They say that before the war Voroshilov called machine guns “gangsters' weapons” and did not approve their development in the USSR. But Soviet soldiers still had automatic weapons before and during the war. Before the war, the Red Army was armed with PPD – Vasily Degtyarev submachine gun with a 7.62 mm cartridge. Vasily Degtyarev, a native of Tula, which is famous for its weaponsmiths, started designing weapons in the first year of the twentieth century. The second Hero of Socialist Labor of the USSR after Stalin also designed an anti-tank rifle and a whole line of machine guns – for aircraft, for tanks, and so on. The name of the winner of four Stalin Prizes, Doctor of Technical Sciences Degtyarev is given to streets in almost a dozen Russian cities and also to the famous Russian defense plant in Kovrov, where he worked since the Civil War.