Yevgeny Dragunov

Who was Yevgeny Dragunov?

Yevgeny Fyodorovich Dragunov was a Russian weapons designer, best known for the semi-automatic rifle bearing his name, the Dragunov sniper rifle.

From a family of gunsmiths, Dragunov worked as a factory machinist before beginning military service in 1939. After 1941 he was a senior armourer, working on Soviet and also captured enemy weapons during wartime. After 1945 he returned to Izhevsk and joined the Arms Design Bureau, working as a project engineer on sporting and civilian target rifles through the 1950s. One of these, the Biathlon target rifle, went on to Olympic Gold. In 1959 Dragunov submitted his design for a military sniping rifle, the SVD, which was accepted into Soviet military service in 1963, and later became known as the Dragunov rifle.

Dragunov also participated in the competition that led to the adoption of AKS-74U with a gas-operated design called MA. Although Dragunov's avtomat was comparable in performance to Kalashnikov's, the latter had the advantage that it shared some parts with the AK-74 rifle already in production. The non-metallic parts of the MA were made of polyamides. The MA was Dragunov's last major design. The trigger mechanism used in the MA was fairly similar to the one previously used in the PP-71 sub-machine gun, which is also attributed to Dragunov.