OTs-14 Groza

The Groza is an AKS-74U turned back to front. Valery Telesh, who had designed the GP-25 under-barrel grenade launcher, and Yuri Lebedev began work at TsKIB SOO in Tula in December 1992 on a weapon that would combine a short assault rifle and a grenade launcher into one object rather than bolting the second onto the first. Prototypes were firing within a year and the rifle was in production by early 1994.

Three-quarters of its parts come straight from the AKS-74U: the gas piston, the rotating bolt, the hammer, the three-position selector on the right of the receiver. Moving the magazine behind the trigger is what the design buys with that inheritance — a 240 mm barrel inside a weapon 565 mm long, which is shorter than most submachine guns. What it costs is a Kalashnikov action working next to the firer’s cheek, and a weapon that critics found awkward to carry despite its length.

The modularity is the other half of the idea, and it is unusual. The trigger and pistol grip are a single removable unit, and the kit contains two of them: one plain, one carrying a 40 mm grenade launcher derived from the GP-25. With the launcher unit fitted, one trigger serves both barrels and a selector by the trigger guard decides which fires. Detach it and a vertical foregrip goes in its place, taking 1.23 kg off the weapon. A quick-change short barrel and a detachable suppressor are in the same aluminium case, so a single weapon can be assembled as a carbine, a foregripped assault rifle, a suppressed rifle or a rifle-and-launcher.

It was shown at MILIPOL Moscow in April 1994 and taken up by the Interior Ministry’s OMON, which wanted a 9x39mm subsonic weapon for close work in Chechnya; the Defence Ministry followed for Spetsnaz and some airborne and engineer units. A 7.62x39mm model, the Groza-1, has a 420 mm barrel and a 30-round magazine. Production stopped in 1999 and the type was phased out of military service, although Russian police units still carry it.

Gaps on this page: the figures recorded here are for the OTs-14-4A-01, the 9x39mm rifle with the vertical foregrip, because the four published configurations differ by up to 220 mm in length and 1 kg in weight and no one of them is “the” Groza; the alternatives are named in each field’s source note. No production total, sight radius, rifling twist or trigger pull is published in any free source, and the article’s own height figures — 294 mm without the grenade launcher and 266 mm with it — are recorded as published without being reconciled. The illustration used as the lead image is a drawing rather than a photograph, because the only freely licensed photographs of this weapon are watermarked and low-resolution.