Stalin’s staccato burb gun: The PPSh-41 7.62x25mm SMG (VIDEOS)

Ian with Forgotten Weapons treks to the far north, where he encounters one beauty of a Soviet submachine gun and lets it sing a song of its people.

The Pistolet Pulemjot Schpagina model of 1941, or rather just PPSh-41, is a work of industrial art. Its design was by Soviet weapons guru Georgii S. Shpagin and was very basic: a short 33-inch long blowback-operated select-fire submachine gun with a 10-inch chrome-lined barrel inside a wooden stock. It weighed 12 pounds when loaded with a 71-round drum magazine or about 9.5 pounds with the more reliable and preferred 35-round box magazine.

The Soviets made more than 6 million of these room brooms and they are still in (second-hand) use, nearly 70 years later, in hotspots all over the world and the occasional parade through Red Square. It fired the same round as the Soviet Tokarev pistol, the 7.62x25mm cartridge, at a paint-peeling 1,250-rounds per minute, almost twice as fast as other subguns of its days.

In the above video, Ian McCollum with Forgotten Weapons travels to Canada where he found a beautiful PPSh-41 is original condition and brings the heat, burning through a stick mag in seconds.

“That is an absurdly high rate of fire,” he says after zipping through a load of 7.62x25mm with absolutely gentle recoil.

For more info on the gun and a tabletop review, check out the below:

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