The Soviet Union Revisit of the GPMG Concept, the PK Series.

By Lynndon Schooler

Bulgarian PK and Romanian PKM. Photo by Lynndon Schooler

The earliest known example of the Soviet Union’s development of a universal or general-purpose machine gun concept is the Degtyarev prototype in 1941. This was a tumultuous time for the Soviet Union as the war unfolded. As the conflict escalated, requirements shifted, and attention was diverted to other priorities. The Soviet Union needed a nudge to revisit this concept, which came in the form of the German MG34 and MG42 machine guns and the German military doctrine surrounding universal machine guns during the war.Fast-forward to the adoption of Kalashnikov’s PK in 1961 and the PKM in 1969, which introduced arguably the best general-purpose machine gun in the world. M.T. Kalashnikov built upon his   earlier work, improving the SG-43 to the SGM and the AKM to develop the PK series. Every aspect of firearm development involves trade-offs. Kalashnikov and his design team took this consideration to the next level by effectively balancing various elements in creating the PK. This meticulous balancing contributed to the PKM’s remarkable controllability and reliability. The mass ratio between the

Source: The Firearm Blog