Vyatskiye Polyany Machine-Building Plant

The plant known as Molot — the Hammer — was set up at Zagorsk outside Moscow in April 1940 and moved east to Vyatskiye Polyany in Kirov Oblast in 1941, taking its workforce with it. Among those workers were Georgy Shpagin, whose PPSh-41 the factory then built in enormous numbers, and Nikolay Makarov, who would design the pistol that gives this site’s 9x18mm cartridge its name. After the war it added the RPK and RPK-74 light machine guns and the AGS-17 grenade launcher to its military line, and in the 1950s it also turned out the Vyatka motor scooter, which is the sort of thing a Soviet arms plant did between contracts. From the 1990s it sold sporting and hunting rifles under the Molot-Oruzhiye and VEPR names, many of them exported to the United States. The company went into bankruptcy proceedings in 2012 and is now a subsidiary of Rostec.

No freely licensed wordmark for the plant could be found, so this page shows the placeholder rather than a logo.