"Vibes" of an original...on restoration
At the risk of sounding a bit too Californian, there is something sort of semi-mystical about the feeling of unrestored rifles and swords to many collectors. The Japanese believe great swords have a sort of spirit of their own and many ships and boats are thought to have individual personalities -ask any Navy man. I'm not sure how much is imagination and how much is real psychic experience, but many collectors, myself included, want to see what the weapon really was like, not what someone restored it to be -the wear, scratches and dings, to "feel" the way the rifle felt the last time it was used. Attempts to "restore" old flintlocks, polish up old swords on grinders, reblue historic Winchesters and chrome SAA Colts, cut down Mosins and restock Martinis are some of the sad results of "restoration," much as new metallic red paint and chrome rims are not what an old Rolls-Royce needs. That doesn't mean don't clean them up, but keep them original, even if that shows the wear. Those are battle scars.
To a historian and collector a Mosin rifle first tells a story of the machinists, men, women and teenagers working in the Tula or Izhevsk facilities in desperate wartime conditions, trying to make weapons to save their country.
I have seen pictures of the factories and have known the children and grandchildren of the Russian factory workers and steel workers -they all speak, not of the tough conditions, but of their desire to do the very best they could, to increase production, to help kill Nazis; sort of a "Rosie The Riveter" mindset . Much like the late Japanese "last ditch" rifles carry the story of exhausted resources, the Mosins carry the story of pride in workmanship, not slave labor.
The stories of the war and of the soldiers are there, too, when you look through a scope that might have been at Stalingrad, down the barrel of a rifle that marched on some soldier's back all the way to Berlin or see the frag marks on a Tula cartouche caused by some grenade or bullet long ago.
In classic automobiles, a field where I was very involved for years, there is a whole class of rare cars beyond the good restorations, the rarest of all, the totally unrestored, original great cars such as unrestored 1934 Alfa Romeos, racing Ferraris from the early 1960s, original Cobras with original paint and wheels and the unrestored Bugattis that come to Pebble Beach every year, valued in many cases beyond the million dollar restorations at auction. A mint original early Ferrari, for example, is generally worth far more than a repaint, even if the repaint looks newer.
The Mosin rifles went to a variety of soldiers and many were picked up and refurbished from the dead. Zaitsev's "Notes of a Russian Sniper" is considered by many to be the best account of Stalingrad from a Russian soldier's point of view, but many histories and films give insight into the unimaginable horror and uncertainty of the Nazi invasion and the Great Patriotic War that followed. All this is somehow part of the mystique of an unrestored Mosin, at least to me, and much of it disappears when the finish is "restored" and the stock sanded down and the battle scars removed. Well, enough ghost hunting...