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 Russian Makarov pistol. Just the standard, normal version of the Makarov. We'll go on in future videos later to look at some of the other countries that produced copies of the Makarov, and some of the
odd and interesting variations on it. But for today just the standard pistol, where
it came from, and more importantly: why? I think there are a lot of
interesting questions out there that people have about why the Makarov. Like, why is it in a non-standard cartridge? Why was it adopted? What was it intended to do? And once you understand the
background context of the Makarov, With the end of World War Two the
Soviet Union, like many other countries, has put together a plan to completely
renovate its small arms inventory. They have a new rifle, a new pistol,
a new submachine gun, the works. Now, I think one of the key
questions about the Makarov is why is it in this unique
proprietary cartridge? Makarov ammunition is 9x18mm, and it's not the standard 9mm bullet that
we are used to in the rest of the world. It's not a .355 or .354 inch bullet,
it's a .363, it is actually 9.2mm. And the question is, well,
why didn't they use the standard? And the answer is
because pistol ammunition is typically interchangeable with
submachine gun ammunition. That's why you have a 9mm Parabellum pistol
for your 9mm Parabellum submachine guns. And with the new post-World War Two Soviet
small arms plan that was no longer relevant. You see, the new Soviet rifle was
the SKS, chambered for 7.62x39. The new Soviet submachine gun to replace the
Papashas and the PPS-43s was the Kalashnikov. The Kalashnikov was originally
developed as a submachine gun. That's why it was full-auto,
that's why it had a large magazine. And it was primarily intended
to be issued to specialist troops, elite troops, airborne, mechanised troops. Where the standard line
infantry were getting SKS rifles. So if that's your submachine gun, you are obviously
not going to chamber your sidearm for 7.62x39. You've already got your ammunition
interchangeability with the rifles. The sidearm is now subject to a
whole different set of requirements. What the Soviets had found during
World War Two issuing the Tokarev pistols is that the Tokarev ... was kind of
awkwardly large and heavy, not tremendously so, but bigger than it
needed to be because it was overpowered. The 7.62 Tokarev cartridge was way more
powerful than it needed to be for a handgun. What the Soviets found was ... first off, you
almost never used the handgun in combat. When you did, the accuracy that people were
actually able to get with handguns was pretty poor. You didn't have competitive pistol
marksman champions out there plinking German soldiers at 50 or
75 metres with their Tokarev handguns. No, ... you were lucky to hit someone
at 10 yards with your sidearm. And in fact the pistols ... almost caused as
many friendly casualties as enemy casualties. And I don't mean for a stereotypical
Russian blocking operation sort of reason, I mean because Tokarevs had
a lot of accidental discharges. There is absolutely no mechanical safety
on the Tokarev short of the half-cock notch. And the Soviets had a lot of guys who accidentally
shot themselves with their Tokarev pistols. This is understandable, ... especially by the end of
the war there were a lot of conscripts in the army, not a lot of long-term training,
and a pistol that is legitimately unsafe to handle when loaded
because it has no safety on it. So the priorities for the new
Soviet pistol in the ... late 1940s were it needed to be small, light and compact. Because the vast majority of the time
what you're going to do with the pistol is stick it in your holster
and carry it, and nothing else. It needed to have stopping power,
but only at very limited range. And ... ignore the modern day take on how one
determines the terminal effectiveness of bullets. In the 1940s this was determined in the Soviet
Union to be primarily a function of bore diameter. The big bullet is going to have the stopping power.
We need a big bullet travelling relatively slowly, we'll have stopping power but only at short range. That is exactly the combination
they wanted for the Makarov. And hence they develop a 9mm cartridge for it. But they're going to make a 9mm
cartridge based on standard Soviet, or standard in this case Russian
nomenclature and design criteria. Which is the bore diameter is just nominal,
and if anything, it is actually measured by the interior diameter
of the lands in the barrel. That's the ... protrusions that stick into the
barrel to actually cause the bullet to twist. In the West we typically measure things by the
groove diameter, the large diameter of the barrel. A 9mm inside diameter equates to
approximately 9.2mm in a Makarov, hence the bullet diameter
is .363 but it's called 9mm, because the interior diameter of the lands is 9mm. It is irrelevant that that's non-standard,
because ... there are two weapons that this cartridge would be used in, but they
were developed simultaneously side by side. That being the Makarov and
the Stechkin automatic pistol. It doesn't need to be
used in submachine guns, it's never going to be because
the submachine gun is now the AK. So the Soviet Union is not looking to
buy surplus ammo from other people, they are going to make all their own ammo. It literally doesn't matter if it's not the same
bullet diameter that other people are using. That's where the 9mm Makarov cartridge
comes from, that's why it was developed. So the pistol itself was designed
by one Nikolay Makarov. He was born in 1914, he was
educated at Tula 1936 to 1941. In 1941 he actually went to work in a
factory building Papasha submachine guns. He was promoted from foreman to senior
foreman, to chief design engineer at the factory. And at the end of the war he was
actually working on an improved version of the PPSh-41 submachine guns. The end of the war made that irrelevant
because the AK is going to take over instead. And he is moved to a design bureau
where he develops the Makarov pistol. So let's take a closer look
at what this pistol actually is, and how it works, and then
we'll talk about where it went. The fundamental requirements of
this pistol were that it be inexpensive, safe, and essentially light and handy. So Makarov does a pretty good job
combining all these elements. The cartridge design certainly helps him. By having a cartridge that is basically just
a smidge more powerful than .380 ACP he is able to design a pistol that has a simple
blowback mechanism, that makes it inexpensive. Before we take it apart here to
show you that, let me point out that this does have a number of significant
safety improvements over the Tokarev. Also handling, like the gun
is easier to actually use and shoot than the Tokarev,
largely because it is double action. So you don't have to do anything upon drawing
this from a holster except pull the trigger. Now it is a quite heavy trigger but again, they had pretty minimal
expectations for combat accuracy with the gun. So a heavy double-action trigger is more
important because it is a safety element. That makes it much more difficult to
accidentally shoot yourself with the gun than trying to get competition
marksmanship out of these pistols. In addition to the double-action trigger, there
is also a combined safety and de-cocker here. So of course red is the fire position,
if I push this up into the safe position it automatically de-cocks the hammer
and locks the trigger and hammer. So again, I can't accidentally
shoot myself with the pistol. It is a pretty darn compact little gun. It's relatively light, weighs in
at I think 730 grams unloaded. And it comes with a
pretty simple flap holster. This covers up all aspects of the pistol,
does a really good job of protecting it. You've got your spare magazine
held here, you've got your cleaning rod which has a little
screwdriver tip on it as well. The markings on different Makarovs
will vary by country of production. This one is Russian, which is fairly scarce.
So we have an arrow in a triangle here, this is the symbol of the Izhevsk Arsenal, which
is where all of the Makarovs were manufactured. We have a serial number in three places,
the slide, the frame and the safety lever. The safety lever only being the actual digits. There's a two-letter prefix on the serial numbers
here, that will include Cyrillic letters of course. We have a date of manufacture as well. Now manufacture actually began in 1951, but the early pistols used a letter date code instead of actually writing the date of manufacture. Here is an example that is an
"M" date, I believe that is 1960. And this is one of the very last ones,
in the 1960s they transition to just writing the date
of manufacture on the gun. There were no original
markings on the other side. What you will typically find is
an importer mark on the side here. It's interesting, these are Russian guns,
you saw the Izhevsk Arsenal marking. But they were imported mistakenly as
(or combined with, it's a little unclear) Makarovs from East Germany. And East German ones were legal
to import, Russian ones, technically, were not supposed to be
importable into the United States. But these showed up, that's
why they are marked German. You will also find the serial number
stamped on the back of the magazines. The pistols were issued with two magazines. And they are in fact both
stamped with the serial number, and the number 1 mag and the
number 2 mag are individually marked. Later in production they stopped
stamping the serial numbers and they start just electro-pencilling
the serial number onto either the side, or sometimes the
back of the magazine. Disassembly is very easy, fundamentally the
same sort of system as the Walther PP or PPK. Certainly that was a gun that the
Russians had lots of exposure to, it makes sense that Makarov
would have had ... several of those and used them as a
starting point for his design. That's how firearms design is in the 20th century,
you are largely copying pre-existing good ideas. So to disassemble this we are going to pull the
trigger guard down, and rest it off to the side there. You do need to make sure that the gun is in the fire
position, because you will need to cock the hammer. The next step for disassembly is you just pull
the slide back, up, and off the front of the barrel. So there's your slide. The
recoil spring nests around the barrel. The barrel is fixed to the frame because
it's just a simple blowback pistol. The one further step in disassembly
is just to take off the grips which are held in place by
a single screw on the back. Notice that there is a little spring-loaded
detent in the ... grips themselves, and that snaps into the four little
semi-circular notches in the screw. So that prevents the screw from rotating
free while the gun is being carried or fired. Other than that, it's basically a
wrap-around grip much like a Walther. We've got a five-pointed star
and the red Bakelite. This is indicative of Russian
production military grips. And then there's the frame of the pistol,
not a whole lot going on here. We've got a flat spring for
the hammer and trigger. The magazine release is a heel release, that is
connected to the bottom of that same spring. So the magazines
themselves hold 8 cartridges. Single stack, not a whole lot
to them. There are two variations. Note that there is a little tab here connected
to the follower, that activates the hold open. So when the magazine is empty,
the slide will lock open on the gun. And so you need to
accommodate that tab at the bottom. On the early production magazines they
actually stamped the magazine body up to give space for that little blade to
slide in when the magazine is fully loaded. On later production magazines they
just had a cutout stamped in the body for that little blade to slide down through.
So those are your two versions. And then the Russian pistol
production was essentially unchanged over the course of about 30-some years. Really the only substantial externally
visible difference in production is that early on they serialised the safety
levers, and later production they did not. By the way, ... the safety levers often have
a reddish sort of a plum tinge to them, that just comes from a different alloy
and different heat treat combination than some of the more
pressure-bearing parts like the slide. So there you have the PM, "Pistolet Makarova". A gun that was light, handy, convenient,
reasonably powerful at short range, and really did a very
good job of meeting Something on the order of 5 to 10 million
Makarovs have been manufactured. They were manufactured by a variety
of different countries, the Soviet Union, China made them, Bulgaria made
them, East Germany made them. And then there are a number of other Warsaw
Pact nations that made very similar pistols. They aren't strict copies, but same cartridge
and same fundamental mechanical system. They are very common out there still,
they are still in widespread use. Manufacture ended for military
guns in Russia in the 1980s. Commercial production
continued through the 1990s. There's lots of commercial ones out there. Original actual Russian military Makarovs
are really quite scarce in the United States. ... Well you saw there, they were imported
mistakenly as ... East German pistols. So. Overall, it's a gun that doesn't
get a lot of attention I think today as a really particularly
interesting military pistol. Largely because so many of them were
imported that they seem commonplace. But in reality this, I think, is a really
interesting take on military sidearms. It's got a great piece of world, and specifically
military history to it. And they are really neat guns. So as I said at the beginning,
we will follow this up in the future with some more specialised videos
on other variations of the Makarov. So if you enjoyed this,
stick around for some of those. Hopefully you did enjoy this video.
Thank you very much for watching.
