SVT-40: The Soviet Standard Semi-Auto from WWII

Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at the SVT-40 Tokarev. This is the ... most common standard Soviet semi-automatic rifle from World War Two. The Soviet Union had been wanting to adopt a standard infantry semi-automatic rifle since basically the mid-1920s. And they did end up doing it with this being one of the three nations to successfully pull off that feat during the Second World War. The other two being, of course, the US and Germany. Now the story of the development of this rifle actually goes back to the mid-1920s when the Soviets held their first semi-auto rifle trial, 1926 actually. That would lead to the adoption of a 1930 pattern Degtyarev rifle, which had lots of issues. It was very expensive, very complicated, but it did work. And the way the Soviet adoption process for this sort of thing worked was a little bit different than what we're used to here in the US. There would be a trial, and if one of the rifles was deemed to be particularly ... like it looked like it was going to do well, it had the potential, it had all the hallmarks of a rifle that was going to successfully fill this role, that gun would be adopted. And it would then essentially go into this sort of symbiotic development process between all three major parties, those being the design bureau, the guy, the inventor, and his assistants, who actually put it together, the manufacturing factory that would be making them, and the troops in the field who would be using them. And rather than try and develop the whole thing and then drop it on the troops, they'd make a small batch, and then it would go through this iterative process of improve the machinery and the tooling for making it, improve any flaws that ... the troops find in early troop testing, improve the design itself, and then make another batch of them, a little bit, a few more of them, a larger batch, and repeat this process. And it would typically take two or three years for a weapon to actually go from technical adoption to being actually mass-issued in the field. In a way this actually worked fairly well, but it also sometimes led to this weird situation where guns were being replaced every couple of years. And that's what we have with the semi-auto rifle program. So 1930 a Degtyarev is adopted. 1936, nope, that one's out, and we have a Siminov rifle. Sergei Siminov, same guy who invented the SKS, that was adopted after the war, he developed the AVS-36 in 1936. And it looked better than the Degtyarev, and so it got adopted. Now in this case we're talking about a select-fire rifle. There was a scoped version of it, so ... it could be an assault, well, it could be a standard infantry semi-auto. It could be an automatic rifle in sort of the Shosha BAR school of thought, where you have an infantry-sized rifle. It's not really truly a light machine gun, but it is capable of full-auto fire for the assault, or for defensive placement, that kind of thing. And you could scope it for precision fire. The AVS-36 would be the best-looking contender for all of about two more years when a further set of trials had it replaced by a Tokarev. That would be the SVT-38. Now at that point they kind of abandoned the full-auto thing, like, you know, let's leave that to machine guns. We've got Degtyarev machine guns that are good, we've got Maxim machine guns that are good. And it doesn't really make all that much, it's not all that useful in a shoulder rifle. So they went from AVS to SVT. So semi-auto, and the T for Tokarev, who designed this. Well, the SVT-38. Now the SVT was more durable in trials than the Siminov that preceded it, and then the other competitors at that point. But it was also heavier. And the trials committee didn't like the fact that it was heavy, but they did like the fact that it was more durable. And so it was kind of a close call, and they ended up going with the Tokarev. Now because of the nature of Soviet arms design, Siminov would continue to iterate and develop his rifle throughout the course of World War Two, ultimately winning adoption in ... well, technically adopted in 1945, but not really getting into troops' hands until close to 1950. In 7.62x39 is the SKS that we're familiar with today. Anyway, to go back to the Tokarev here, the SVT-38 is adopted in 38. It's put into production in 39 and 40. I do have a video on the SVT-38 if you want to take a look at it. The two visible differences between it and the 1940 pattern here are a full-length wood handguard instead of this metal section at the front, and a cleaning rod that ran on the outside of the stock. Both nice ... easy to visually identify elements. ... About 190,000 SVT-38s were manufactured. They were used in the early days of the German invasion, Operation Barbarossa. They were also, before that, used in the Soviet invasion of Finland that led to the Winter War. And it was primarily in the Winter War that some of the problems with the design came to light. And primarily they really wanted the gun to be lighter. And so they went through and developed sort of an upgrade package to turn this into a somewhat lighter gun, and that would be the SVT-40. So the mechanics of the 38 and the 40 are essentially identical, but there are relief cuts on various parts of the 40 to make it lighter. The stock was lightened in part by using this metal handguard in place of a thicker wood handguard. The whole stock was made thinner and lighter, which would come back to bite them, because the problem with the SVT-40 in the field, the main one was the stocks tended to be weak and crack and break. So they'd eventually actually go backwards and re-thicken the stock on the SVT-40s. But these are formally adopted in April of 1940. And unlike previous designs, this one is able to go into production almost immediately, because mechanically it's basically the same thing as the SVT-38. And so between April of 1940 and about the midpoint of 1942, about 1.4 million SVT-40s are manufactured. So why don't I go ahead and pull this apart, we'll take a close look at it, I'll show you how it works, and we'll talk about what happened to the SVT-40 in 1942. Let's start with the basics here. This is a semi-automatic magazine-fed rifle. It is chambered for 7.62x54 rimmed, the standard Russian military cartridge at the time, military rifle cartridge. We have a 10 round magazine, that was standard. There were experiments made with 15 and 20 round mags, but none of those ever actually came to anything. It does lock open when the magazine is empty, and there is a stripper clip guide built into this top dust cover, which allows you to reload it by standard Mosin-Nagant stripper clip. The magazine catch is down here, push it forward. You have a nose-in, rock-back style of magazine, like so, and the magazine catch folds. So once you put the magazine in, you can fold that up to keep it out of the way, make sure it doesn't get accidentally depressed. For what it's worth, the rifles were originally issued with three matching numbered magazines. Matching magazines are virtually impossible to find with a rifle these days. But they did come with three mags, so you could reload by stripper clip, but you did have multiple magazines to work with. The safety is very simple, it is a flag type right there. And the way it works is when the safety is down, the trigger hits it, and so you can't pull the trigger all the way back. And to disengage it, you just push it up out of the way, and then the trigger can move. So, really simple there. If we take a look at the markings, we will have a serial number here on the side of the receiver. For most of them that's going to be a 2 Cyrillic letter and 4 numeral serial number. We then also have a production date on the top. This one is 1943, got some proof marks. And the star there is the factory mark. That star was originally for the ... factory in Tula. Partway through the war that factory had to relocate to a town or a city called Mednogorsk. That's where this one was manufactured. SVT-40s were also manufactured by Ishevsk, where you'll find a triangle with an arrow in it. And also by the Podolsk factory, which is an oval with an arrow in it. Those are often called Kovrov because there was a machine gun manufacturing, well, factory, called at Kovrov that used that same or very similar logo. But the SVTs were not made by Kovrov. We have a rear sight here that's adjustable out to 1,500 metres. Front sight is a very basic post. You can screw that in and out to adjust elevation, and you can move the whole front sight assembly left and right for windage. A couple neat elements here. We have a spring-loaded button that holds the cleaning rod in place. So to take the cleaning rod out you push that down, and you can then pull the cleaning rod out. You can see that little rib on it that locks behind that button. That prevents the cleaning rod from bouncing forward when you're firing. We do have a bayonet lug here. The SVT-40 had a standard blade bayonet, which is relatively uncommon to find today. And I actually don't have one for this video, but attaches just like you would expect a normal bayonet to do. We also have this six port on each side muzzle brake. This is the original pattern, and this is a little bit of an oddball on this rifle. Mednogorsk had transitioned to a late pattern of muzzle brake in late 1941. Interestingly, the Ishevsk plant never did switch. So Ishevsk kept making this version. Mednogorsk and Podolsk both transitioned to a four port brake. And I can actually show you that here. This is the late pattern of brake. You might look at this and think, oh, that's simpler to make, that's why they made that switch. And that would be true for the case of many changes to the SVT-40, but not this one. This was actually a change that was very deliberately done because this early brake was too loud for people around the shooter. It was a much more effective muzzle brake than this, but it was also a lot louder. So mid-1941 they tested this new pattern of brake. It was something like 40% less effective at reducing recoil, but it was also less unpleasant to people around. And so this became the standard. You will also find the serial number on the stock. This one's been sanded, but the serial number is still nicely legible on there. The safety is another part that changed during production. And this is also a bit odd on this particular rifle. They got rid of the hole in the centre very quickly. Normally this should have just a solid flag safety. And that was ... a change that they made just for simplicity's sake. Like the weight removal is insignificant compared to the machine time you can remove by getting rid of that. A couple of the other elements that we will see change on the SVT over the course of the war are a transition from this sling swivel to a sling slot in the stock, like the 91-30 Mosins. The same thing on the front sling swivel. Early on they used a swivel like this. Later that was switched to a fixed sling bar on this side of the barrel band. The trigger guard itself on the SVT-38 was just like this. It's the full width of basically this assembly. On the early SVT-40s they made this narrower, and that was just to save weight. But then they ended up later on abandoning that change to save time instead of saving weight. We also have the serial number down here. Now originally you would have serial numbers on the magazines. This does not have a matching magazine. As I said, that's almost impossible to find these days. One other element I will point out is that early production SVTs have a pair of rails right here. One on this side, and one on this side. And those were used to hold the scope mounts. Now all of the early SVTs got the rails. Only a small number of them were actually scoped sniper rifles. Again, I'll cover that in a separate video. About the summer of 1941 they abandoned those rails. It's just simpler. They weren't using them, they weren't making snipers anymore, or they weren't making them all potentially snipers anymore. So they got rid of those rails. This is an example that does not have the rails. All right, for disassembly I'm going to start by removing the magazine. Then I'm going to take this receiver cover, and I can actually slide it forward and lift it out of its grooves in the receiver. Bring this to here. There we go. So that comes out. You'll note that it has a little clip attachment right back here that holds on to the end of the recoil spring guide. Now I can compress the recoil spring, pull it off to the side here, being careful that you don't let this go flying across the room, because it will. We can take out the recoil springs. Note that we actually have two of them, and a center bar here that will nest that guide rod. Now I can take the bolt and bolt carrier all the way to the back, lift them out. And there's that assembly. And then I can just pick up the bolt and run it out. So that's our bolt, and that's the bolt carrier. Mechanically, this is a tipping bolt system. So that's the locking surface, and it locks against this lug right here. So it's going to go in like that. And then when it unlocks, it lifts up and slides back. And then to lock, it's going to come forward and drop down. And what allows it to unlock are these two trapezoidal lugs on the side. These two little cutouts in the bolt carrier are going to pick it up. So that's the locked position. As the bolt carrier goes backward after firing, these two surfaces right there will connect. That pulls the bolt up out of lock, and then the whole thing can cycle. That cycling, of course, is done by the gas system up here, which is actually one of the most copied of all gas systems. The Tokarev is the progenitor of, like, most of our gas piston rifles today. If you think of, well, the AR-18, as well as the Gewehr 43, both copied the SVT-40, SVT-38 system. And that's what ended up being, you know, most of the 5.56 piston operated guns today. So this is a rifle with quite a significant legacy to it. So once I take off the barrel band, which by the way you have to take the cleaning rod out as well, then I can lift this up, slide it backwards. It nests under these two little tabs right there. That's what holds it in place. This is ... just a simple stamped sheet metal upper handguard. The wood handguard then just slides off the gun right there. And that is your gas piston system. It's very long. When it cycles, the operating rod is going to come back here, right there. And that is where it hits the bolt carrier. Let's see, we've got that point right there. So the bolt carrier is going to sit here. Gas piston pushes it back, gives it the energy to cycle around. We can disassemble this system by pulling this back, let the main operating rod go forward. It has a little return spring at the back there. Once we have that off, we can then take off the front part of the gas piston. And that's the whole thing. Actually, I will note there is an adjustable, a five position adjustable gas regulator on the gas block here. That allows you to adjust, obviously, the size of the gas port so that you can fit it to whatever ammunition you happen to have, or whatever temperatures. Because, for example, in cold weather the ammunition will not generate as much gas pressure, and you might need to open the gas port up a bit. A couple last little things. This is hammer fired, so there's the hammer there. We have an out-of-battery safety right here. That has to be pressed down to allow the hammer to release. And that is held down when the bolt carrier goes forward over it. Push that down, there we go. There's the hammer. Not a whole lot going on there. You can see the hammer spring in the bottom. This is a very basic semi-auto style of fire control system. One last interesting element is this little port on the back of the receiver. Kind of weird, right? Well, this is actually there so that once you take the bolt out, you can open that up and you can then access the barrel from the back. So you can clean it from the chamber end, despite the fact that ... the end of the receiver is closed. This is kind of cool. This is something the M1 doesn't have a way for you to do. On the M1, similar sort of receiver architecture, and you just have to clean it from the muzzle. Well, cleaning it from the muzzle has a tendency to lead to bore damage over time, crown damage from metal cleaning rods. And so this is preferable, and Tokarev actually put a way to do it on the SVT-38 and 40. I am skipping the sniper-scoped version of the SVT-40 here. That was a real thing. There are a lot of fakes, but there are real ones. And ... that's a gun that deserves its own video. So we'll cover that on its own at a later date. What happened in 1942 though, that led to technically the end of SVT-40 manufacture, was a combination of a number of things. First off, the Soviet Army started reminiscing about how great the full-auto must have been in those AVS-36s. And they thought, well, why can't we make this full-auto? Like, we have it, it's got magazines, let's just make it full-auto. And so they did. That was the AVT-40. And starting in 1942, 100% of production of the SVT transitioned over to AVTs. And those would run primarily in 43 and 44, with a little bit of production in 1945 before the whole thing was cut off. I need to interrupt myself here and make a comment about the AVT-40s. There is a recognition in the United States that if a gun is ever a machine gun, it is always a machine gun. And the question might arise of, well, if there's half a million AVT-40s floating around there, is the ATF going to round them all up, or are they all machine guns, or what? The answer is no, they are not. The receiver of the SVT is identical to the receiver of the AVT. There's nothing about this receiver that makes the gun full-auto. The full-auto component, really the full-auto functionality, came entirely from the fire control group. And the only other difference in the rifles was the addition of a little extra scoop here for the selector lever to push all the way over to allow it to set to full-auto. So the ones that are registered, the trigger group, is actually the registered component. So it's a bit different from the M1 carbine versus M2 carbine in this case. And there's lots of precedent going back, and I would not worry about the ATF declaring a semi-auto post-1942 SVT-40 to be a machine gun. Total AVT-40 production was only a little under half a million, compared to 1.4 million of the SVT-40. So they decide they want full-auto. By the way, the full-auto turns out to be a bad idea. The gun's really not built for full-auto. It will batter itself to death in full-auto. Turned out to be a mistake. A lot of those guns got refurbed back into semi-auto only. Does that ring a bell? That has happened some other places. A good example would be the Finns and their L39 20mm anti-tank rifles, where they also thought, wouldn't this be awesome in full-auto? They made them full-auto and then went, oh, actually there's a good reason it's not full-auto. We'll go back, I guess. Anyway, at the same time, production of expensive, complicated semi-auto rifles in Russia is being cut down overall, because they're going to two other different guns instead. One is the submachine gun, which is cheap and has a whole lot more firepower at close range than something like this. And one is the Mosin-Nagant. Because Russian equipment losses were heavy throughout the war, one SVT would cost as much as more than four M91-30 Mosin-Nagant rifles. And there were a lot of untrained, or very poorly trained, troops that really didn't make particularly good use of an SVT-40. It was kind of wasted on them. You take the Russian perspective here, and you know these guys are going to get killed or wounded in pretty short order. You just need a lot of fresh bodies for the army. Well, equipping them with an expensive, complicated, potentially very technically useful gun, but one that they don't have a whole lot of training on, that doesn't necessarily make sense. It's a lot more economical to just give them all Mosin-Nagants. And, you know, the guys who get really good and survive, well, they can upgrade to something else later. And so Mosin-Nagant production would pick back up for the latter half of World War II. And a lot of the issue weapons were those, instead of SVTs or AVTs. And that, by the way, ties into the sniper program with the SVT-40, which was a complete train wreck, and caused them to actually develop the M91-30PU. Again, that's a ... topic for a separate video. So, ultimately a lot of these guns got refurbished back into semi-automatic only SVT-40s after the war, to the extent that they were continued to be used by the late 40s, early 50s. The Soviet Union is moving to 7.62x39 as its standard cartridge, and the full power 54 rimmed cartridge of the SVT-40 is no longer an infantry rifle cartridge. And so these kind of went away altogether. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Like I said, I do have videos on the SVT-38 as well as the AVS-36. And if you're interested in those, I'll link to them in the description text below. Thanks for watching.