9×21mm Gyurza

The 9×21mm Gyurza is a Russian military round TsNIITochMash developed through the 1990s to defeat body armour at handgun ranges, entirely unrelated to the Italian/IMI 9×21mm commercial round of the same designation despite sharing a case length and a rimless straight case shape by coincidence rather than lineage. It was built for the Serdyukov SPS pistol, later marketed as the SR-1 Vektor, and for the Gyurza-2/SR-1M and Udav pistols that followed it, giving Russian forces a sidearm round credited with defeating soft body armour and light steel plate at short range — the design brief the 9×21 case was built around, rather than a claim about the round’s effect on a person.

The family carries several loadings under Russian military nomenclature: SP-10 (index 7N29) with an armour-piercing steel core, SP-11 (7N28) with a conventional jacketed bullet, and SP-13 (7BTZ) an expanding bullet intended for use against unprotected targets. The predecessor round shown in this entry’s photograph, the 9×21 RG054, is a 1994 pre-series cartridge rather than one of the standardised production loadings.

No free dimensional standard exists for this cartridge — it has no C.I.P. or SAAMI listing — so every dimension here is recorded as estimated from Wikipedia’s own uncited infobox figures. The three loads’ bullet masses are similarly estimated from the same infobox, which in turn cites the now-defunct world.guns.ru rather than a primary Russian source; its successor site, modernfirearms.net, states a 420 m/s muzzle velocity for the SR-1 Vektor pistol but no barrel length, so no velocity or ballistic coefficient is recorded for any load. No image of a production SP-10 or SP-11 round, rather than this pre-series RG054 predecessor, turned up on Wikimedia Commons, Smithsonian Open Access or DVIDS.