7.62×54mmR
Russian rimmed rifle cartridge
The 7.62×54mmR is a rimmed rifle cartridge developed by the Russian Empire and introduced as a service cartridge in 1891. Originally designed for the bolt-action Mosin–Nagant rifle, it was used during the late tsarist era and throughout the Soviet period to the present day. The cartridge remains one of the few standard-issue rimmed cartridges still in military use, and has one of the longest service lives of any military-issued cartridge.
The fully-powered 7.62×54mmR cartridge is still in use by the Russian military in the Dragunov (SVD), SV-98 and other sniper rifles, as well as some modern general-purpose machine guns like the PKM and Pecheneg machine gun. Originally, the round was designated Трехлинейный патрон образца 1891 года – (three-line cartridge model of 1891). It then became widely known under the designation 7,62мм винтовочный патрон (7.62 mm rifle cartridge). The round has erroneously come to be known as the "7.62mm Russian" (and is still often referred to as such colloquially), but, according to standards, the R in designation (7.62×54mmR) stands for "rimmed", in line with standard C.I.P. designations. The name is sometimes confused with the "7.62 Soviet" round, which refers to the rimless 7.62×39mm intermediate cartridge used in the SKS and AK-based (AK-47, RPK) rifles and light machine gun.
Background
The 7.62×54mmR is the second-oldest cartridge still in regular combat service with several major armed forces in the world. It is second to the .303 British which entered military service in 1889 and remains in service, primarily in some noncombatant Commonwealth nations around the world.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “7.62×54mmR” is russian rimmed rifle cartridge. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through 54mmR, Russian and rimmed, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q259199. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1891 and 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “7.62×54mmR” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.