At the height of the Cold War, the RKKA (Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army) was looking to replace the now 70-year-old Mosin Nagant as their standard marksmanship rifle. We use the term “marksmanship” because it was never really what a Western military would consider a “sniper” rifle. Even the celebrated Soviet sniper teams of WWII were rarely making kills beyond 300 meters and did much of their work in urban environments. Truthfully, the Mosin (and issued ammo) that was accurate enough to be useful beyond that distance was rare, let alone the rifleman who could employ it in such a role. Perhaps as a result of this, Soviet infantry doctrine, presented with the call for a new weapon to fill this role, decided to develop a new application as well. Rather than design highly accurized equipment for dedicated sniper teams, they requested a “squad support weapon” to be issued to every platoon, like light machineguns already were.
HOW IT STARTED
When these decisions were made in the mid-to-late 1950s, Warsaw Pact countries were using 7.62x39 AK-47s, while the West was still fielding .30-caliber battle rifles with much greater range and muzzle energy/velocity. The Soviets
