Mosin-Nagant 91/30: Old Rifle, Young Snipers

On the Eastern Front, sniper fire was not about glamour shots at impossible ranges. It was about patient people with an old, long bolt-action rifle and a small 3.5-power scope, changing the tempo of battles one deliberate trigger press at a time. This episode looks at how the Mosin-Nagant 91/30, paired with the PU optic and produced in huge numbers, became the backbone of a Soviet sniper system rather than a handful of elite one-off rifles.

We follow that system from prewar marksmanship culture through Odessa, Sevastopol, Stalingrad and the final drive into East Prussia, through the stories of shooters like Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Vasily Zaitsev and Roza Shanina. Along the way, we separate legend from documentation, show where the rifle and scope excelled – and where they showed their age – and ask what this “old” sniper rifle can still teach about training, patience, and the difference between perfect weapons and present ones.

Some historical photographs and film clips in this video come from Wikimedia Commons, the U.S. National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Imperial War Museum, and similar collections that provide public-domain or no-known-copyright-restriction material, as well as museum object photos released on equivalent terms.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This video may contain brief quoted text, images, or audio used for the purposes of commentary, criticism, teaching, and research. Such use is transformative and is believed to fall under the fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law (17 U.S.C. §107).

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