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September 2002

Pistol Showdown: CZ and Tokarevs Match Up In Bargain Test

We got amazing performance from a trio of 7.62x25mm handguns—Chinese and Polish TT-33s and a CZ 52.

The Chinese Tokarev suffered from a loose
ûsafety lever that made the Polish version a
ûbetter buy, in our view.

Fourteen hundred feet per second from a pistol in 1930? Make that 1896! In the late 1800s Hugo Borchardt designed a pistol, and a cartridge for it, that became the Model 1893 Borchardt pistol. Borchardt was an American, but his pistols were made by Loewe in Germany. (The Borchardt pistol evolved into the Luger pistol, which used a shorter, less-powerful .30-cal. cartridge.) A hotter loading of Borchardt’s cartridge was adopted by Mauser for his 1896 pistol, known as the “broomhandle.” Velocity was in the 1,400 fps realm, and it was the fastest handgun cartridge around for many years. …

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