Stechkin APS

The Stechkin APS (Avtomaticheskiy Pistolet Stechkina) is a selective-fire machine pistol adopted by the Soviet Armed Forces on 3 December 1951. It was conceived to fill a gap that opened when the PPSh-41 and PPS-43 submachine guns were declared obsolete after the adoption of the AK-47: artillery and mortar crews, tank crews and aircraft personnel still needed a personal weapon, but a full assault rifle was considered unnecessary for them. Igor Stechkin, a recent graduate of the Tula Mechanical Institute, designed a select-fire pistol accurate to 200 m with a combination holster/shoulder stock. Prototypes were field-tested from April to June 1949 and survived a 20,000-round endurance trial against an Astra machine pistol and a PPS-43, after which Stechkin reworked the design, borrowing the silhouette, slide rails and extractor from the Makarov pistol.

The APS is a straight-blowback, magazine-fed machine pistol chambered in 9x18mm Makarov and fed from 20-round double-column steel magazines. It shares the Makarov's heel-mounted magazine release, slide-mounted safety lever and field-strip procedure. The rear sight is a rotating drum dial offering 25, 50, 100 and 200 m settings, and the chrome-lined barrel doubles as the recoil spring guide. The slide-mounted lever combines safety, decocker and fire selector: forward ("PR") decocks and locks the hammer, locks the slide and blocks the free-floating firing pin; down ("OD") gives semi-automatic fire; rearward ("AVT") gives full automatic.

Making automatic fire controllable from a pistol-sized blowback action required three mechanical solutions. The slide travels an unusually long stroke - three times the length of the cartridge - to slow it and soften the collision with the frame. A rate-reducer lever adds resistance to the opening stroke. Finally, an inertial plunger delays hammer release after the slide closes: a cam on the slide strikes a lever that drives a spring-loaded weight down inside the grip, which then slams back up into the trigger bar to trip the sear. Together these cut the cyclic rate from around 1,000 to 750 rounds per minute, and the rate reducer doubles as the auto-sear. A wooden, bakelite or wire shoulder stock attaches via a T-slot in the rear of the frame; hollowed out, it also serves as the holster, in the manner of the Mauser C96.

The APB (Avtomaticheskiy Pistolet Besshumniy) was a suppressed version developed in the early 1970s by A. S. Neugodov and adopted in 1972; roughly 2,000 APS pistols were converted, receiving a longer threaded barrel, an eccentric sound suppressor and a detachable wire stock. Soviet Spetsnaz team leaders carried APBs in Afghanistan, and OMON and SOBR units of the Interior Ministry have used them since. The base APS was praised for its concept and controllability but criticised for high unit cost, complex machining, bulk, limited effective range and a fragile stock; it was officially superseded in 1981 by the AKS-74U. It nonetheless found a lasting niche with Spetsnaz and FSB units needing more than a Makarov, and has seen use in Vietnam, Angola, Libya, Mozambique, the Syrian civil war and the Russo-Ukrainian War. The OTs-33 Pernach, co-designed by Stechkin, was introduced as its successor in 1996.