AS Val

The AS Val is a Soviet special-purpose rifle built around silence rather than around a cartridge that already existed. P. I. Serdyukov and V. F. Krasnikov at TsNIITochMash began in 1981 on a KGB and GRU requirement for a suppressed weapon for covert work, and designed the rifle and the 9x39mm round together; the sniper version, the VSS Vintorez, came first in 1983 and the Val followed in 1985.

The suppressor is not fitted to this rifle, it is most of this rifle. Everything ahead of the receiver is a two-chamber casing wider than the receiver itself, and the barrel inside it is perforated along its length: gas leaves through those holes into the first chamber, cools and loses pressure, then passes through mesh screens in the second before reaching the air. The front sight sits on the casing. Because the cartridge was designed subsonic from the start there is no crack to suppress either, so the two halves of a rifle’s report are dealt with separately and by different means. Barrel length is published as 200 mm, which is a length of rifling rather than a distance to the muzzle.

The action underneath is a modified Kalashnikov: gas-operated long stroke, rotating bolt, the familiar safety lever on the right side of the receiver — with the fire selector moved behind the trigger, which is not Kalashnikov practice. The magazines are ribbed horizontally so that a soldier can tell them from AK magazines by feel in the dark, and hold 10, 20 or 30 rounds; the Val is normally used with the 20. Folded, the skeleton stock takes the weapon from 875 mm to 650 mm, and the whole rifle with its sights and two magazines packs into an aluminium case.

Modernised as the ASM in 2018, it gained a Picatinny dust cover and a rail shrouding the suppressor.

Gaps on this page: this entry covers the AS Val only. The VSS Vintorez shares its receiver, its suppressor principle and its cartridge but is a different weapon with a different role, a fixed wooden stock and a 894 mm length, and belongs in an entry of its own; the encyclopedia treats the two in one article, which is why they cite the same source here. No free source gives the Val’s width, height, sight radius, rifling twist, trigger pull or production total, and its barrel length comes from a printed reference rather than a clickable one, so it is recorded as an estimate. The cyclic rate is published as an 800-to-900-rounds-a-minute range and is recorded as its midpoint. This entry carries no Wikidata identifier because the only item covering it is a joint one for both rifles.