On the other hand, smoothbore long guns were (and still are) called “ружьё”(ruzhyo).Īs for names, Russian naming system has a bunch of long-standing traditions, in case of VSS, the rifle was probably called Vintorez both because words “vint” and “vintovka” are cognate and VSS itself was designed as a hard-hitting special-purpose weapon, a tool for a specialist which could cut through body armor.
Before 1856 rifles were called винтовальное ружьё (vintoval’noye ruzhyo, rifled gun) or shtutzer (from German Stutzen), and the military decided that the term “vintovka” would be easily understandable to average soldiers who were mainly coming from peasantry and lowest class city folk. The first rifle went out of the Tula Arms Plant in 1987. It was designed by two Soviet engineers, Petr Serdjukov and Vladimir Krasnikov during the 1980s. The word “vintovka” was introduced in 1856 as the term for full-length firearms witch have rifled barrel and stock, but before that it was a slang term dating back as far as late XVIII century. In fact, VSS Vintorez is the light, compact, extremely silent (all you hear is the bolt, really), no visible flash. The link above is Bulgarian, but this person is wrong, and yes, it is a machine or an instrument used for rifling.
