RPD Machine Gun

The RPD is a Soviet light machine gun designed by Vasily Degtyaryov, developed and provisionally accepted in 1944 alongside competing wartime designs from Sergei Simonov and Alexei Sudayev, though large-scale production and issue to Soviet infantry squads did not begin in earnest until the early 1950s. Chambered in the same intermediate 7.62x39mm cartridge used by the SKS and AK-47, it fed from a distinctive drum-contained, non-disintegrating metal ammunition belt rather than a box magazine, giving a rifle squad automatic, sustained suppressive fire from the same cartridge family its riflemen already carried. The RPD equipped the standard infantry squad of the Soviet Union and many of its allied and client states through the Cold War, and though it was gradually succeeded in Soviet service by the box-magazine-fed RPK derived from the AK-pattern rifle, RPD-pattern machine guns, including Chinese and other license-built variants, remained in widespread use in conflicts around the world for decades afterward.