Skopetchka

Skopetchka, n. Russian. A sawed-off rifle.

The concept of the shortened rifle is basic and old. England-Scotland's menagerie of Go-guns mostly exists because the Infantry Pattern's 30" barrel is burdensome and hard to handle; France is probably no different.

The idea of shortening a rifle, though, is fairly new, and in popular consciousness is known by the Russian name for such a modification: skopetchka (cf. Russian skopets "eunuch.")

A brief history of the skopetchka

Skopetchkas weren't actually intended to be. Evgeny IV issued a long-barreled gun to his waves of peasant conscripts into the Russo-Japanese War, and as Vechists captured arsenals [details?] they continued to crank them out unchanged. Once the Vechists turned west, though, a lot of those guns didn't stay long for long.

The concept of the skopetchka predates the Thousand Days; a fair number of them were used in the civil war by all sides. None of that particularly matters, because war reporting on the Russian Civil War was very spotty and leaned toward the Tsarist side, who had more professional soldiers. Then, in 1916, the Russian Army was ordered to launch a punitive campaign, and everything changed: both sides were sending considerable numbers of long guns into an urban theater with lots of war reporting.

By the first anniversary of the Battle of Stockholm, the Russian nickname for the weapon had been established - both by soldiers and war correspondents - as the official one.

(The IRL equivalent of the skoptetchka is the obrez, whence came the motivation to write about this.)