The sad story of the Cz. 52 Pistol 

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I miss my CZ 52 fuck the gun laws here F

correct, the 9mm barrel is available here too. A colleague who lend me his vz 52 ordered one so once he receives it I plan to ask him to make a comparison - get both 9mm and 7,62TT ammo and lets see :) Yeah the pressure was insane... after all, the Soviets forced us to replicate their monster trials against the "enemies" of the state hanging or sending to labour camps even the heroes of WW2 - who fought in the Western armies... which is the source of my hatred towards communism :)

@@CzechoslovakGunStories yeah, the West practically handing over Czechoslovakia to the Nazis on a silver platter was a betrayal of the highest order and repeating it when the communist regime took their turn was unforgivable

@@firestorm165 exactly... 400 years under the reign of the Austrians, then 20 years of post-WW1 freedom only to be seized by Nazis and after another two years of post-WW2 independence by Commies for another 4 decades... now, there's the answer why many of us are atheists.... :)

@@CzechoslovakGunStories it's also why I've come to find the history of the region and it's people so fascinating. A long and difficult survival despite so many attempts to deny or destroy your identity and heritage. Also surviving despite supposed friends and allies who use you to their advantage then abandon you in your time of need. The endurance, perseverance, and freedom of the Czech people and the other peoples of central Europe should be celebrated, honored, and preserved.

@@khalgren thanks! really nice to know that our history is known outside the country as well :)

thank you Graham, that made me really happy :)

@@CzechoslovakGunStories I paraphrased some of what you tell here, but tell folks to come watch your video for more information.

@@GBGuns perfect, thanks :) really appreciated :) I don't have that many subs so far but hopefully that will change in the future so that I can share the knowledge with more people... :)

Sorry for your loss. Is there a back story of how she came she came to possession of this fine pistol?

@@828enigma6 it was a pawn shop find. She was never really into guns but liked the way that one felt when she picked it up.

Many thanks and congratulations to your purchase :)

it is indeed an interesting cartridge... although I never fully understood the reason behind it... in general.... maybe would be a good topic for another video :)

I like the 7,62 Tok. too. I have a PPSH 41 semi auto, open bolt. But can´t shoot it anymore. Germany banned all Mags over 10rds recently and now i have the gun but no mags. Can´t even single load, because open bolt xD.

@@feuerfrei7070 yeah, I heard you guys have some new legislation.... Pretty harsh as I was told...Shame, you make some of the best guns out there but you are not allowed to own many of them... we are discussing our 2nd Amendment sort of thing here... looks like it might pass and become a law in the end.... :)

@@feuerfrei7070 there's a premium business idea. Magazines for firearms that you can own but no longer shoot because the original mags are now illegal for some reason

@@firestorm165 Some gunsmith in munich already made a batch. They cut down stick mags to 10rd cappacity. Sold them for 90€ per mag. Thats robbery! Now you cannot even cut down mags anymore because transfer is verboten now. If someone would make them out of germany and then import them it would work.

yeah, it is a cool piece of history indeed.... and a nice piece of engineering... but it has some major flaws :( especially the frame cracks under the ejection port, that is a critical flaw

@@CzechoslovakGunStories Fortunately I've never had my slide crack . Only issue is with feeding . Tokarevs are so much fun to squeeze ... Sure there are more powerful rounds , but none of those are nearly as easy to run ...

@@davidgoldstein3475 yup, that massive bang and the flame.. what a fun :)

@@CzechoslovakGunStories Also don't forget really accurate , even at long range .

I have a CZ 52 in 9mm. Is that a better version than the 7.62 Tokarev version then?

True . Been saying it for years.

Yeah, 7.62 x 25 mm Tokrav is superior in velocity and M48 is even better... But I am afraid it is not the round for everyone. It's too long... hence very hard to make double stack magzine that fits average hands. Therefore a severe loss in capacity using single stack.

@@galancerbacksu5732 fair. Like the old saying tho if you cant hit in 6 you can’t hit at all. 8 with one in the head is plenty for me.

Well, yes and no. 7,62x25 is actually just a so-so cartridge. Not accurate compared to other pistol calibers in the category. Recoil is much less pleasant. Not easy to use for handguns as it is very long and the shape also doesn't make it easy to feed properly - look at Sa 26 and its angled grip....

There is also a pistol made by the Chinese, which is a direct copy of the Sig 226. From all accounts, it is a fine pistol.

Do you mean the Norinco 98. A copy of one of the newer current Russian millitary 9mm handguns ? It's nice and lightweight for a full size service handgun .. kinda like a sig made in a combloc factory with some Makarov styling to it .. it's at least equal to a Taurus of similar features. .. but 9x19 is Not really in the same power level as a 7.62x25 . Not even close

@@michaelbyrd499 Norinco NP762. Very nice pistol. Acutally, easier to handle compared to the M52/Vz, which I also use. Would rather compare the 762 to the P229 in 9mm, but with stronger push

@user-bo3gx2lp3w I would love to aquire a NP762, or even a a magazine.

I own both the T33 and CZ52. The T33/tokarev's major shortcoming is lack of a decent manual safety. CZs have problems. On mine the pins kept coming loose. Firing pins are known to break and the drop safety is often unsafe.

thank you, means a lot to me that people really seem to be interested in this topic :)

Got one for $100 when I was 14 and shot thousands of rounds through it and never had an issue. Not sure why they gave a single action pistol a decocker but otherwise it was a great pistol.

now that sounds cool :) as for Vz. 82 there was a specialty ammo, much hotter than ordinary Makarov round.... I am just starting with a video on this topic :) As for the parts on Vz 52 the rollers and firing pins are the less worrying flaw. The major issue was the recess in the slide for the roller - the right one under the ejection port... the frame tends to crack there. This is what sent majority of 52s out of the service here... :) When Sa23/25 SMGs were rebuilt to 7,62TT they had to strengthen the receiver tube significantly to withstand the Tokarev pressures.... apparently with Vz. 52 they couldn't easily do that... :) so the Sa24/26 work more or less fine with the round, but not the pistol :)

@@CzechoslovakGunStories I'll check that area out on mine and see what I can see.

@@CzechoslovakGunStories I think you mentioned the special round for the Vz. 82 briefly in another video as the reason they used the polygonal rifling. I'm definitely looking forward to hearing more about that. I'd never heard of it before.

@@khalgren yeah, I hoped I could find some to show you but seems it is restricted so I will make a video but no test fire will happen probably :) but it is up next :)

Thank you sir

I hope there is going to be a chance to visit the military history museum in Prague and get my hands on all the prototypes.... then I think I will be able to make a much more detailed video :)

Thank you so much!! And yes I noticed that too. It is cool, no question about that. Thing is it could have been much cooler if commies did not intervene :/ but I can see Tokarev cartridge is very popular in the US

@@CzechoslovakGunStories It has long has that reputation in the US, and there's a few angles to it. There's the 7.62mm Tokarev cartridge, which was available as cheap surplus and cheap commercial ammo from China for a time, while offering a pretty decent bit of power. It penetrates soft armor pretty well, too, which some people thought was really cool because it did so even with normal lead core bullets, which have no special restrictions. In relation to this, you have the mythical higher powered "submachinegun load," attributed to the Red Army. In reality, the Red Army, and almost all of the Warsaw Pact, only ever used one common load of 7.62mm Tokarev for both pistols and SMGs. This is conflating it with Bulgaria, who never issued any pistol in the cartridge, but they did have SMGs, and Bulgaria, who have a history of enjoying higher powered SMGs (being one of the few to use SMGs in 9mm Mauser Export), hotrodded their loading of it. I've seen some people insist that "The inferior Tokarev can't handle the SMG load, but the Vz.52 can, and that's why it's better!" when the reality is the opposite, the barrel locks very solidly into the slide on the Tokarev, while the locking recesses in the slide on the Vz.52 are not too strong, and the Bulgarian ammo will very quickly destroy them. Quite a few Vz.52 pistols have been destroyed that way. Then it's that it's the odd one out of the 7.62mm Warsaw Pact pistols. All of them are Tokarevs, but not this one, it's the odd one out, and it uses an unusual roller locked action, which some people no doubt associated with Heckler & Koch's roller delayed blowback guns, which have always been very highly regarded in America, from SWAT teams and special forces putting them to real and hard use, to action movies like Die Hard. That association isn't perhaps very relevant, or even correct as the Vz.52 pistol isn't delayed, it is fully locked with a recoiling barrel, meaning the closer association is the MG42 and MG3, which has its own veneration, complete with the sinister "Hitler's Buzzsaw" moniker for the MG42. As the odd one out, the pistol also looks pretty cool and distinct, it has these aggressive angled lines to it which you really do not see in most other pistols. At the most, it _maybe_ looks a little like it has the shape of an overgrown Walther PP if you took off your glasses, but it really is pretty unique. So there's these very long running "games of telephone", vague associations, and myth from a lack of knowing.

@@CzechoslovakGunStories On the 7.62mm Tokarev being popular in the US, it really is not, and hasn't been popular in a long time. When you could get the cheap imported ammunition there, 7.62x25mm pistols had some popularity because they were cheap to buy and cheap to shoot, while having some power (some liked them for hunting smallish game, like coyote). However, the only pistols around were Tokarevs and Vz.52s, and the popularity was for the very most part sustained by the cheap ammo, nobody tried to make a new and modern competitive pistol in the caliber in the US, because it wasn't popular enough, and it wouldn't compete well with cheap surplus pistols. So what you really have is a lot of nostalgia for the days of cheap ammo, and a lot of romanticizing of the cartridge for its virtues (both the imaginary and real ones). There's still some commercial ammo around, but not only is it not as cheap, it's often actually loaded a little bit lighter these days given the liability of the Vz.52 pistols, and looking at hollowpoint and softpoint defensive loads for carry, it's apparently pretty poor quality stuff. Zastava makes their Tokarev in both 7.62mm and 9mm, and you can get either, but I'm confident their 9mm one is the better seller, the ammo is just better and cheaper.

Honestly, I wouldn't really mess up with firing pin safety. These guns are known to go off when decocked because of the faulty firing pin safety so if yours has a stiff spring and works fine I would leave it as is. But in general it could help the poor trigger pull which this gun is known for :)

@@CzechoslovakGunStories Thanks.

I am preparing an episode on that topic. Let's just say this cartridge is worse on recoil, accuracy is also poor and so is the stopping power. And flat trajectory is not very useful if the cartridge is inaccurate 😉 that is the outcome of the 1950's military trials for both pistols and subguns in the combloc country so you can imagine that the performance must have been very poor if it encouraged the designers to vote for German round and not the soviet one.

@@CzechoslovakGunStories Its recoil is not worse, the momentum is about the same (faster speed but lower bullet mass). Accuracy depends on the weapon and cartridge quality, almost all rifle cartridges are bottlenecked just like 7.62 Tokarev (not that it matters for pistols where accuracy is limited by the shooters hand). Nobody snipes with submachine guns for a good reason, they are handheld weapons. Being more forgiving with distance and wind estimates is actually a great boon for practical accuracy, the war is not an indoor range where there is no wind, distance to the target is known and there is no excessive handshaking due to adrenaline and tiredness. Besides, all supersonic cartridges lose accuracy when they cross sound barrier and 9mm (in standard 115gr) does it almost immediately. Voting for 9x19 cartridge might have had a million reasons, including lower energy (easier to deal with) and shorter overall length (easier to fit into the pistol handle if you put a lot of sht into it too, like the mainspring). Objectively, 7.62x25 was the best submachine cartridge of the WW2, by far. Study ballistics of various cartridges if you don't understand why. BTW, it is not really Russian, it is also German in origin, basically 7.63x25 Mouser+P. I have shot a few types of 7.62 Tokarev and 7.63 Mauser from Mauser C96, CZ.52, PPS-43 and everything works interchangeably. :)

@@PaulVerhoeven2 I kinda don't assume anything. This is the result of the trials and parts of the report are available in Cz . All the designers, military officials, pretty much everybody was opposing Tokarev. If 7.62Tok was any good why did the Russkies get rid of it immediately after the war and never returned to it adopting 9mm Luger variant instead? Also to make the history more accurate it is actually based on 7.65 Borchardt which was a base for the 7.63 Mauser and later for Tokarev.

@@CzechoslovakGunStories I am aware about the history of the cartridge starting ultimately from 7.65 Borschart, but it was not really used. 7.62 TT was based specifically on 7.63 Mauser because Bolshevicks had a lot of C96s and already had the production lines for the cartridge bought from Germany after WW1. It was not droped technically, it was produced until 1980s at least, I think some Russian manufacturers still make it. Submachine guns though were gradually replaced by AKs, first in 7.62x39 and then in 5.45x39, so it lost its main use. 9mm Makarov is a much weaker cartridge, but had a couple advantages specifically in pistols: 1) It has better efficiency in compact pistols (like PM, generals wanted a compact) in its Hague-compatible round-nose form against soft targets, including lower chance of overpenetration, which is important for police use 2) it is just weak enough so a cheap and simple straight-blowback pistol can be made without excessive weight of the slide. See HK VP70 and Hi-Point C9 to see what is required for straight blowback in 9x19, they are abominations.

@@CzechoslovakGunStories Oh, and one more thing. Straight cases are much cheaper to manufacture compared to bottle-necked cases, shorter cases are cheaper than longer cases, and low-pressure cases are cheaper than high-pressure cases, and 9x19 Mak is all 3! Bottle-necked are more reliable to feed and extract, so 7.62x25 is kind of luxury round of sorts. Also, I think (but not 100% sure) 9x18 had soft steel cases from the beginning which is also MUCH MUCH cheaper than brass in terms of material cost (compare the price of iron to the prices of copper and zinc, orders of magnitude difference).

I guess not, the Tokarev itself was heavily based on Colt design, Makarov on Walther PP... + they were obviously desperate to find something that would work better :)

The TU-4 airplane was a direct, part for part, copy of the Boeing B-29. The Soviets reversed engineered four B-29s that had been forced by mechanical failures to land in the USSR during WW2 in 1944. The US had refused to supply the Soviet Union with B-29s under lend lease...Stalin wanted one! The Soviets had absolutely NO objection to copying western designs of almost anything. Look at some of the Soviet Avtovas made vehicles (Lada and Volga, among others) and tell me they aren't direct copies of European models such as Volkswagen.

Honestly I am not sure ... Stupid decision indeed. The decocker itself makes no sense on single action... I was checking my resources but none of them explains it...

definitely, it is very common in case of Tokarevs..... sometimes it can be around 2,5k rounds or perhaps even less if you use some hotter loads

thanks yeah, got a new mic now, should be better in the next videos ;)

@Czechoslovak Gun Stories Awesome. I bought a Laugo Alien a few months ago. Have you had the chance to try one? I'd love to hear your opinion on it if you have the chance to make a video about it.

@@Watchdog_McCoy_5.7x28 would be nice to have this chance... so far I know no one around owning one but fingers crossed I find somebody.... are you happy with yours?

@Czechoslovak Gun Stories Yes, I'm absolutely thrilled with mine. Im looking for the optic rail with the red dot as the one I bought didn't include that part. It seems to be sold in Europe somewhere, but I haven't had any luck finding one here in the United States. The trigger is absolutely phenomenal as well.

if your mouse is big as a dog and carrying 3A body armor... something like the dogs from John Wick 3 :D

I pretty much agree. It is a good design ruined by idiot decisions

I can added that you have to change a lot of springs. The ergonomics is poor indeed, to brake the hammer with one hand is a pain in the neck, the same problem has TT, the location of hammer is very uncomfortable. I suppose it was different when this gun has 9-19mm cartridge. Also I have changed a firing pin, the original one has a bad reputation.

well, depends... it was in the service only because there were more important projects for the army.... but if you ask anyone who served with it - they all hate it

it is happening now :D Czechs sent a batch of Vz. 82 pistols in 9mm Mak to UA :D

nice piece to any collection... if you manage to find a 9mm barrel it is a fun shooter also :) makes much more sense than with Tokarev

@@CzechoslovakGunStories Finding a 9mm barrel for one of these is incredibly difficult. I've been looking for one for a while now. It would be a huge help if I managed to find one though since 9mm ammo is much easier to find than 7.62 Tokarev.

@@trapperscout2046 + it prolongs the lifespan of the gun drastically..... up here they are available from time to time.....

@@CzechoslovakGunStories If you know anyone selling a 9mm barrel for a CZ 52 let me know. I have had no luck so far.

@@trapperscout2046 up here they are for sale as I just found out for 3100 CZK, which is like USD 140? Brand new.... Not sure if they export though.

yeah, there are still people who love them for what they are - a Tokarev alternative. There are essentialy just three choices - TT33 and clones, Vz. 52 and recently Norinco started making a P226 clones in this caliber PX-3.... but not sure how they are available in other countries.

@@CzechoslovakGunStories Well the norincos won´t come to the states. Thats for sure. Would you like to do a review on one of the PX-3, now you got me interested? One can get them in germany. The americans in your audience might be very interested in this.

@@feuerfrei7070 If I manage to find one why not :) I am curious myself how it feels and works :)

Feuer Frei! I recently saw two type 54 Norinco Tokarev pistols for sale at a gun show in Raleigh, NC. I think they wanted $400 a piece.

there's no better way to say it than like this :)