As the experience of the First World War showed the machine gun became a very important element in the armament of the infantry. The attempt to adopt the Danish machine gun of the Madsen system for the Russian Army was not successful for a number of reasons, and therefore the task of creating a model of such weapons was faced by Soviet gunsmiths. Vasily Degtyarev successfully coped with the task. In 1927 he introduced a new machine gun of his design. It was certainly a successful and simple weapon with a device that had a disk store for 49 cartridges and a reliable gas venting automatics.