Why Soviet Snipers Were Nothing Like American Snipers

In the Soviet Army, the man listed as the platoon's sniper was a conscript with a four-power scope. In the US Army, a sniper was a specialist the battalion lent out when it needed one. Both armies made their choice in the same year, 1958. One of them got the half-kilometer right. This is the story of the SVD Dragunov and the idea behind it: a contest between three Soviet design bureaus that a maker of target rifles, Yevgeny Dragunov, won in 1963; a four-power scope built for speed, not patience; the 7N1 cartridge and the 1975 barrel change that let the rifle feed from a machine gun's belt; the valleys of Afghanistan where it arrived late and changed how squads fought; the streets of Grozny; the copies built in Romania, Yugoslavia, China, Iran and Iraq; and what happened when Western armies met the same mountains. Technical figures are from the record: barrel length, weight, the factory accuracy standard and the hit probabilities the Soviet Army expected from the man behind it. CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 1:36 The Short Cartridge 4:51 Three Rifles 9:20 Four Power 13:02 The Word Sniper 16:37 Four Hundred Meters 20:06 The Street in Izhevsk 21:38 Grozny 24:33 The Half Kilometer 28:39 Still Issued