so please if you'd like to, and if you would like to, like and subscribe as well. That really does help. I know it's a cliche to say it, but please do. There is a link in the description for you to send us a donation if you feel moved to do that. We would appreciate it. You can visit our museums, you can check out our website, our social media channels, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, but whatever you do, we really hope you join us here again on What's This Weapon next week. Is that a Tarantino reference? A little bit.