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Interesting story of American Arms Manufacturers making weapons for the Russians in WW1 and the subsequent use of said weapons. Story from American Rifleman.

"As arms collectors, many of us have established fairly strict boundaries on our collections—most often out of financial necessity and available space in our homes— and we sometimes pass by interesting, and affordable, antique or vintage guns being offered for sale, because they don’t seem to fit within the confines of our collection. However, by taking a broader view and ultimately understanding the history of your period of interest, guns that, at first glance, don’t appear as candidates for inclusion in your collection may actually have a place in it. The secret is to know how to discern the history of a gun and to read the story that it can tell you.

While taking a break during musical session in my former collection room (the late “Kriegszimmer”) some years ago, one of my pals looked around at the assemblage of military memorabilia and asked the rhetorical question: “If these things could only talk, what kind of a tale would they have to tell?” I was sitting next to a vintage rifle, so I pulled it out of the rack and said, “This one really has quite a history, and I can only imagine the stories that it could tell.” Taking this as a cue, the other guest musicians asked me to tell the story of this well-traveled rifle that had been born in one country, fought for another country and then fought for two more countries over a short span of only thirty years.

When Russia entered into World War I, its huge conscript army was already woefully short of service rifles. Its standard infantry shoulder arm was the “Russian Three-Line Rifle, Caliber 7.62 mm. (.3”),” or M1891, a five-shot, bolt-action rifle that was chambered for the 7.62x54 mm R rimmed cartridge. The “three-line” designation was a Russian term, meaning that the caliber of the bore was 0.3” in diameter, a “line” representing 0.1”—thus .30 caliber, or 7.62 mm. A Russian army officer, Sergei Mosin, designed the rifle in 1891, but a Belgian inventor, Leon Nagant, claimed to have developed certain features on it, so, at least in the United States, this rifle is commonly referred to as a “Mosin-Nagant.”

By 1915, the Russians had more men in the lines than they had rifles, and they also had lost thousands of guns in the defeats they suffered by the hands of the German army in 1914. The czarist government turned to America and contracted with both the well-known Remington Arms Co. in New York and a new firm called New England Westinghouse in Massachusetts to make Mosin-Nagant rifles. Remington was contracted to make 1.5 million rifles, while Westinghouse was to produce 1.8 million arms. According to some published sources, only a total of about 750,000 thousand rifles had been produced by Remington prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and nearly 470,000 of these had been shipped to Russia. However, the serial-number range from extant verifiable rifles does not bear out these statistics, as the National Museum of the Marine Corps has a Remington rifle that was supplied by the Russians to the Nicaraguan insurgents in the late 1920s, and it has a serial number in the 562,000 series. Westinghouse alone must have made more than 800,000 rifles, as at least two of them in my former collection, 828084 and 803375, clearly made it to Russia and were subsequently used by the Finns. These rifles were very well-made and had wood stocks of American walnut. The Russians stamped an acceptance mark on the wood buttstock and then issued them as fast as they could.

The rest of the story can be found here:

Remington made Mosin-Nagants