Sergei Mosin - the inventor of the legendary "trilinear"

Mosin Sergey Ivanovich was born in 1849, in a family of peasants. His father was promoted to lieutenant of the hussar regiment, and his mother was a simple peasant woman. Since childhood, the boy has shown great abilities - he graduated with honors from the Voronezh Military Gymnasium and entered the Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy in St. Petersburg,
Petersburg (named after the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich).

After graduating with a gold medal in 1875, Mosin asked him to send him to work at the Tula Arms Factory.

In the Tula region, among the Arseniev landlords, his father, Ivan Ignatievich, who was widowed by that time, served as his manager, and the son wanted to be near him.

The owner of the estate had a son, Nikolai Vladimirovich Arseniev, married to Varvara Nikolaevna, nee Turgeneva, cousin of the writer Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. She had two children, she lived in a homestead quiet life and almost did not go out into the light. Her husband mostly stayed in the capitals - in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
When Sergei Mosin first saw a young woman, occasionally flashed in the garden of the manor, he immediately fell in love with her. For a long time he did not dare to express his feelings to Varvara Nikolayevna, but in the summer of 1879 he could not stand it - and confessed to her in love. Then she was 25 years old.

After hearing the recognition of the ardent captain, Varvara Nikolaevna confessed in response that she also loved him
.

When she told her husband that she loved another, the husband did not want to give her a divorce. He told her to remain a legitimate wife and loving mother of her children.

Captain Sergei Mosin also tried to persuade the intractable husband to give a divorce to Varvara Nikolayevna, but was refused. Then he told him that one of them must remain alone - and summoned the landowner to a duel
.

In response, he heard the phrase: "Who was, he will remain. And you, dear sir, have been like no one, so nobody will remain. "

Such an insult the officer could not demolish and summoned his arrogant husband to a duel.

Nikolai Vladimirovich did not accept the call, but instead wrote a complaint to the authorities, and Mosina was put under house arrest for three days.
However, he did not give up and soon repeated his challenge, already in the presence of witnesses, in the Nobility Assembly. The result was already two weeks of house arrest.

For several years, Sergei Mosin had sought permission from the landowner to divorce, but he was refused all the time. But suddenly in 1883 Nikolai Vladimirovich relented and said that he would give his consent to a divorce,
if Mosin will pay him 50,000 rubles in compensation for "moral damage".

It was a huge sum. The salary of the engineer was then 200 rubles. in months. Of course, the officer did not have such money. But Sergei Mosin decided to earn them by creating the best rifle in the world.

At that time the main small arms of the Russian army were the rifle of Khayrem Berdan,
known to all "Berdanka". With all the advantages, she had one drawback: the rifle was single-shot.

Mosin undertook to correct this defect. Already in the summer of 1883 he presented several samples of a rifle with rack and application stores for 8 rounds. Unlike foreign analogues, bullets did not jam in Mosin stores.

In the same year, he introduced another sample of the rifle, now with a magazine for 12 rounds.
Soon an experimental batch of 1000 Mosin rifles was produced at the Tula plant.

Abroad, they immediately understood the value of Mosin's invention. The French firm offered to buy from him a patent for a rack and application mechanism for 600,000 francs. Such a sum, of course, could immediately solve all the problems of Sergei Ivanovich, but, firstly, he could not sell the patent
, because he was in the civil service, and, secondly, he did not want his weapons to serve as a foreign army.

The bosses decided not to sell the secret of the design, and Mosin was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir of the 4th degree.

In 1889, it was decided to transfer the army to shop weapons.
The commission approved a sample of the "Russian three-linear rifle of the sample in 1891".

The name "three-line" arose because the caliber of the rifle barrel was equal to three "Russian lines" (the old measure of length equal to 2.54 mm - respectively, the three lines are equal to 7.62 mm).

In the summer, Mosin was promoted to Colonel Guards Artillery,
and in the autumn he was awarded the highest military and technical award - the Mikhailovsky Prize.

Now, finally, Mosin was able to fulfill the requirements of the Tula landowner and pay him compensation for a divorce from his wife. He finally married his beloved Varya. This he had been waiting for almost 15 years.

In 1894, Sergei Ivanovich appointed chief of the Sestroretsk arms factory,
and in 1900 they were promoted to generals. In the same year, his "trilinear" won the Grand Prix at the World Exhibition in Paris.

Sergei and Varvara lived happily together, but not for long. At the very beginning of 1902 the designer fell seriously ill and died on January 26.

At his burial, at the request of the spouse, on the lid of the coffin, except for the general's saber,
put and invented his rifle.

Varvara Nikolayevna Mosina no longer married, although she was 48 years old and she was a rich widow-general. She quietly lived in Sestroretsk before the revolution of 1917, and her further fate is unknown to anyone.

"Three-line" continued to live after the death of its creator. It was produced until 1944,
it was the main weapon of the Russian infantrymen in the first and second world war. Since the weapons were removed this rifle only in the mid-1970s, but until now it is considered one of the most successful types of infantry small arms.