Soviet Union and the SKS
Seeing combat as a trails rifle on the Eastern Front the SKS was baptized in the last days of World War Two in the hands of Soviet Frontoviks. They became standard issue to front line infantry troops in the Soviet Union in 1949. The ubiquitous AK-47 was adopted at the same time but initial problems with the metallurgy of the stamped receiver of that assault rifle kept it from being widely issued until 1956. SKS production ended in the Soviet Union in 1957. It was during this period of time that the SKS was a first line rifle in the Soviet Union. Increasingly as numbers of AK-47 and the later improved AKM came online into the early 1960s the SKS was relegated to use as a second-line weapon. Quantities of the SKS were given to Warsaw Pact allies as well as Communist China. The SKS was withdrawn from even second line use with the Soviets after 1978 when the AK-47 itself was replaced by the AK-74. They were captured in Grenada, Nicaragua and Mozambique. Thousands were kept in arsenal storage as an emergency war reserve until the end of the Cold War when they were liquidated on the world market in the 1990s. Today Russia and many of the other former Soviet states still stock a small numb er where they are used by honor guards and ceremonial units like the Kremlin Regiment.
China and Vietnam and the SKS
In 1956 at the same time that SKS manufacturing in the Soviet Union came to a halt it began in earnest with Soviet help in China. These Chinese SKS’s varied from the original Soviet design after the Sino-Soviet split into quite another evolution all together. The People’s Army rapidly adopted the SKS, using it to replace a hodgepodge of captured Japanese and donated Allied weapons from the Second World War and earlier. These millions of weapons armed both regular Army and paramilitary units in the Chinese Security forces and Border Guard well into the 1970s. They were used in combat in Tibet, along the Soviet border, as well as by secondary troops in the Sino-Vietnamese conflict in 1979.
Over the same time period the People’s Republic of China passed many thousands of weapons to North Vietnam and assisted that country with indigenous production as well. Several hundred Chinese made SKS’s were captured by US forces during the Vietnam conflict and were brought back to North America by returning servicemen. In many parts of the country the SKS was more commonly encountered than the ubiquitous AK-47.
Balkans and the SKS
Being produced by the isolated country of Yugoslavia under the eye of Marshal Tito from 1959 onward, the “Yugo” SKS was the last to see active combat in Europe. Some 700,000 of these weapons were built and maintained by the huge military machine during the cold war. Of those the country sold many abroad to raise hard foreign cash including nearly 100,000 to Uruguay in the 1970s. With a commonality of ammunition shared by the AK-47/AKM/RPK family those weapons retained in Yugoslavia were held for use even after being withdrawn from first line units. When the Cold War defrosted and the Yugoslav wars erupted in 1991, the SKS was taken from arsenal and thrust into first line use. Regular and irregular troops on the Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian forces utilized these weapons over a nearly ten year period. As more modern western arms were brought in and a NATO-enforced peace settled over the former Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav SKS again went into storage. The stocks were liquidated since 2001, with many thousands destroyed or sold abroad after being turned over to peacekeepers.
One of the most interesting subcultures of the surviving Yugoslav SKS’s are the fact that many bear handmade engravings such as unit mottos, girlfriends names, ‘kill marks’ and political slogans that were carved into the weapon’s wooden stocks. These are evidence of the fact that these were often carried by untrained militiamen and volunteers rather than professional soldiers.
Sources
Department of the US Army The SKS RIFLE (Training Circular 9-56, SIMONOV TYPE 56) US Government Printing 1969
Fuller, Wyant and Stephen compliers Editors Lamont SIMONOV SKS-45 TYPE CARBINES (Paperback - 1988)
Gebhart, James F Official SKS Manual of the U.S.S.R. Army (Paperback - Jan 1997)
Gun Guides SKS Rifle Disassembly & Reassembly Gun-guide (Ring-bound - 2006)
Kehaya, Steve and Poyer, Joe The SKS Carbine, 4th Revised and Expanded Edition Biotechniques Books, 2008
Long, Duncan The SKS Type 45 Carbines 1992
Sweeney, Patrick The Gun Digest Book Of The AK & SKS: A Complete Guide to Guns, Gear and Ammunition Gun Digest 2009
carbinecollectors.com/sks.htm Maintained by RK Smith & Dan Reynolds, accessed June 2009. For collectors information about various models.
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