“I have the honor” against Nagan. How Mosin created the Russian legendary rifle

175 years ago, on April 14, 1849, the designer was born Sergei Ivanovich Mosin, author of a three-line rifle with which a Russian soldier fought through the Russo-Japanese, First and Second World Wars. And the sniper version of the “mosinka” with an optical sight helps out soldiers in the North Military District today.

The race was watched from the sidelines

In the last quarter of the 19th century – the time when Mosin created his rifle, which was later produced in a record edition of 37 million units – smokeless gunpowder was invented. This revolutionary technological leap made it possible to increase the range and accuracy of fire and the number of cartridges in the magazine.

The authors of the invention, the French, were ready to sell the gunpowder itself to Russia, but they refused to share the formula, even for big money. “Just like today, they tried to cut Russia off from modern technologies,” he says in an interview with AiF. Colonel Ruslan Chumak, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Head of the Artillery Funds Department of the Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineering Troops and Signal Corps. “In the end, Russian scientists themselves coped with the task.”

This was the very case when there would have been no happiness, but misfortune helped. Russia watched the drama unfold in the European arms market called “You can’t do that.” The Germans, trying to keep up with the French, adopted the “crude” Gewehr 88 rifle, managing to produce it in a circulation of 1.9 million copies, which they bitterly regretted and were soon forced to rearm again. The British also rushed with the Lee-Metford rifle of 1888, which turned out to be insufficiently advanced – it was subsequently modernized more than once. The Russian military department purchased samples of these and other Western models of small arms to study the pros and cons.

Nagant and industrial espionage

An important milestone was the development in Russia of a new 7.62 mm caliber cartridge (three lines of 2.54 mm, hence the second name of the future Mosin rifle – “three-line”, which uses such a cartridge). And in 1889, a competition was announced to create a new Russian rifle, which was supposed to rearm the largest army in the world at that time. Foreign gunsmiths were also allowed to compete. What the Belgian did not fail to take advantage of Leon Nagant, whose rifle had lost a test to the German Mauser the day before in his home country. “Having presented to Russia in 1889 a very imperfect sample of his rifle, which was significantly inferior in quality to the bolt design of the Mosin rifle, Nagan gradually improved his rifle and eventually, together with Mosin, reached the finals of the competition,” continues Chumak. — At some point, the votes of the commission members were divided in half, but recent tests showed significant advantages of the Mosin rifle in terms of manufacturability and production cost. He was awarded the victory.”

Nevertheless, the Belgian notably “drank blood” from Mosin. Using the influence of a certain very high-ranking Russian patron in uniform, Nagan, in his letters to the Russian Military Department, begged for relaxation of the conditions for submitting his rifles for testing. In addition, he personally came to Russia, and was shown the rifle of his competitor Mosin, in which he spied the most advanced parts of the Russian rifle. Including the key mechanism of the magazine – the cartridge deflector. His rifle’s cartridges jammed when fed from the magazine, but Mosin’s rifle had no such problems. And this is at the time of preparing test samples, when the winner has not yet been determined! All these facts are confirmed by documents stored in the archives of the artillery museum,” says Ruslan Chumak. Today this would be called industrial espionage.

Invented in his free time from work

Subsequently, Nagan tried to take credit for the invention of the Mosin cut-off reflector. The Russian designer had to prove that he used this mechanism 5 months earlier than the Belgian. For more than a year, while the rifle was being improved before the decisive tests, Mosin, according to the recollections of his assistant Zalyubovsky, was absorbed in one thing: “how to best and quickly outdo the foreigners and give us something of our own, Russian. And at the factory, and at home, and at meals, all there was talk was about a new model, about the advantages of this or that type of device.”

Mosin essentially did all the work on designing his rifle in his free time from his main job – in the evenings, on weekends. Only for a short time on the eve of the release of a batch of rifles for testing, Mosin was relieved of his duties at the plant. But even such unfavorable conditions for creativity could not prevent Mosin from creating an excellent rifle.

The results were summed up in 1891. After numerous tests, the Mosin rifle was chosen for the rearmament of the Russian army, thereby saving hundreds of thousands of lives of Russian soldiers on the battlefield in the future and saving huge public money due to its greater cheapness and ease of design and ease of use.

The devil, as always, was in the details. For example, in two small screws in the bolt. The Nagan used two screws to connect the parts in the bolt. In order to disassemble and clean the most important part of the rifle – the bolt – a screwdriver was required. “You can imagine how much attention this unscrewing requires. And what’s important is that if you tighten these screws a little tighter, you can tear off the slot and unscrew the screws and, accordingly, disassembling and cleaning the shutter will become impossible; it had to be repaired using a factory machine. And if the screw is not screwed in enough, then the bolt cannot be inserted into the rifle. If the screw unscrews a little while the bolt is inside the rifle, then it is impossible to remove it back – you need to file the head of the screw, says Chumak. “Mosin had these same parts attached to each other according to the design principle, so disassembling and cleaning his rifle was much easier.”

Compensation of 200 thousand gold rubles

However, Nagan “bombed” Russia with letters, trying to prove his authorship of parts of the Mosin rifle, blackmailing the Military Department with the fact that if Russia starts producing these weapons abroad, he will sue. Our country was really going to place part of the order for the production of a new rifle in France, since domestic factories could not produce more than a million rifles in a short time – that’s exactly what was required at the first stage of rearmament.

Nagan’s absurd, but loud and dangerous claims were paid off with a substantial sum of 200 thousand gold royal rubles. However, the Belgian’s intrigues backfired on the Russian designer. In the wake of the scandal unleashed by Nagan, the rifle was not officially given the name of its creator. The documents emphasize the “key role of Sergei Mosin,” but called this small weapon a “3-line rifle of the 1891 model.” “And Nagan in Europe told everyone that the main parts of his rifle were included in the design of the Russian Mosin rifle, which is why in Europe our “three-line” is still called the Mosin-Nagant rifle. This myth, alas, turned out to be extremely tenacious,” says Ruslan Chumak. “Although, as you already understand, Nagan was nowhere near Mosin’s creation of his rifle.”

After winning the competition, Captain Mosin was promoted to colonel and was awarded the Mikhailovsky Prize, the main military-technical award of the Russian army, awarded every five years for major inventions. And they paid a bonus for his invention… 30 thousand rubles, almost 7 times less than the compensation paid to Leon Nagan.

Mosin was not tempted by money

Someone in Mosin’s place, offended, would “slam the door” and resign. But Sergei Ivanovich put the interests of Russia, to which he swore allegiance, at the forefront. If it weren’t for his selfless love for the Motherland, then even before the creation of the “three-line”, Mosin had a real chance to get rich, because the famous “three-line” is not the first small arms he invented. In 1885, Captain Mosin created a rifle with an original and quite advanced rack-and-pinion magazine, which attracted the interest of French gunsmiths. Then he was approached by a representative of the Parisian arms company G. Richter” with an offer to pay 600 thousand francs for the right to produce and use the Mosin magazine in the Gra system rifle. Mosin did not agree to this. The main goal of the designer was not to earn as much money as possible, but to provide the Russian soldier with a reliable weapon in battle.

Rifle as the key to Victory

And he did not forget that his grandfather – Ignatiy Mosin — fought in the Patriotic War of 1812 and died in one of the battles with the French. His father also fought Ivan Mosin. He fought bravely with the Turks, for which he was awarded the Order of St. George. Then, in the Crimean War, the huge Russian Empire lost to the obviously weaker Turkey due to the fact that the latter was armed with modern American and British small arms. This lesson was not in vain. When Captain Mosin, who graduated from the Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy, arrived to serve in Tula at the famous arms factory, more than a thousand new machines were installed in its workshops – milling, drilling, turning. Russia was preparing for rearmament.

During his service at the Tula plant, Mosin managed to serve as the acting head of almost all key departments, impressing the workers with his meticulousness. One of them recalled: “Mosin studied the manufacturing technology of each part to the finest detail, stood at the machine himself, was not afraid to get his hands dirty in gun grease, and did not boast of his officer rank.” It was important for him to feel the capabilities of the machines, because in the future fundamentally new systems for his rifle would have to be machined on them. Wanting to understand the nuances of making parts, during non-working hours Mosin invited craftsmen to his apartment over tea to ask them about subtleties that only craftsmen knew. This is how solutions were formed in his head that achieved the set goals and required a minimum of investments. When, after the success of the “three-line”, Mosin was transferred to the military plant in Sestroretsk to the position of head of the arms factory, all the workers in Tula came out to see him off.

“Burned out” in a week from pneumonia

In Sestroretsk he served with the rank of major general. His other talent, that of a production organizer, also flourished there. He managed to modernize the factory’s facilities and created a vocational school, whose graduates came to work at the defense enterprise. He built a dormitory for the workers. And he still did not raise his voice, even though he commanded the Sestroretsk garrison.

The death of the designer came as a surprise to everyone. At 52, he burned out in a week due to lobar pneumonia. Mosin died in 1902. And his rifle, which people affectionately called “Mosinka,” served faithfully as a Russian soldier until the end of the Great Patriotic War.

Later, another interesting fact was revealed: a letter to Mosin from the American attache Henry Allen, who offered to “bear all the costs” if Mosin “agreed to provide his invention (“three-ruler”) to a friendly state.” But dollars, like francs, turned out to be powerless against the Russian “I have the honor.” More than 130 years have passed since the Mosinka was adopted into service, and it continues to beat the enemy. Equipped with an optical sniper scope, these rifles are used in air defense forces, including against mercenaries from “friendly countries.”

Unique long-lived cartridge

Separately, it is worth mentioning the cartridge for the Mosin rifle. “This cartridge with smokeless powder and a metal-jacketed bullet with a diameter of 3 lines was developed by other Russian officers,” says Ruslan Chumak. The cartridge was adopted for service along with a rifle in 1891, and since then it has been produced in factories in our country and in other countries of the world. They tried several times to replace it with a more modern model, but for some reason it didn’t come to that, so they made do with modernization.

This cartridge went through all the wars of the 20th century with Russian and Soviet soldiers and is still used in Kalashnikov machine guns and the Dragunov sniper rifle. At the same time, all its peers – rifle cartridges from other countries, adopted for service at the end of the 19th century – have long since retired. According to Ruslan Chumak, the Russian 7.62 mm rifle cartridge, adopted along with the Mosin rifle in 1891, will be used in the Russian and other armies of the world for many decades to come. Perhaps until weapons based on new physical principles are invented – laser or some other weapon, which now belongs to the realm of science fiction. Or maybe even after that.