Soviet milsurps
- Thread starter Irons78
- Start date
- Location
- Algoma, ON
Very nice collection! That Mosin Sniper certainly looks like it's in phenomenal shape.
No, the Poles kept the SVT-40 in service well into the 60's, (mostly at officer training academies and as ceremonial rifles, but they remained in active inventory) - they refurbed a great many SVT's.
Wilkas/Wilkolek reworked bayonets, and even made fresh bayonets.
"Radom" wasn't a factory, that's a misnomer. It was/is a city in Poland with a wide variety of arms industries. They did a lot of refurb work over the years, from Mosins, to SVT's, SKS's, among other things.
Referring to the city is common practice. Izhevsk isn't a factory either but you don't see a lot of people selling "Factory no. 74 91/30s".
I don't doubt that Poland was given SVT-40s in the 1950s but I've never read nor heard anything at all about them marking SVTs with an 11 stamp. It's no doubt fake.
But why would someone fake it?
If you're going to put fake stamps on a milsurp, generally people put recognizable stamps with a known history associated with the firearm, as a way of increasing value.
There was a lot of strange goings on behind the iron curtain back then, and we still only know a fraction of what went on with the mobility of their arms.
We know that Poland was using the SVT's, at least for training purposes, into the 60's, and were refurbishing the bayonets, even making new ones, well into the 50's. Is it really that much of a stretch to contemplate that they had, at least on a small scale, a refurbishment program for some of the guns?
Can I prove it either way? No. But I wouldn't discount the possibility out of hand.
I used to actually feel the same way. "Why would someone fake it if it doesn't increase the value?". It seems a lot of times people just do it because it's fun for them, a hobby. Sometimes it's a way to differentiate what they have and make it unique, rather than run of a mill. Sometimes it's a fantasy, god only knows.
It's not impossible that they're legitimate stamps, just highly improbable. The odds are not very good that the stamp is real when not a single European, US or Canadian collector has ever observed a Radom marked SVT-40 and that there are no references of any kind, no photos, no documents, notta. Keep in mind that the Factory 11 marked SVT-40 magazines that hit the market are new production and you'll see that not a lot of this Polish stuff makes any sense.
