Description
Own a Mosin Nagant that was made in the USA!
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 caught Imperial Russia seriously short of military weapons. The existing stockpile of small arms was inadequate to arm Russia’s huge army & the situation became rapidly worse through the expansion of the armed forces & the normal loss of weapons by capture, accident or otherwise.
By the second year of the war the small arms deficit had became critical. Russia sustained frequent defeats at the front & at one point was suffering a loss of rifles at the appalling rate of 240,000 per month. Despite the purchases of some 2,461,000 rifles from foreign sources during the war – among them Arisakas from Japan & Great Britain & Model 95 Winchesters from the U S & the capture of rifles from their enemies, the Russians never acquired a sufficient quantity of firearms for their troops.
In 1915 the Imperial Russian government ordered 1,500,000 M1891 infantry rifles & bayonets plus 100,000,000 rounds of 7.62×54 mm ammunition from the American firm Remington-UMC & an additional 1,800,000 of the rifles & bayonets from another American company, New England Westinghouse.
The New England Westinghouse company was founded in 1915 in East Springfield, Massachusetts. Its primary purpose was to fulfill a contract to produce Mosin–Nagant rifles for Czar Nicholas II of Russia during World War I. In order to produce the rifles, they purchased the J Stevens Arms & Tool Company in Chicopee Falls, MA on 1 July 1916 & acquired all its holdings which included firearms & tool manufacturing facilities. The Stevens firearms facility was renamed the J Stevens Arms Company & its machinery was retooled to meet the Mosin–Nagant contract. The Czar was deposed in the Russian Revolution in 1917 & the Russian government defaulted on the contract so New England Westinghouse did not receive payment.
The U. S. companies had incurred substantial expenses in tooling-up for & making the Russian rifles & this meant financial disaster. In January 1918, to rescue the American firms the U. S. government agreed to buy the rifles in Westinghouse’s inventory as of January 4th of that year. The U. S. kept 208,050 of the rifles it bought. Some of which were issued to National Guard units, state militia & similar entities. Others were used by the Army, mostly for training purposes.
Other US Mosin-Nagants also made their way to Russia in 1918 via the Arctic port of Archangel where they were carried by some of the American troops sent to intervene in the civil war then raging between communist (Red Russians) & non-communist (White Russians). This use of the guns was based on the theory that it would be cheaper to use locally-available ammunition rather than to add to the expedition’s expense & baggage by shipping cartridges halfway around the world for use in standard-issue Springfield M1903 rifles. Most of these American Mosin-Nagants were abandoned in Russia when the last US troops left in 1920.
The U. S. government sold its remaining M91 rifles as surplus during the 1920’s. These rifles were popular as cheap shooters for years & most were made into hunting or sporting rifles in the 1920’s & ’30s, meaning a rifle in the original configuration is quite hard to find, especially in Australia.
Remington & New England Westinghouse versions of the Mosin-Nagant M91 are highly sought after by collectors this is a fine example. Dated 1915 on the receiver, it is in very good condition as can be seen in the photos. Not unusually, it is not matching numbers. Photos coming soon.
Being sold on consignment for a collector.
