A Soviet Sniper Team.

Apparently, somewhere near half a million men and women were trained as snipers by the Red Army during World War Two. One of them has arrived to give a little specialized marksmanship to my little Soviet Bolt Action force.

Somewhere around two and a half thousand Russian women served as snipers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War and I would have liked to portray my sniper as one of those female heroes of the Soviet Union but, as I built my team from the standard infantry sprue, I have had to field my sniper as a Vasily Zaytsev rather than a Lyudmila Pavlichenko.

The sniper is armed with a Mosin-Nagant M91 rifle, fitted with telescopic sights.

The sniper's assistant is armed with a Tokarev pistol and a PPSh submachine gun to lay down some covering fire if the pair get too close to the enemy!

I decided to put the sniper on one of the large oval bases intended for the prone firing figures, so that I could give him some kind of cover to conceal himself behind. I initially thought about putting him behind some large barrels, but the ones I have were too big to fit on the base with the figure as well. Sat at the back of my painting shelf in the garage, is an old tin full of stones from our local pet shop and intended to be used in an aquarium and they offered an opportunity to try my hand at a bit of dry stone walling!

I toyed with the idea of putting both figures on the prone figure base, but decided against it as the whole vignette would have looked too crowded. This figure has a German helmet fastened to his waist belt; I can't decide whether this is just a souvenir taken from one of the sniper's victims, or a useful bit of kit used to make approaching the enemy a little less risky. Damn sneaky these Ruskies!

Covering the main man's back... armed with multiple weapons and a keen pair of eyes, the sniper's number two performs an essential role in the job of picking off those German officers and other key personnel... including those enemy snipers!