Compared with the rifles of the other warring parties, the Mosin-Nagant with 1306 mm was relatively long!
For comparison
The German "Mauser" 98 rifle measured 1110 mm ...
...the British "Lee Enfield" 1133 mm...
...and the US Standard infantry rifle "Springfield" (M 1903) had 1055 mm…:
Only the French "Lebel" rifle corresponded in length of 1307 mm the Mosin-Nagant ...:
As a result of the long run, the Russian rifle had a pretty high "V0" (the speed at which the cartridge leaves the barrel!), which meant: It shot very well on medium and longer distances!
In the Second World War, the weapon (with riflescope of the type "PE" M 1933!) Therefore preferably used as a sniper rifle. Here the often successful "Sniper" A. V. Sidorov ...:
The disadvantage: When fighting in a small space (for example, in the trench) the Mosin-Nagant rifle impeded its wearer by its length!
The misfortune of the Russian soldier during the First World War meant that the military leadership of his country would further increase this disadvantage by a grotesquely wrong decision!
The Russian Minister of War (from March 1909 to June 1915) Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov ...
... was not only corrupt through and through, but completely incompetent!
Suchomlinov publicly boasted before the First World War that since the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 he had not read a single military textbook or journal, because, as he said, "the laws of war remain eternally the same!"
Suchomlinov considered the new weapon - the machine gun - "unsoldatic" and long opposed its introduction into the Russian army!
Therefore, the Tsar's troops went miserably into the war with MG's underserved.
Nor did the Russian Minister of War keep anything from trenches - and he refused to allow their construction to be practiced!
"Trenches only seduce the soldier into cowardice!" he often said.
Instead, the Russian military leadership continued to rely on the classic bayonet attack to decide a battle.
And for this reason were on the - already very long - Russian rifles already in the factory 48-centimeter long triangular steel bayonets ...
... firmly mounted!
So the Russian soldier in 1914 had to learn under fire not only what soldiers of other armies could long ago (create trenches, indeed!), but he was also equipped with a weapon that was almost completely useless in the narrow ditch!
The Russian soldier had instead to run with bayonet attacks against fortified positions, from which he was shot at with machine guns!
It may be objected that he could have removed the obstructive bayonet! In some places that happened - out of sheer despair!
But where to go? Unlike other armies, the Russian soldier did not have a bayonet sheath or something like that!
And especially! - the accuracy of his rifle was also reduced drastically - because the weapons were shot in at the factory (Tula or Izhevsk) with mounted bayonet!
When the disastrous War Minister was finally driven away and charged in 1915, it was already too late:
The best soldiers of the Russian army were already dead (or in captivity) and the troop's moral backbone was broken!
**to be continued next post**