MOSIN – NAGANT MODEL 1891 RIFLE – U.S. MANUFACTURED

World War broke out with a vengeance in August, 1914. It wasn’t long before all of the combatants were looking for increased supplies of food, money and weapons. The United States traded with England, France and Russia. Germany and its allies were not recipients of our largess. This was the state of mind of our international politics; we traded with one side in the conflict while we told the world that we were neutral. If you look up the word neutral in the dictionary it does not correspond with the meaning of neutrality that the Wilson Administration had at that time.

The Russians were off to a bad start militarily from the very beginning. The soldiers were under trained and they were short of supplies which included rifles. In 1915, the Russian government signed contracts with Remington Arms and Westinghouse to build rifles for them. Westinghouse received an order for nearly 2 million rifles and these were produced at the Savage Arms Co. plant in Chicopee Falls, Mass. As Westinghouse did not have any rifle production facilities.

Many of these rifles were shipped but the political situation in Russian prevented all of them from being accepted by the Russian government. This was the case with both Westinghouse rifles as well as Remington. With a large surplus of rifles on hand in the USA that could not be delivered, the U.S. government purchased some 250,000 of these rifles and used them to train the large numbers of recruits that were mobilized after our entry into the war in April, 1917. They were not of the correct caliber, but they were certainly better than broomsticks which were being used in training.

The Russian M-1891 rifle in my collection was made by Westinghouse. Its serial number is a little over the 1.3 million range. The bolt and the receiver serial number match on the rifle which is always a plus. On the left side of the breech is an U.S. ordnance bomb stamped into the metal. This signifies its use by the U.S. military (army) in WWI.

On the left side of the butt stock is an imprint in the wood; Angliskii Zakaz which translates into English Contract. The equipment at the Chicopee Falls, Mass. Plant was owned by the British Government and they were paying for these Russian-Westinghouse rifles. As they say, Truth can be stranger than fiction!

After the Great War many of these rifles were sold to the American citizens as it was a non-standard arm and it was not worth keeping in U.S. Ordnance inventory. Many were turned into sporting rifles by cutting the wood back and in some cases the barrel length was also reduced. The original rifles can still be found on racks at pawn shops and at gun shows. It is a very interesting rifle of World War I and a nice addition to any collection.