TsKIB SOO

The Central Design and Research Bureau of Sporting and Hunting Arms was set up at Tula in 1946, and its name describes only half of what it does. Its civilian side builds the MTs series of hand-fitted competition and hunting shotguns, guns made in tens rather than thousands and finished to a standard no production line reaches. Its other side is a prototype shop for the Soviet and Russian armed forces, and the list of designs that came out of it — the TKB-022PM and TKB-408 bullpup rifles, the TKB-517, the OTs-14 Groza — is largely a list of weapons that never went into quantity production. The bureau is now run as a branch of the KBP Instrument Design Bureau, also in Tula.