RPD: The Machine Gun the Soviets Retired and Vietnam Refused to Give Up.

By the middle of the 1960s, the Soviet army had already made up its mind. The machine gun was finished. Not broken, not a failure, just finished. Surplus to a plan that had moved on without it. Across the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, [music] quarter masters were pulling it out of frontline squads and pushing a newer weapon into its place. On paper, the decision was clean.

The gun had done its job. time to retire it. At almost exactly the same moment, on the other side of the world, American and South Vietnamese soldiers began filing reports about a new enemy weapon. April 1964, the first confirmed sightings. It was a light machine gun, beltfed. It came down the Ho Chi Min Trail in the hands of North Vietnamese regulars and it fired the same short cartridge as the AK47.

It was compact, it was fast, and one man could carry it and keep firing without ever stopping to change a magazine because the ammunition rode in a drum slung under the gun. 100 rounds linked into a single belt, coiled and waiting. It was the same gun. the exact weapon the Soviet army had just decided it no longer wanted. The name on it was RPD.

The letter at the end stood for a man, Degario. Vasili Degario, one of the most decorated weapons designers in Soviet history. And here is the first strange thing about this story, the thing almost no account leads with. By the time his gun reached the war that made it famous, [music] Vasili Degariov had been dead for 15 years.

He never saw it fire a shot in anger. He never saw the jungle or the trail or the men on both sides who would come to prize the thing he built. The gun that carries his name outlived him. Outlived [music] his own army’s interest in it and went looking for a war he never knew about. [music] This is the story of how that happened.

How a weapon its own creators gave up on became the one machine gun that both sides in Vietnam fought to keep. How a hundred rounds in a drum decided the whole thing. And how the man who designed it, a boy once pulled out of school because his family couldn’t pay, spent his entire life refining a single idea, then died 4 years before it ever reached a soldier’s hands.

If you want the full story of the gun its own army abandoned and both sides in Vietnam refused to give up, stick with me. A quick like and subscribe helps [music] these deep dives reach the next person. The belt in that drum is where it all turns. To [music] understand the gun, you have to start with the man.

And to understand the man, you have to start in a city called Tula. Tula sits about a 100 miles south of Moscow. For centuries, it has meant one thing above everything else. Arms. Gunsmithing. [music] The forges that armed the Russian state. Vasilei Alexeovich Degario was born there in 1880 into a family of hereditary gunsmiths.

[music] The trade was not something he chose. It was something he was born inside of. The forge was part of the household. But being born into a gunsmithing family in Imperial Russia did not mean comfort. It meant work. When Vasilei was around 11 years old, the money ran out. There was no more schooling to be had.

So he did what a boy in that place and that time did. [music] He went to the factory. The Tula Arms plant took him on as a spring tester and a machine operator. 11 years old on the floor of an arms factory learning the trade with his hands because there was no other way to learn it. That is the whole of his formal education.

There was no university, no engineering degree, no academy. Everything Vasilei dear would ever know about how a weapon works. He learned by touching weapons, by [music] testing the springs, running the machines, feeling how steel behaved when it was asked to do something under pressure. Then came the army. He was conscripted, [music] and in the service he ended up where his skills mattered in an armory workshop, repairing and maintaining rifles.

And there [music] he met the man who would change the direction of his life, Vladimir Fedorov. Fedorov was one of the fathers of Russian automatic weapons, the designer behind what many consider [music] the first Russian automatic rifle. He needed skilled hands, men who understood machines. He found Deg Tiario.

And under Fedorov, the self-taught factory boy became something more, a designer’s right hand than a designer in his own right. Fedorov gave him the theory his childhood had never left time for. Degariov supplied the instinct no classroom could teach. His first attempt at a design of his own, an automatic carbine submitted for military trials in 1916, was rejected.

But the ideas inside it did not die. He carried them forward. After the revolution, everything changed. and Deg Tiario’s talent found room to grow. Starting in 1918, he headed the first Soviet firearms design bureau based at the plant in Kov. This was the beginning of the whole Soviet small arms machine, the institution that would decades later produce the AK-47’s competitors [music] and its successors.

And Deg Tiario was at the head of it. His breakthrough came in 1927. The DP light machine gun, the Degariov infantry gun with its distinctive flat pan magazine sitting on top like a dinner plate. The Red Army adopted it. It went to war in Spain in Finland against the Nazis. It spawned a whole family, a tank version, an aircraft version, a modernized version called the DPM.

From that one design flowed a career. By the height of his life, the honors were extraordinary. Major General of the Engineering and Artillery Service, Doctor of Technical Sciences, four Stalin prizes, and in 1940, the title Hero of Socialist Labor, the highest civilian honor the Soviet state could give.

He was only the second person ever to receive it. The first was Joseph Stalin himself. The boy who left school at 11 now stood on paper one rank below the leader of the Soviet Union in the state’s own ledger of merit. But honors are not the same as a finished career. And in 1943, in the middle of the most desperate war his country had ever fought, the Soviet arms world was handed a problem that made almost every existing weapon obsolete at once.

The problem was a bullet. Soviet designers had developed a new cartridge, the 7.62x [music] 39 mm, often called the M43, [music] worked out by the designers Nikolai Elizar and Boris Simin. It was an intermediate round, smaller than the full power rifle cartridge the Russians had used for half a century. Less recoil, lighter to carry, deadly enough at the ranges that actually mattered in real combat.

It [music] was the round that would within a few years define the AK47 [music] and change infantry warfare permanently. But a new cartridge meant new weapons. Every category had to be reinvented around it. Rifle, [music] carbine, and a light machine gun. A squad weapon that could pour out [music] sustained automatic fire using the new round.

The Soviet system did what it always did. [music] It held a competition. Three of the country’s most capable designers were asked to submit a light machine gun for the M43 cartridge. Vasilei Degariov, Sergey Simonov, and Alexe Sudv. Three men, three designs, one winner. Degarov was in his 60s now, decades past the age when most designers do their best work.

His great gun, the DP, was already old. He entered a design he called the RD44. And what he brought to that competition was not a blank sheet of paper. It was 30 years of a single idea refined one more time. To understand why it won, you have to understand exactly how it worked. Here is the thing most people miss about the RPD. It was not a leap into the unknown.

It was the opposite. It was the most refined version of something Degario had already spent his life building. Look at his DP machine gun from 1927 and you will see the ancestor of the RPD hiding in plain sight. The heart of both guns is the same locking system, [music] a mechanism called flapper locking.

Here is what that means in plain terms. When the gun fires, the bolt has to be locked solidly shut or the whole thing tears itself apart. In Detiario’s design, the locking [music] is done by two hinged flaps on the sides of the bolt. As the bolt goes fully forward, those flaps are forced outward into matching recesses cut into the walls of the receiver, locked, solid.

When the gun cycles, the flaps are cammed back in, the bolt unlocks, and the action runs. He had been using that idea since the 1920s. In the RPD, he kept it with one refinement. In the old DP, the flaps were pushed out by the firing pin itself. In the RPD, they were driven out by a wedge on the moving slide. Same principle, cleaner execution.

A lifetime of the same idea tuned one more turn. The gun was gas operated with a long stroke piston. Gas tapped from the barrel drives a piston rigidly connected to the bolt carrier, throwing the whole assembly back to cycle the action. Simple, rugged, forgiving of dirt. It was the kind of system that kept running when everything around it was covered in mud, which is exactly what a squad machine gun has to do.

It fired from an open bolt. That was deliberate. On a weapon meant to put out sustained automatic fire, an open bolt lets air move through the chamber between bursts and keeps the gun cooler with less risk of a round cooking off in a hot barrel. And it fired full automatic only. No semi-auto setting because that was not its job.

Its job was to be the base of fire for a squad. the gun that kept the enemy’s heads down while the rifleman moved. You do not need single shots for that. You need a hose. And then there was the feed. This is the heart of it. This is the thing to hold on to. The old DP had that flat pan magazine on top. 47 rounds in a plate that had to be swapped out when it ran dry.

[music] The RPD threw that away. Instead, it fed from a belt. 100 rounds of 7.62x 39 mm linked together. Actually, two 50 round non-disintegrating metal belts joined into one. And that belt was coiled inside a sheet metal drum that clipped onto the underside of the gun. [music] The gunner did not feed it by hand from a box some helper carried.

He carried his own ammunition, slung under the weapon, and fed it through a system that [music] pushed each round forward out of the belt and into the chamber. 100 rounds ready, carried by one man hanging under the gun. Think about what that gave a soldier. He could move. He could fire long bursts without a loader, without a magazine change every 15 or 20 rounds without stopping at the worst possible moment.

He could carry the gun at his hip or his shoulder, like an oversized rifle, and walk fire onto a target. [music] The whole weapon weighed around 16 lb empty, roughly 10 lb lighter than the heavier machine guns standing beside it in that era. Light enough for one man. Deadly enough to anchor a squad. It was not perfect, and honesty about the trade-offs is part of the [music] story. The barrel was fixed.

It did not quick change. On a true sustained fire gun, you want to swap a hot barrel for a cool one so you [music] can keep firing indefinitely. The RPD could not do that. [snorts] Fire it long enough and hard enough, and the barrel would overheat with no fix, but to stop. Degarov’s answer was to line the bore and chamber with chrome, hard, [music] slick, resistant to the corrosion and fouling that would otherwise build up.

It was a compromise. A light gun that could not sustain fire forever in exchange for a gun one man could actually carry and feed on the move. That was the bet. And in the 1944 trials, it beat Simonov’s design and Sudv’s design. Degarov’s RD-44 was judged the best of the three. [music] It was accepted into Soviet service as the RPD, the model of 1944.

The first belt-fed light machine gun the Soviet Union ever built around an intermediate cartridge. In a real sense, the ancestor of every modern squad automatic weapon that would follow in every army on Earth. He had won. At 63 years old with a design that distilled 30 years of work, Vasilei Degario had built his last great gun.

And then almost nothing happened [music] for years. Because between winning a competition and reaching a single soldier’s [music] hands, this gun had a long, strange road to travel. And by the time it got where it was going, the Soviet army was already looking past it. The RPD won its competition in 1944. It should have flooded into the Soviet army immediately. It [music] did not.

The problem was the calendar. 1944 was the middle of the most destructive war in human history fought on Soviet soil. The country was bleeding factories, cities, and people. Everything that could be built was being built for the fight in front of them with weapons already in production. A brand new machine gun, however good, was a luxury the wartime economy could not stop to retool [music] for.

So the RPD waited. It was ready for mass production near the end of the war. It was formally adopted in 1948, but large-scale delivery to Soviet troops did not truly begin until 1953, nearly a decade after it won. The gun spent its first years as a design that had proven itself and then sat while the country that made it rebuilt from rubble.

When it finally came, it came in force. [music] The RPD became the standard squad-like machine gun across the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. And then it did what Soviet weapons did in the Cold War. It [music] spread. China built it as the Type 56 and the Type 56-1. North Korea built it as the Type 62. Egypt built it in a factory at Miy Guns that would turn up in the Arab-Israeli wars.

Finland fielded its own version, the 7.62 [music] KKK54. The design radiated outward from Kov across the communist world and beyond it, copied, licensed, and restamped in half a dozen countries. And then in the early to mid 1960s, the Soviet army made the decision, “This whole story turns on.” It retired the RPD, not because it had failed, because something more convenient had arrived.

Miky Kalashnikov’s design bureau offered a new squad weapon, the RPK. And the RPK’s great advantage was not firepower. In pure firepower, it was arguably a step backward. The RPK gave up the belt. It fed from a magazine like a rifle, a bigger magazine, a drum or a long box, but a magazine, not a 100 round belt.

What the RPK offered instead [music] was Salonus. It was in effect a heavybarreled AKM. It shared parts with the rifle every Soviet soldier already carried. It used the same magazines. It could be built on the same lines, repaired with the same spares, taught with the same manual. For an army the size of the Soviet Unions, that was worth more than the belt.

It was commonality over capability. The quartermasters logic won. So the Soviets began pulling their RPDs out of firstline service. And all those surplus guns, plus all the ones China and the others were still turning out, needed somewhere to go. They went to the wars the Soviet [music] Union was not officially fighting.

They poured down the Ho Chi Min Trail into Vietnam. The first American and South Vietnamese reports of the RPD came in April of 1964 as they began running into North Vietnamese regulars. And the gun spread through the communist forces fast. It fired the same 7.62x 39 mm round as the AK-47 and the SKS.

The same soldiers carried one cartridge for the whole squad. Simple to supply. It was light. It was beltfed. And in the close green ambush heavy fighting of Vietnam, that combination was close to ideal. By 1968, [music] the RPD and its Chinese type 56 twin was the standard squad machine gun of the Vietkong and the North Vietnamese Army.

Here is the thread pulling tight. the exact capability the Soviet army had just decided it did not need. The belt, the 100 rounds under the gun, sustained fire one man could carry and feed without stopping, was the exact capability that made the RPD lethal in the jungle. Moscow saw an inconvenience. The men on the trail saw the best tool for the job.

They refused to give it up. And then the irony completes itself because it was not only the communist side that wanted this gun. The American special operations unit running secret crossber missions MACV [music] SOG went looking for a support weapon and found that their own was wrong for the work.

The M60, the American beltfed machine gun, was a fine gun, but it was heavy, [music] well over 20 lb, and it fired the big 7.62 62x [music] 51 mm NATO round. Too much weight, too much bulk for small teams moving fast and quiet deep in enemy territory. So SOG operators did something remarkable. They picked up captured RPD guns and made them their own.

They cut the barrels down, sometimes right back to the gas tube for a shorter, handier weapon. And they built custom [music] belts, reportedly stretching the load to 125 rounds, and lined the drums with lenolum so the ammunition would not rattle and give them away as they crept toward a target. American commandos carrying a Soviet gun the Soviet army had thrown out, hunting Vietnamese soldiers who were carrying the very same gun.

Both sides, the same weapon, in the same jungle. neither one willing to give it up. The RPD is still out there today in the Middle East, in Africa, in the war in Ukraine, and in cut down semi-automatic form in the hands of American civilian collectors. The gun the Soviets retired never really retired at all, but the man whose initials are stamped into the name, the letter D in RPD, got almost none of this.

And that is the part of the story almost no one tells. Vasilei Degario died in Moscow on the 16th of January 1949. Line that date up against the life of his gun and something quietly sad comes into focus. The RPD had been formally adopted only months earlier in 1948 on paper. An achievement he lived just long enough to see.

But the gun did not reach Soviet troops in real numbers until 1953, four years after he was buried. Vietnam, the war that made the RPD famous, did not begin generating American reports until 1964, 15 years after his death. MACV SOG cutting down captured RPD guns. The Vietkong feeding belts in the jungle, the gun spreading to a dozen armies.

All of it happened in a world he never saw. [music] He built the thing. He won the competition. And then he died before his final design fired a single shot in the war it was destined for. The gun carried his name forward into history [music] and left the man himself behind. There is a deeper unfairness underneath that one.

Ask almost anyone to name a Soviet weapons designer and you will hear one name Kalashnikov. The AK47 made Mikail Kalashnikov a household word, a face, a legend the Soviet state polished for decades. [music] And Kalashnikov earned his place. But Deg Tiario came first and arguably ran deeper. He headed the first Soviet firearms design bureau, the institution Kalashnikov would later work within.

He carried the lineage forward from Fedorov, [music] the father of Russian automatic arms. His designs armed the Red Army through the Winter War and the whole of the Second World War, the DP and its variants. The PPD [music] submachine gun, the PTRD anti-tank rifle that Soviet soldiers used against German armor, the heavy machine gun [music] that refined by Spagen became the DHK, a body of work most designers could only dream of.

And yet to most of the world he is a footnote, the obscure name behind a single letter. And his final gun suffered its own version of that fate. The RPD was the design that got leapfrogged. Within roughly a decade of reaching the troops, the Soviet army set it aside, not for a better machine gun, but for one that shared parts with [music] a rifle.

The RPK that replaced it gave up the very thing that made the RPD special. [music] It surrendered the belt for a magazine, traded firepower for tidiness in the supply chain. The same state [music] that had made Degario a major general, a doctor of technical sciences, a four-time Stalin prize laurate, the second hero of socialist labor in the history of the honor.

That same state looked [music] at his last gun’s best feature and decided it was not worth the logistics. And this is where the whole thing circles back to [music] the promise in the title. The Soviets retired the RPD for a reason you could write on a spreadsheet. Fewer part numbers, simpler supply, one magazine for the whole squad.

It was a rational, bureaucratic quartermaster’s decision. [music] And on those terms, it was probably correct. But the men [music] who actually carried weapons through actual jungle did not think like quartermasters. They thought about what they could carry and how long they could keep firing. They looked at 100 rounds coiled in a drum under a 16-lb gun, and they saw exactly what they needed.

So while one army filed the RPD away as obsolete, fighters half a world away, and the commandos hunting them held on to it with both hands. The [music] gun outlived its designer. It outlived its own army’s interest in it, and it found its longest, fiercest life in the hands of the very people he had built it to fight. Go back to where we started.

Two truths at the same moment pulling in opposite directions. An army retiring a gun. A war refusing to let it go. For a long time that looks like a contradiction. [music] It is not. It is the truth about what a weapon is. A gun is not finished when its designer signs off on it. It is not even finished when an army adopts it or retires it.

It is finished when the world decides what it is for, and the world does not always agree with the people who built it. Moscow, thinking like an accountant of war, saw a machine gun that did not fit the plan, that shared parts with nothing, that complicated the supply line. On those terms, it was obsolete, and out it went. But a soldier moving through the dark toward an enemy position was not doing a counting.

He was carrying weight and he needed [music] to keep firing and he could not afford to stop. To him, the RPD was not obsolete. [music] It was the answer. 100 rounds he could carry himself. A belt he could feed without a loader. A gun light enough to move with and heavy enough to matter. Two different kinds of people looked at the same object and reached opposite conclusions.

And both of them were right from where they stood. And in the middle of all of it, unseen, unmentioned in almost every telling, [music] is the boy from Tula. Pulled out of school at 11 because there was no money. Put on the floor of an arms factory with nothing but his hands to learn with. He never got the education.

He got [music] the material instead, the springs, the machines, the steel under stress. [music] And out of that, he built a career the state decorated like almost no one else’s. He spent his whole life refining a single idea, the flapper lock, the light gun one man could carry and feed. He turned it over and over for 30 years.

And his last version of it, the RD44, the gun that became the RPD, outlasted the empire that built it, [music] the army that retired it, and the man himself. He never saw the war it was made for. He was gone before it ever got there. [music] But somewhere right now, in a conflict Vasilei Degario could never have imagined, in a place his name will never be spoken, [music] someone is crouched over an RPD.

And they are doing the one thing that ties this entire story together. The same motion that made the gun beloved on the trail. The same feature the Soviet army decided it could live without. [music] The same 100 rounds the man from Tula designed his weapon to hold. They are lifting the drum onto the underside of the gun, threading the first round of the belt into a weapon designed by a dead man for an army that gave up on it 3/4 of a century ago.

And then they are pulling the trigger anyway.