I've done so good.. not buying, but, I fell off the fricken wagon. A local auction place had this and I, all willy nilly threw a max bid of 205 at it, thinking ain't no way. Sure enough 2 hours later, I received a wonderful invoice from my local crack dealer. So I went paid the man and picked it up yesterday, cleaned it up all nice and purdy, just to turn around get it dirty, so I could clean it again
It's a true blue Russian made Makarov, a commercial variant, made by IMEZ....or Izhevskii Mechanicheskii Zavod or Izhevsk Mechanical Factory, imported by B-West sometime in the early 90's. It has the adjustable rear sight to get around the import laws of the time. One other difference is it's not 9mm Mak, but chambered in .380acp. So I dug around and found my Bulgarian Makarov, sure enough everything looked the same, even the magazines. So, now what....uhm..then out comes some ammo
sure enough, the magazines are swap-able. Shooting the two, I noticed no difference in recoil or even accuracy with generic run of the mill ammo.
In 9mm Mak, I dug up some Red Army Polish made stuff, LVE Novosibirsk and some Silver Bear, I dug around some more and found 5 different brands to try in the 380, it ate like a fat kid in front of a cake, everything from cheapie Win. white box, Blazer, some off the wall reman gunshow stuff with Hornady XTPs, to an expensive single mag full of Corbons... Warmer stuff like Corbon 380 or LVE Novosibirsk 9mm Mak wasn't even a really noticeable difference, just maybe a very slight increase in muzzle flip and slightly more snappy recoil.
Of course it worked.... It's Russian..
The twin devices that made the nice quiet spring day, not so quiet.