Molot RPK – A Must Have Piece of History For Any True Collector

“The window of opportunity is small,” this statement rings true the most when it comes to firearm imports.  Great products become collectors’ items in a drop of a hat.  Most of the time due to geopolitics. This is what happened to the FIME Group RPK-47 and RPK-74.  A true semi-automatic version of their squad automatic counterparts, built in the same factory.  A rare piece that is often cloned by different nations, kit built and imitated here in the US.  This isn’t just a story about the guns themselves; it’s about timing, import reality, sanctions, and how a narrow window produced a rifle that’s now basically a sealed chapter in American collector history.

First though lets, rewind and talk about the RPK itself.  The RPK’s story starts with the doctrinal need to give the squad a sustained-fire weapon without dealing with belt fed logistics.  The Soviets wanted an automatic weapon that shared controls, magazines, ammunition, and maintenance commonality with the standard issue AKM rifle.  Mikhail Kalashnikov’s solution was to build a beefed-up AK light machinegun.  The RPK featured a heavier/longer barrel, bulged trunnion, thicker sheet metal receiver, bipod, and fed from a large capacity magazine. The original caliber was 7.62×39 and had a 75 round drum magazine and a 40 round stick magazine option. When the Soviets transitioned to 5.45×39 and the AK-74 platform, the concept carried forward into the RPK-74.  Near identical to its original counterpart except in 5.45×39 and issued with a 45 round bakelite magazine and a specialty airborne variant the RPKS-74.  The next advancement for the RPK would come at the end of the Cold War, we see further improvements in weight savings, polymer furniture and magazine, and a side folding polymer club foot stock was added to the system, taking the feature from the RPKS-74 and standardizing it.  This version would be known as the RPK-74M, modernized, this model is still in service today and is the most sought after variant.

The Vyatskie Polyany machine building plant, Molot, built many items from military equipment to scooters, but what they are most known for is producing all versions of the RPK.  In the U.S., Molot became widely known through the VEPR sporting rifle with import of these starting in 1998.  They carried some of the features of the RPK including the thicker receiver, bulged trunnion, smooth dust cover, windage adjustable sights, and a thicker barrel profile.  Completely over built for a sporting rifle but was highly sought after, being built of a higher quality than their Saiga cousins.  Plenty of importers brought in Molot Veprs over the years, all of them remaining in their sporting configuration with very little improvements.  It wasn’t until 2015 when FIME Group became the sole importer that the Vepr system gained it’s true potential and made way for the RPK in the US.

FIME didn’t just bring in another sporting rifle.  They understood what the advanced collectors in America wanted and the Vepr FM-AK series was born. Now more like a robust AK100 series these rifles featured a RPK handguard/retainer, gas tube and cover, a double feed bullet guide, a straight back 1.5mm receiver, a heavy 16in barrel, pistol grip and stock.  Later models would include more heavy caliber options, barrel lengths and folding stock options.  Time and finances were invested into this project.  Converting sporting rifles into these configurations with special rear folding trunnions/ mechanisms and molds were built for specialty furniture with the intention of building the most sought after Molot product, the RPK.  In 2016 FIME made the FM-RPK47 and FM-RPK74 available to the public.  These were built to exact RPK-74M specs, with it’s side folding stock, but semi-auto only.  The amount of work that went into these units raised the price over a standard VEPR but to the collector market they finally had what they have been looking for.  The total number of FM-RPKs ended up being around 708 with the RPK-47 being only 300 units and RPK-74 being 408 units.  A year later the supply for these models stopped.

The end of this era was a geopolitical one. In 2017 sanctions tied to the war in Ukraine effectively severed the pipeline for Russian small arms imports.  As of 2026, to our knowledge, no firearm-related sanctions have ever been lifted.  It has been almost 10 years since the last new FIME RPK-47 and RPK-74 was manufactured.  Though rare when they first came out, today they are even rarer still, with very few collectors giving up their FIME RPKs, knowing their true value.  With many late to the game lamenting the missed opportunity to pick one up and learning the hard lesson about the import firearms market.  The question is not if the import window will close, but when?  In the case of the FIME RPK, that window was only one year.   Now it is part of American firearms collectors’ history and a must have in any serious firearms collection.