These two revolvers were developed for competitive sport shooting in the Soviet Union. They are usually described as variants of the Model 1895 Nagant, but they actually work on a different mechanism, despite both being gas-seal designs. The TOZ-36 was designed in 1962, and it was a single action, six-shot revolver in 7.62x38mmR – the standard Nagant revolver cartridge. It was made until 1975, and in 1977 it was supplanted by the TOZ-49. That was essentially the same design, but chambered for 7.62x26mmR – a shorter version of the gas-seal cartridge. The TOZ-49 was made until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Both models are quite accurate, and also quite rare to find in the United States.
Thanks to the Supply Battalion of the Estonian Defense Forces Support Command for giving me access to film these two rare revolvers!
“TOZ-36(…)TOZ-49(…)usually described as variants of the Model 1895 Nagant, but they actually work on a different mechanism(…)”
There was target Nagant revolver, namely МЦ-4 see 23rd image from top at https://pikabu.ru/story/tyazhelo_v_derevne_bez_nagana_chast_3_11741016 which was in production around 1955, most distinctive feature is longer barrel (147 mm).
“(…)was made until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.(…)”
This is not definite end, as according to https://www.imfdb.org/wiki/TOZ-36 In 1996, nearly twenty years after the production was discontinued, a new version appeared: the TOZ-96, a version of TOZ-49 chambered in .32 S&W Long.
I have a question!
I have found an another one difference between the TOZ-36 & TOZ-49 – many years ago. I happily take the opportunity to ask it.
Lets see the section view of the TOZ-36:
https://reibert.info/lots/uchebnyj-plakat-revolver-toz-36-konstrukcii-e-l-xajdurova-1969-g.444937/
(Backup:
https://st.violity.com/auction/big/auctions/90/41/96/90419688.jpg)
There is an arm in front of the cylinder. I am not sure the function of it, but most probably it prevents the cylinder from rotation, when the hammer is not cocked, I guess.
Now, see the section view of the TOZ-49 (page 4 in the manual):
https://manualzz.com/doc/10831611/raznoexport-toz-49
There is a space for this arm, but it is missing.
Is it known, why was this difference necessary?
One of the weirder things in firearms history has been the Russian/Soviet fascination with the gas-seal revolver. No one, anywhere else in the world, felt it necessary to go through the contortions necessary to enable this technology even for limited civilian usage, and the Russians felt like it was an absolute necessity to the point where they put it on standard issue for their entire military.
Why?
Did Nagant just do that good a job selling the Tsar on this idea, or is the rest of the world really that dumb?
I’ve fired the Nagant revolver just enough that I can safely say that I didn’t see much in the way of difference between it and your bog-standard .38 Special.
The continued insistence on holding to this idiosyncratic approach to revolver design strikes me as a waste of time and effort in production, as well as materials. Is there something I’m missing? Can anyone provide a coherent and reasoned argument for the Nagant gas-seal designs? I sure as hell can’t.
The big stink that is made about gas-seal revolvers is their use with a suppressor. The Russian/Soviet sneaky police certainly made use of such. But were suppressor a thing back in 1895?
Were the Russians worried about the flash and spray from the cylinder gap scarring the not-so-bright peasant conscripts?
A good gas-seal would make revolving carbines less dangerous to fire. Daweo’s link shows a couple examples of Nagant revolving carbines, but I doubt many were made.
https://pikabu.ru/story/tyazhelo_v_derevne_bez_nagana_chast_3_11741016
Maybe there was perceived a need, even if limited, for gas-seal revolvers. Then the Russian mentality did not allow for multiple designs and multiple cartridges. So brute force was applied to make just one model.
One motivating factor in the switch from the TT semi-auto pistol to the Makarov was based upon wanting a single model/cartridge for both police and military. Seems a bit of push to think one design would really fulfill both requirements well. But this may be yet another example of Russian thinking that ended up with mass production of the Nagant.
I dunno. Jeff Cooper touted the Colt 1911 as a do-all police or military handgun. The idea is not necessarily wrong. Though yeah. If there be such a panacea its name is not Makarov
If by police we mean the Ministry of the Interior armed forces, they had units that were practically full infantrymen. Maybe the Kremlin was trying to force a single supply chain on them, the KGB’s border forces, and the Army. Personally I think 9mm Ultra/Makarov is not an unreasonable Army sidearm by the ’50s when sidearms hardly mattered anymore.
During the “transitional revolver” phase of the 1840s-50s, in which every pepperbox maker was building half-assed revolvers that were nothing but pepperboxes with the barrel clusters cut to about an inch and a half long and a single barrel stuck on the front by whatever Rube Goldberg method they could think of, there was a short spate of “gas-seal” revolvers, notably in Britain;
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2021/02/24/wheelgun-wednesday-early-gas-seal-revolvers/
Half a century later, the Pieper gas-seal revolver in 8 x 41R and revolving carbine in 8 x 50R were issued to the Mexican “Colorados”, the “Imperial Guard” of Madero, Huerta and Diaz from 1893 to 1916.
https://forum.cartridgecollectors.org/t/8-mm-pieper-revolver-carbine/36665
I’m guessing that in a combat environment chock-full of revolutionaries with Winchesters of various calibers, they probably wished they had something a but more emphatic to make their rebuttals with.
cheers
eon
If you watch C&Rsenal, there’s a Pieper carbine usually visible on the wall behind Othais. Yes, it drove me so crazy not knowing what it was that I searched “Nagant” and “revolving carbine” until I learned about the name difference.
There also exist gas-seal percussion revolver namely THE SAVAGE-NORTH PERCUSSION .36 CALIBER NAVY REVOLVER https://www.armscollectors.com/mgs/savage_north.htm which proved too complicated for intended users https://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/artifacts/arms-and-ordnance/small-arms/handguns/36-caliber-percussion-revolver–savage-north.html
No, everything is a tradeoff until it isn’t. If the Nagant’s quirks and sacrifices caused it to outperform all the “leakers”, it might have a point; as one of the least potent military cartridges even of its era, it proves you (and the rest of the world) are absolutely right.
The 8 x 50R and 8 x 41R Pieper rounds weren’t exactly barn-burners, either. From the limited data available, I’ve concluded their closest analogues were the 8 x 48R Sauer, and the trio of .32-40 rounds from Remington, Ballard and Winchester. None of which were noticeably more powerful than a . 44 WCF was from a rifle barrel.
They and the arms made for them seem to have been a case of great effort for very little return.
clear ether
eon
eon said:
“They and the arms made for them seem to have been a case of great effort for very little return.”
Which is the point I was making… The adoption of the Nagant and the Russians/Soviets hanging on to it for the majority of the early 20th Century is more a sociological phenomenon than a technical one, and I’ll be damned if I can figure the rationale out. Not even the French, with their quixotic and idiosyncratic firearms sensibilities got themselves up to anything even remotely akin to the Nagant system, nor did they double-down on it as demonstrated by these two successor pistols.
What on Earth made the Russians go down this path? It’s not like there was some massive internal constituency demanding it, as in the American monomania in reference to the “individual rifleman”, at least that I am aware of. And, granted, we’ve got very little access to Russian literature of the era…
Was this a case of a poor selection converted over to the “installed base” fallacy? How the hell did Nagant pull that one off? I’ve been told rumors that Nagant got this contract because of the crazy BS that went on surrounding the adoption of the Mosin-Nagant rifle and its patents, but… Seriously? They couldn’t have just given him cash?
As always, the social part of the whole thing is more interesting than the technical. Why’d they lock themselves into this insanity for so long? Was there an internal constituency for it, people whose thinking demanded gas-seal?
As weak as the cartridge is, I can’t help but think that the gas-seal bit was an excessive effort for the questionable benefits gained. Russia would have been better off buying something like what the British Empire eventually did, a rationalized .38 caliber along the lines of the .38 Special.
“(…)rationalized .38 caliber(…)”
Not possible. Russian Empire wanted same internal barrel diameter like recently-adopted Mosin rifle.
I think that it started with a good sales job by Nagant and after that it was just the snowball-boulder of institutional inerta (and worse, RUSSIAN institutional inerta) rolling endlessly downhill.
I can at least sort of see why you *might* want gas-seal for a specialist target gun, since the lack of the ‘jump’ between the cylinder and forcing cone might theoretically improve precision
“(…)waste of time and effort in production, as well as materials. Is there something I’m missing?(…)”
You should consider its’ competitor. Mosin pepper-box revolver. See images at
https://www.kalashnikov.ru/revolver-mosina-nesostoyavshayasya-privelegiya/
which resolved problem of gas-escape using cluster of 6 barrels. This weapon required crafting 6 rifled barrels and then arranging them to keep them parallel.
1. According to Veress Gábor’s book [Híres katonai pisztolyok és revolverek – A Colt Navytől az APSz-ig (1851-1951) = Famous military pistols and revolvers – From the Colt Navy to the APS (1851-1951], the gas seal was a solution for the problem that the then new smokeless powder flame cut the top strap made from a not so quite good quality steel. – Although the author has (mainly or fully?) based his book on international literature, I cannot track down where this information came from.
2. Some experienced target shooter says, a semi automatic pistol is more accurate than a revolver.
Why?
Because the projectile’s free travel distance from the case to the start of the rifling is minimal.
This is why many target revolver made in .38 and .32 caliber uses shorter than standard cylinders for only special ammunition: wadcutter bullet fully seated in the case.
Maybe the Soviet engineers thinked that, precision-wise they can unite the benefits both the target revolvers (fixed barrel, no moving mass except from the hammer) and the semi automatic pistols.
Look here:
https://www.gunboards.com/threads/henri-pieper-gas-seal-revolvers.1258337/
Looks like a clone of the Nagant M1895 by a different manufacturer.
And mentions of other attempts at gas-seal.
https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2016/8/29/rifleman-qa-gas-seal-revolvers
Information on Pieper, by Ian himself.
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/biography-henri-nicolas-pieper/
And this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieper_M1893
Which came first Pieper or Nagant? Did one steal the design from the other? Looks like Pieper may have been first. Both men were from Belgium. A bit more detail about when Pieper started work on the design than I have found on Nagant.
As far as I know, Pieper had a patent, which expired in 1891. He abandon it, and the Nagant brothers used his idea. – I have never could find this patent.
There is another really different approach to gas-seal revolvers: internal piston rounds. Which the US and USSR both fooled around with.
https://cartridgecollector.net/cartridge/44-quiet-special-purpose-revolver/
In the end, the “tunnel rats” tended to stick to their first choice of handgun, the S&W M10 .38 Special 4″. Although they did sometimes use a special “shot” cartridge developed for aircrew survival, that fired half-a-dozen steel “splinters”, an early form of “flechette” ammunition.
One “rat” of my acquaintance (25th ID) said that the “splinters” were effective “wounders” out to about ten feet, but no more.
He also said that he couldn’t see them being any good for “foraging”, as they wouldn’t kill a rabbit at twenty feet. He opined that he could do better with a slingshot.
cheers
eon
I knew a former “tunnel rat” from my early days in the Army, when we still had actual Vietnam vets cluttering up the place. Learned a lot from him, and all the rest of them, God bless their hearts.
The one thing about “tunnel ratting” I learned from him was “Don’t do it, and if they want you to, tell them to f*ck off… Ain’t worth it.”
I should point out that he and about five of his friends were ordered to go into a tunnel complex that collapsed on them, and he was the only survivor they managed to dig out after about six hours. If, for whatever reason, you got him talking about it, you could expect an extensive binge and then a lot of collateral damage.
From what I understand, the company-grade officer that had ordered the effort was removed from command and flown out of theater sometime in the week after all of it happened, as the entire unit effectively turned on him. The majority of the unit felt like he’d given the tunnel team (which was never officially authorized or actually trained on the task) suicidal orders, aaaand… Yeah. Supposedly, someone let it be known to the Sergeant Major that a fragging was imminent, and that if they didn’t want to be court-martialing a bunch of people, his departure from command would be a Really Good Idea™.
As a not-sanctioned element of tunnel rats, they’d had zero access to the specialized tools developed for them, and the team had felt that about the only real benefit for the gadgets was that it bolstered your confidence going in. Outside of that, the whole thing was Hobson’s choice, in that you could have all that crap, and you’d still wind up going at it with the VC using only a folding Buck knife.
An object I learned was something likely to trigger a PTSD episode with my informant, in that every so often when you used one around him, you’d get a fugue state while he remembered whatever it was he’d associated with it. It was usually tactile, so the sight of the knife wasn’t that big a deal, but having him handle it? Big problems were usually on the way. Someone later told me that while he was trapped in the collapsed tunnel he’d been in, in the dark, he’d been considering using the knife as a way out for himself.
Tunnel rats were guys I can only look at with a certain respect and outright awe. Of course, a lot of them were just plain nuts, but… Man.
The man I knew said the book The Tunnels of Cu Chi was about 90% accurate.
He said the 10% they missed included things like the fact that the tunnel complex went clear under Saigon (“Ho Chi Minh City” today), and that a lot of the tunnels were several centuries old, having originally been built during the Champa kingdom’s “civil war” with other Vietnamese states in the 10th Century AD.
“Tunnel warfare” is an old tradition over there. Something we and the French knew nothing about going in.
clear ether
eon
The list of things that the French and the US “missed” in Vietnam was near-infinite…
The one that cracks me up, looking back at it all, was the insouciant way the US just ignored the whole issue of “route interdiction” and rear-area combat as if it wasn’t going on. You’ll be hard-pressed to find anything contemporaneous discussing the whole thing; they treated it all as a minor inconvenience, insofar as actually getting attention on the issue from high-up in the US.
Meanwhile, the Rhodesians and South Africans were faced with a lot of the same problems, and where the US Army put a couple of draftee schmucks with mine detectors out in front of sandbagged trucks backing down the roads, the African nations were building out the first iterations of purpose-built armored vehicles for route clearance and force protection… Which we studiously ignored for thirty-odd years, until walking blind into the same sort of threat scenario in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The only comfort I can take from all that is that the Soviets did the exact same thing in Afghanistan during the 1980s, having apparently suffered a breakdown of communications between their trainers who were spreading the gospel of rear-area battle in the Third World, and their version of “Big Soviet Army”. Either that, or they’d never thought to come up with their own countermeasures and studiously avoided taking notes about how the Germans countered their efforts on the Eastern Front during WWII.
It’s an entire area of historical study that’s lain fallow since ’45. Not a soul on either side of the Iron Curtain appears to have paid the slightest attention to it, aside from the Rhodesians and South Africans…
Eon, It would be cool to contemplate about if there was actually a situation where development of a city in several centuries was mirrored by same development of a city underground tunnels, so you basicly have a tree like parallel system of “roots” underneath.
@Storm,
Talk to your local city engineers. If you’re in Germany, and make that mistake? You may never sleep soundly within projectile range from your nearest major metropolitan area.
The amount of simply abandoned underground “everything” in most major German cities is mind-boggling; I used to know a Wallmeister that we would go up and inspect prepositioned targets in our area with, and if you got him talking…? He was highly… Informative.
The Germans have really good records from WWII. They’re fragmentary, because bombing and the fact that Hitler hated Germans by the end of it all. There are hundreds of thousands of tons of unaccounted-for explosive materials that were transferred around Germany during the war, and a good fraction of those remain unaccounted for in terms of “We know there was a bang…” or “We know they made munitions from them…”
The rest vanished into night and fog, like a lot of the people did. At least some considerable fraction of those materials are suspected to be in storage/factory structures that were built and integrated into what is now the urban landscape of modern Germany, and the hopeful wish that the authorities had that the problem would go away and take care of itself…? Likely not going to happen.
It’s like the situation at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. There were levels of the complex there that the Brits turned into storage during the Cold War, but because the pumps got turned off during the Battle of Berlin, the lower reaches are underwater and inaccessible. There are indicators that while the Brits were able to keep the top stories functional, there may be as many as four or more extending deeper below, and those are all flooded, being below the water table. What’s in them? Who knows, but they were building and flying aircraft out of that complex right up until the end.
The Wallmeister I knew would not give away anything classified, but he did make a point of mentioning that none of his immediate family lived or worked inside the city limits of any major German urban area, and he would not allow any of them to do so. He was highly critical of what was then West German policy to just leave those issues alone, and certain that there were going to be epic tragedies as the cheap Nazi explosives degraded and sensitized themselves.
Of course, he was working from bad records, somewhat obsessed, and none of what he was predicting has eventuated since I knew him during the mid-1980s. That said, were you to have a good look at all the GIS that I’m sure the Germans have worked up since then, you’d probably be unpleasantly surprised about what a lot of the German population is living over. It’s not just unexploded Allied bombs; in all too many cases, they simply couldn’t deal with the cleanup during the post-war years, and just walled things off or welded the doors shut, and hoped it would all work out for the best. And, maybe it will…
I’d just exercise caution, were I to be an urban explorer inside the territory of Germany. We had apocryphal tales of guys who’d broken the seals on the doors in our barracks buildings, and who were never seen again once they went in exploring. At least one of those stories I saw the records on, but it’s unclear whether he succumbed to left-over booby-traps, or if his criminal partners smuggling drugs got him.
I also distinctly remember getting the “HAZMAT” briefing before working on ranges down at Grafenwoehr and being casually informed that we needed our actual working NBC gear with us, because there were known yet unaccounted-for or located bunkers thought to contain significant stocks of WWII German nerve agents out in the impact areas… You ran a bulldozer out there, you had to have guys observing what they turned up, lest you disturbed something really dangerous with their blades.
Seems that there was something of a reduced interest in documenting things as the war wound down, and a lot of the records that were made simply fell through the cracks.
I think my Wallmeister acquaintance was perhaps a bit on the paranoid side, especially looking back at things, but… He had basis for it.
“(…)you’re in Germany(…)”
Keep calm. This was not limited to Germany, even in neutral Switzerland (so no intentional documents destroying), there was https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosionskatastrophe_von_Mitholz in 1947.
If nothing else, the discussion here has dispelled the myth that that Nagant 1895 was the only gas-seal revolver ever made.
Losing sleep over that, were you?