The Horrors of Soviet VSS Vintorez
For two decades the West only heard rumors. A Soviet sniper rifle that broke down into a handful of pieces and fit inside an ordinary aluminum briefcase, that fired a heavy subsonic bullet making no sonic crack on its way to a man at 200 meters, and that ran at a noise level closer to a suppressed MP5 than to a normal rifle. When Western analysts finally got their hands on captured examples after the five day Russo-Georgian War of August 2008, there was a genuine scramble just to identify what they were looking at. The VSS Vintorez, Russian for "thread cutter," had been quietly slipped to GRU and KGB Spetsnaz teams from 1987 onward, built in tiny numbers by the Tula Arms Plant for the men sent off to do the work nobody talks about. The program traces all the way back to May 1960, when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union and engineers at the secretive TsNIITochMash institute near Moscow began picking apart the captured suppressed pistol pulled from the wreckage.
This is the full story of the integrally suppressed Soviet special purpose sniper rifle that grew out of the RG-036 prototype completed in 1981 and a formal development program led by designer Petr Serdyukov from 1983, demanded a brand new heavy subsonic cartridge just to function, the 9x39mm SP-5 sniper round and armor piercing SP-6 developed by Nikolai Zabelin, Lidya Dvoryaninova and Yuri Frolov on a necked out 7.62x39mm case, entered service in 1987 under the GRAU designation 6P29 alongside its full auto sibling the AS Val (6P30), was rumored to have been tested by Spetsnaz teams in the closing months of the Soviet war in Afghanistan before the February 1989 withdrawal although no captured examples or front line photographs from that conflict have ever surfaced, came into its own in the meat grinder of the First Battle of Grozny on New Year's Eve 1994 where Russian special forces used it to pick apart Chechen commanders, machine gunners and snipers from holes in the rubble, became a standard tool for the GRU, FSB units like Alpha and Vympel, and MVD scout teams across the Second Chechen War and the Dagestan campaign from August 1999, stepped out of the shadows when both Russian and Georgian forces were caught carrying it during the five day war over South Ossetia in August 2008, turned up in the fighting across Ukraine's Donbass region and in Crimea from 2014, surfaced in the Syrian civil war alongside Russian backed government troops from 2015, and reappeared from the opening days of the full Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 where captured examples are now being turned back on the men who brought them in. Updated as the VSSM (6P29M) with an aluminum adjustable buttstock, Picatinny rails and the new 1P86 optic for deliveries running since 2018, the Vintorez also spawned an entire family of 9x39mm Russian special weapons including the SR-3 Vikhr, the 9A-91, the VSK-94 and the newer AMB-17 carbine from Kalashnikov Concern, and remains one of the most coveted firearms in PUBG, Escape from Tarkov and a thousand other video games almost forty years after it first slipped into a Spetsnaz briefcase.
Chapters:
0:00 Why the Spetznaz wanted it
7:45 The VSS Mystery in Afghanistan
9:05 The insane First Chechen War
11:41 Second Chechen War & Dagestan War
12:44 Then NATO got it in Russo-Georgian War
14:00 Its Insane use in the 2010s and 2020s
-- All motion graphics and map animations are made in after effects --