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The prisoners at the penal colony in St. Petersburg were expecting a visit by officials, thinking it would be some sort of inspection. Instead, men in uniform arrived and offered them amnesty — if they agreed to fight alongside the Russian army in Ukraine.
Over the following days, about a dozen or so left the prison, according to a woman whose boyfriend is serving a sentence there. Speaking on condition of anonymity because she feared reprisals, she said her boyfriend wasn’t among the volunteers, although with years left on his sentence, he “couldn’t not think about it.”
As Russia continues to suffer losses in its invasion of Ukraine, now nearing its sixth month, the Kremlin has refused to announce a full-blown mobilization — a move that could be very unpopular for President Vladimir Putin. That has led instead to a covert recruitment effort that includes using prisoners to make up the manpower shortage.
This also is happening amid reports that hundreds of Russian soldiers are refusing to fight and trying to quit the military.
“We’re seeing a huge outflow of people who want to leave the war zone — those who have been serving for a long time and those who have signed a contract just recently,” said Alexei Tabalov, a lawyer who runs the Conscript’s School legal aid group.
The group has seen an influx of requests from men who want to terminate their contracts, “and I personally get the impression that everyone who can is ready to run away,” Tabalov said in an interview with The Associated Press. “And the Defense Ministry is digging deep to find those it can persuade to serve.”
Although the Defense Ministry denies that any “mobilization activities” are taking place, authorities seem to be pulling out all the stops to bolster enlistment. Billboards and public transit ads in various regions proclaim, “This is The Job,” urging men to join the professional army. Authorities have set up mobile recruiting centers in some cities, including one at the site of a half marathon in Siberia in May.
Regional administrations are forming “volunteer battalions” that are promoted on state television. The business daily Kommersant counted at least 40 such entities in 20 regions, with officials promising volunteers monthly salaries ranging from the equivalent of $2,150 to nearly $5,500, plus bonuses.
The AP saw thousands of openings on job search websites for various military specialists.
The British military said this week that Russia had formed a major new ground force called the 3rd Army Corps from “volunteer battalions,” seeking men up to age 50 and requiring only a middle-school education, while offering “lucrative cash bonuses” once they are deployed to Ukraine.
But complaints also are surfacing in the media that some aren’t getting their promised payments, although those reports can’t be independently verified.
In early August, Tabalov said he began receiving multiple requests for legal help from reservists who have been ordered to take part in a two-month training in areas near the border with Ukraine.
The recruitment of prisoners has been going on in recent weeks in as many as seven regions, said Vladimir Osechkin, founder of the Gulagu.net prisoner rights group, citing inmates and their relatives that his group had contacted.
It’s not the first time that authorities have used such a tactic, with the Soviet Union employing “prisoner battalions” during World War II.
Nor is Russia alone. Early in the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy promised amnesty to military veterans behind bars if they volunteered to fight, although it remains unclear if anything came out of it.
In the current circumstances, Osechkin said, it isn’t the Defense Ministry that’s recruiting prisoners — instead, it was Russia’s shadowy private military force, the Wagner Group.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, an entrepreneur known as “Putin’s chef” because of his catering contracts with the Kremlin and reportedly Wagner’s manager and financier, brushed aside reports that he personally visited prisons to recruit convicts, in a written statement released by his representatives this month. Prigozhin, in fact, denies he has any ties to Wagner, which reportedly has sent military contractors to places like Syria and sub-Saharan Africa.
According to Osechkin, prisoners with military or law enforcement experience were initially offered to go to Ukraine, but that later was extended to inmates with varying backgrounds. He estimated that as of late July, about 1,500 might have applied, lured by promises of big salaries and eventual pardons.
Now, he added, many of those volunteers — or their families — are contacting him and seeking to get out of their commitments, telling him: “I really don’t want to go.”
According to the woman whose boyfriend is serving his sentence at the penal colony in St. Petersburg, the offers to leave the prison are “a glimmer of hope” for freedom. But she said he told her that of 11 volunteers, eight died in Ukraine. She added that one of the volunteers expressed regret for his decision and doesn’t believe he will return alive.
Her account couldn’t be independently verified, but was in line with multiple reports by independent Russian media and human rights groups.
According to those groups and military lawyers, some soldiers and law enforcement officers have refused deployment to Ukraine or are trying to return home after a few weeks or months of fighting.
Media reports about some troops refusing to fight in Ukraine started surfacing in the spring, but rights groups and lawyers only began talking about the number of refusals reaching the hundreds last month.
In mid-July, the Free Buryatia Foundation reported that about 150 men were able to terminate their contracts with the Defense Ministry and returned from Ukraine to Buryatia, a region in eastern Siberia that borders Mongolia.
Some of the servicemen are facing repercussions. Tabalov, the legal aid lawyer, said about 80 other soldiers who sought to nullify their contracts were detained in the Russian-controlled town of Bryanka in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, according to their relatives. Last week, he said that the Bryanka detention center was shut down because of the media attention.
But the parent of one officer who was detained after trying to get out of his contract told the AP this week that some are still being detained elsewhere in the region. The parent asked not to be identified out of safety concerns.
Tabalov said a serviceman can terminate his contract for a compelling reason — normally not difficult — although the decision is usually up to his commander. But he added: “In the conditions of hostilities, not a single commander would acknowledge anything like that, because where would they find people to fight?”
Alexandra Garmazhapova, head of the Free Buryatia Foundation, told the AP that soldiers and their relatives complain of commanders tearing up termination notices and threatening “refuseniks” with prosecution. As of late July, the foundation said it had received hundreds of requests from soldiers seeking to end their contracts.
“I’m getting messages every day,” Garmazhapova said.
Tabalov said some soldiers complain that they were deceived about where they were going and didn’t expect to end up in a war zone, while others are exhausted from fighting and unable to continue.
Rarely, if at all, did they appear motivated by antiwar convictions, the lawyer said.
Russia will continue to face problems with soldiers refusing to fight, military analyst Michael Kofman said, but one shouldn’t underestimate Russia’s ability to “muddle through … with half-measures.”
“They’re going to have a lot of people who are quitting or have people who basically don’t want to deploy,” said Kofman, director of the Virginia-based Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses, on a recent podcast. “And they’ve employed a lot of measures to try to keep people in line. But ultimately, there’s not that much that they can do.”
It was November of 1974 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While the weather in such places as North Dakota and Illinois was already abysmal, the legendary Florida sunshine still kept things warm and cheery. This day, however, there was some serious mischief afoot.
The names of the two bad guys have been lost to history, though I have read that they were originally wanted for burglary. We know that they were stopped by Officers Mike Gilo and Gary Jones of the Fort Lauderdale Police Department while driving a flashy Chevrolet Camaro. In 1974 the gas crisis had not yet castrated American muscle cars, so the Camaro still had ample spunk.
Things got tense, and Officers Gilo and Jones retrieved their long guns. In a veritable fit of stupidity, the passenger side perp produced a handgun and fired. Shooting at well-armed police officers seldom ends well.
Officer Jones leveled his issue slide-action 12-gauge shotgun and cut loose with a load of buckshot. The resulting cloud of 0.33-inch lead balls tore up the hot rod but otherwise failed to connect. Officer Gilo, however, wielded something else entirely.
Mike Gilo hefted his fully automatic American 180 .22-caliber submachine gun, jacked the bolt to the rear, and took a bead on the car. Squeezing the trigger he unlimbered a fusillade of zippy little 40-grain lead bullets at some 1,200 rounds per minute into the vehicle’s rear window.
The American 180 Submachine Gun
The American 180 was an open-bolt, selective-fire .22-caliber submachine gun loosely patterned upon the American-designed and British-produced Lewis machinegun of WW1 fame. The father of the American 180 was Richard “Dick” Casull. His original Casull Model 290 was a semiauto .22 rifle that fed from an enormous drum magazine located atop the weapon.
The 1960’s-era Model 290 was both expensive and cumbersome. Eighty-seven hand-built copies saw the light of day before the project died a natural death. Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos owned one. However, by the 1970s other manufacturers in the US and Austria took up and built upon the design.
Dick Casull was a gunsmith from Utah who also developed the monster .454 Casull cartridge along with the big-boned revolver that fired it. The .454 Casull was basically a grotesquely up-engineered .45 Long Colt round that developed nearly 2,000 foot-pounds of muzzle energy.
Casull along with Wayne Baker also pioneered Freedom Arms in 1978 to develop miniature single-action revolvers. Eventually, North American Arms acquired the production rights and covered the country in a thin patina of these adorable well-built compact stainless steel wheelguns.
Technical Details
The American 180 SMG weighs 5.7 pounds empty and 10 pounds loaded with a 177-round drum. Original magazines carry either 165 or 177 rounds, though larger capacity drums of up to 275 rounds are still in production today. 275-round drums effectively occlude the weapon’s sights. However, E&L Manufacturing, the current producer of American 180 drums, includes an elevated front sight along with your first 275-round drum purchase.
The American 180 bolt incorporates a series of grooves in the sides to channel crud out of the mechanism. The British L2A3 Sterling submachine gun features similar stuff. The body of the drum spins on top of the receiver as it empties, which is kind of weird.
There is a captive screw underneath the forward aspect of the receiver that allows the gun to break down quickly into two handy components. The stock removes with the push of a button like that of the M1928 Thompson submachine gun. The bulky pan magazine produces a cluttered sight picture, but the gun is just a ton of fun on the range.
You can die of old age while loading these drum magazines. There is supposedly a mag loader available, though I’ve never seen one. The process really is spectacularly tedious and is best executed in front of some Netflix. A single common spring-powered motor (the detachable mechanical bit in the center) can be used on multiple drums.
The American 180 was originally designed to be used in conjunction with a primitive bulky helium-neon gas laser designator. These early laser sights were enormous contraptions that ran about two hours on a single set of batteries. Oddly, there was also the option of operating the sight off of wall power. That would, of course, presuppose an exceptionally cooperative target.
A single .22LR round isn’t particularly awe-inspiring, but twenty of them in a single second will absolutely rock your world. Even at 1,200 rounds per minute recoil is inconsequential, so the gun is easy to control. The original marketing literature claimed that the American 180 would munch through concrete walls, car doors, and body armor. To eat through body armor with a full auto .22 necessitates a remarkably open-minded miscreant. The gun’s manufacturers claimed that you could place the contents of an entire 165-round magazine within a three-inch circle at twenty yards in the span of eight seconds. Wow.
Trigger Time
I found the gun to be finicky. However, the youngest civilian-legal machinegun in the registry is some thirty-four years old by now. None of these things were designed to last for generations.
The spring-driven motor for the drum magazine has to be tuned a bit. Too little tension and the gun chokes. Too much and the gun chokes. Get it just right, however, and the American 180 is every bit as cool as you might think it would be.
Burst management requires a bit of discipline, but the onerous loading cycle serves to motivate. Given an adequately expansive piece of paper, you really could write your name with the thing. Take your time and hold your protracted bursts on a single spot, and the American 180 will indeed eat through some of the most remarkable stuff.
Running the gun intimates an element of precision that is likely illusory at best. The lack of over-penetration in urban areas, when compared to centerfire offerings, was one of the biggest selling points for the gun. However, a gun that cycles at 1,200 rounds per minute is the stuff of nightmares if wielded in a slipshod fashion in a congested area. Truth be known this might not actually be markedly more hazardous than a 12-bore chucking buckshot, but both guns do demand a lot of practice for safe employment.
The Rest of the Story
Though the 12-bore failed to connect, the 180 reliably did the deed. Officer Gilo unleashed a 40-round burst that took all of two seconds. These forty little rimfire bullets chewed through the back window of the car, and the car crashed in short order.
One of the bad guys was already toasted, his critical bits thoroughly rearranged courtesy the prodigious swarm of little 40-grain slugs. His partner in crime fled the scene but was apprehended soon thereafter sporting an unhealthy collection of small caliber bullet wounds of his own.
In the 1970s there were apparently not quite so many lawyers as is the case today. In an era wherein folks sue cops over some of the most inane stuff, I suspect a .22-caliber machinegun that rips along at twenty rounds per second would likely not satisfy any modern Law Enforcement agency’s risk management department.
Ruminations
The American 180 was produced for a time in Utah and was formally adopted by the Utah Department of Corrections. The Utah DOC bought quite a few laser units as well. When wielded from a guard tower at their state penitentiary I suspect these puppies reliably kept the cons in line.
The Rhodesian Special Air Service used a few of these weird little weapons operationally in Africa. A similar gun produced in Slovenia and titled the MGV-176 was purportedly fairly popular in the sundry wars that took place thereabouts.
It’s tough to imagine what the American 180 might bring to the table that a proper 9mm subgun might not, but it is nonetheless a thought-provoking concept. I personally wouldn’t be comfortable relying upon the cumbersome drum feed system in an austere environment.
The company’s marketing efforts focused on LE sales, and I recall their advertisements in gun magazines back in the Dark Ages. Like all legal machineguns, transferable examples command a premium these days. Many of the guns available to civilian shooters today were traded out of LE arms rooms as departments grew weary of them.
The American 180 is one of the most unusual combat weapons ever imagined. Under controlled circumstances as our hapless Florida burglars discovered, the American 180 can indeed be devastatingly effective. At this point, however, the American 180 is little more than an historical footnote and recreational range beast.
Loading drums would befuddle Job the prophet, and the gun eats ammo like a monkey after Sugar Babies. However, you’d be hard-pressed to conjure a more delightful way to turn .22 rimfire ammo into noise. Novel, unique, and oddly effective within its admittedly narrow applications, the American 180 is an artifact of the golden age of gun design.
Technical Specifications
American 180 Submachine Gun
Caliber .22LR/.22 Short Magnum
Weight 5.7 pounds empty/10 pounds loaded w/177 rounds
Magazine Capacity 165/177/220/275
Length 35.5 inches
Barrel Length 8/18.5 inches
Action Blowback, Open Bolt
Rate of Fire 1,200 rounds per minute
Colt was on top of the world with the Single Action Army revolver and took aim at the lever action rifle market. Its entry? The Burgess rifle, released in 1883.
The Burgess failed to find traction and was never a challenge to Winchester’s legendary Model 1873, the rifle that was the “gun that won the west” yin to the Colt Single Action Army’s yang. Colt discontinued the Burgess after 16 months and after a mere 6,403 were made. Winchester was selling about 15,000 Model 1873s per year.
Then, lightning struck for Colt.
The company introduced the New Lightning Magazine rifle in 1884 that used a pump action to cycle rounds. The company made more than 185,000 Lightning rifles between 1884 and 1904.
The Colt Lightning, like the carbine gifted for Christmas to Carrie Adell Strahorn, Queen of the Pioneers, was produced in three models and offered in a number of calibers. Rock Island Auction Company has six of the Colt Lightning rifles on offer in its May 13-15 Premier Auction. Three are medium frame models and three are large frame models that are chambered in heavier calibers.
Gentleman’s Agreement Between Colt and Winchester
Legend has it that after the Burgess was introduced, Winchester officials approached their opposites at Colt about making a revolver and competing in that arena, offering up samples of what their pistols would be like. That led to a gentleman’s agreement between the companies that they wouldn’t intrude on each other’s market.
That didn’t stop Colt from buying the patent for a pump action rifle from a dentist who dabbled as an inventor. Dr. William H. Elliot’s design had a sliding forend that replaced the conventional lever used with the Burgess and Winchester rifles.
Elliot wasn’t someone who caught lightning in a bottle with his pump action design. He earned more than 130 firearms patents in the second half of the 19th century. His most successful design was a Remington double-barrel pocket pistol. Manufactured between 1866 and 1935, more than 150,000 of the over-under guns were produced.
An engraved model of the double derringer, as it was called, and its factory original box is on offer in Rock Island Auction Company’s May Premier Auction.
Colt Lightning, Part I
A warning here — don’t confuse the Lightning rifle with the original Colt “Lightning.” The Colt Model 1877 double action revolver in .38 caliber was unofficially called “Lightning,” first. The M1877, Colt’s first double action revolver, was given nicknames of “Lightning” for .38 cal versions and “Thunderer” for the .41 caliber model by Benjamin Kittredge, one of Colt’s major distributors. An early .32 caliber model wore the moniker, “Rainmaker” as well. Two Colt Lightning revolvers are also on offer in the May Premier Auction.
Kittredge, who came up with at least nine Colt Model trade names. also gave Colt’s first large frame double action revolver, the Model 1878, a nickname, too, calling it the “Omnipotent.
Pump Action Rifle
Colt engineers honed Elliot’s design before the Lightning – the rifle – was released it in 1884. The gun was described as reliable, easy to use, and extremely fast. Holding the trigger and using the pump allows the rifle to be fired very quickly – or slam fired, according to a Colt advertisement of the time. The Winchester 1897 might be more famous for slamfiring in the trenches of the Great War, but the Colt Lightning did it first.
The rifle was also light, weighing about 6.5 lbs. Over the three versions, they were offered in a deep-blued finish with a case-hardened hammer, a walnut stock, and forend and open rear and front sights. One of the medium frame Lightning rifles on offer features a rare case-hardened finish.
The Lightning was introduced with a number of calibers, including the .44-40, the same as the Colt Single Action Army’s frontier model. This model, considered the medium frame Lightning, was also chambered in .32-20, and .38-40, with a 15-round tube magazine. Colt made 89,777 medium frame rifles.
Three years later, the small frame and the large frame Lightning rifles were introduced.
Carnival Gun
The small frame Lightning, chambered in .22 rimfire, gained popularity as a carnival gun and with backyard marksmen. It was the most popular model, with 89,912 manufactured. The rifle was offered in a 24-inch barrel with a tube magazine holding 15 rounds – 16 if it was loaded with short ammunition. Many of the small frame rifles had rubber butt plates while the rest had iron.
Big Game Gun
The large frame Lightning, known as the Express because it could carry .50-95 Express ammunition, was made for big game hunting. A 28-inch barrel rifle and a 22-inch barrel carbine were produced. It was only made until 1894 and is the scarcest of the three models with just 6,496 manufactured. It was also chambered in .38-56, .40-60, .45-60, and .45-85 as well.
Police Gun
The medium frame was popular with law enforcement for its firepower. The Colt Lightning most sought-after by collectors is the 401 medium frame rifles sold to the San Francisco Police Department in 1898 that carried a special number series and are stamped “SFP.”
Colt Lightning Ends
Colt discontinued the Lightning after making more than 186,000 of the rifles to focus manufacturing capacity on its pistol lines, according to author James E. Serven, who wrote a history of the company.
Since it was often overshadowed by Winchester’s ubiquitous rifle the Colt Lightning doesn’t get much screen time. It did find its way into the spaghetti western “For a Few Dollars More,” wielded by the deadly Col. Douglas Mortimer, played by Lee Van Cleef, and a few others.
Gentleman’s Agreement, Slight Return
Returning to the apocryphal agreement between Colt and Winchester, more basic economics might have been at play with discontinuing the Burgess and pursuing the Lightning, according to Samuel L. Maxwell Sr., who wrote a book about the Colt Burgess rifle.
Burgess rifles, introduced in 1883, were priced at $24 for a 20-inch carbine model and $27 for a rifle with a 25.5 inch octagon barrel and had some shortcomings, including a lack of a dust cover over the action that came standard on the Winchester 1873.
A Winchester 1873 was priced less expensively and could be had for about $20 in the 1880s, but the company had been dropping prices to fend off competition. Colt on the other hand was financially well-positioned with the success of the Single Action Army, released in 1873, and its double action revolvers.
Colt priced the Lightning at $20.50 to $19 depending on the barrel length and whether they were round or octagonal barrels, according to Colt advertisements at the time. The success of the Lightning left Colt with little reason to continue with the Burgess lever action rifle. Production ended in 1884
Maxwell posits that Winchester was struggling to stay profitable while already competing with Marlin and Whitney. Trying to break into the pistol market, Winchester would face stiff competition from not only the venerable Colt brand but the already established Smith & Wesson and Remington, too. Meanwhile, Colt didn’t price the Burgess rifle competitively against Winchester so it didn’t have a problem discontinuing the model.
That left the companies at an impasse and back to doing what they do best, Maxwell argued, Colt making pistols and Winchester producing rifles.
Colt Lightning Rifles
Despite its short history, manufactured from 1884 to 1904, the reliable and fast pump-action Colt Lightning proved to be a respectable challenger to the lever action rifles of the time. When the Lightning was discontinued, Colt had turned to developing a semi-automatic handgun. Six examples of the Colt Lightning rifle– three medium frame and three large frame — are on offer in Rock Island Auction Company’s May 13-15 Premier Auction.
Sources:
A Fist Full of Double Trouble, by Phil Sprangenberger, truewestmagazine.com
Colt Lightning Rifle, by Jon C. Branch, revivaler.com
Colt Firearms 1836-1959, by James E. Serven
Colt-Burgess Magazine Rifle, by Samuel L. Maxwell Sr.