Those who believe that the Soviet ‘Photosniper’ appeared in the sixties of the XX century are mistaken: the first photographic guns in the USSR were first produced back in 1937. These were analogues of German devices for photoreconnaissance based on ‘Leica’ with a Visoflex mirror attachment. The Soviet Union, as you know, had its own ‘Leica’ called ‘FED’, and the attachment with a lifting mirror for KMZ could be made without much difficulty.

However, the main snag of such a gun was the lens. It should be long enough and fast enough. The needed lens called ‘Tair’ was designed in those years by the Soviet optician David Volosov. The lens turned out to be so successful that it was produced for several decades and became the ancestor of a whole family of telephoto cameras. In 1965, ‘Tair-3’ was installed on a new photographic gun, already with a mirror ‘Zenith-EU’. Instead of a wooden box of the military ancestor, ‘Photosniper FS-3’ received an elegant metal stock with a pistol grip and a special wheel for more convenient lens focusing.