Cyrillic Proof Luger, 7.65mmP

[Kyrie]

When I first saw this one my initial thought was "Chinese copy." As an old Mauser C96 collector I saw my share of Chinese C96 copies with inverted letter "M" ("Wauser"), backward letter "N" in the "A/N" and inverted numbers. I circled the gun for over a month before Buying it.













Lugers with this proof are mentioned in a few sources (including Sam Constanzo, Aarron Davis, John Walter). Walter (“The Luger Book”, page 138) seems to me to have the most comprehensive comments:

"On P.08 receivers, in the form of a ‘backwards N’ below a crown: allegedly a Russian proofmark. Sam Costanzo (WOLI) states this controversial stamp to be a ‘1923 DWM Russian left receiver backward N proof reworked by DWM and sold to Russia on a limited contract basis’ – without offering any evidence for what appears to be nothing more than guesswork. The letter is hardly a ‘backward N’ unless the punch was cut backwards, but no proofhouse would tolerate such a mistake. The mark may be a Cyrillic ‘I’, but, if genuine, what does it mean? Proof at Tula and Izhevsk recommenced 1920, three years after the October Revolution, but the words Proba and Nitroglitserin – ‘proof’ and ‘nitro’ – provide no clues. The most likely of several highly dubious explanations is Is’pytanie (‘trial’, ‘test’) but even this does not explain the presence of a crown in a supposedly post-Revolutionary mark. Were the guns acquired by emigres hopeful of unseating the Bolsheviks? Unfortunately, none of the principal claimants to the throne had names beginning with “I”; had this been so, the mark could have been considered as a cypher. The possibility that the guns were acquired by one of the other states to use Cyrillic script should be considered too."