1/72 Zvezda Soviets for SCW

With an eye towards having more variety for my Spanish Civil War Republican forces, I purchased these:

I had never owned a kit from Zvezda before, but at roughly $4 a box I thought that the risk was minimal.


Inside the box of Militia, one finds:

Two sprues of figures, an instruction sheet for assembly, and a data card for Zvezda's own WW2 game, Art of Tactic.  Right off the bat, I was struck by two things:  first, there are only five figures in the box; and second, the production values are quite high.  The figures are free of flash and mold lines, and the weapons are right to scale.  Unfortunately, this makes the rifles, and the bayonets especially, quite fragile as they are very slender.

Still, they are a useful purchase and look like they will fit right in with my Minairons figures.  Conversions are already being planned.  The female figure has a PPsh SMG, but I think that I might leave it as is.  One of the male figures (on the left-most sprue) appears to have a Molotov cocktail, but he is holding it by the neck of the bottle and upside down.  He might be converted to a dinamitero, or the bottle will just be rearranged in his hand.


In the second box:

Two identical sprues, two data cards, and instructions.  Each sprue has a two-man MMG crew and their Maxim MMG.  The figures and MMG are beautifully made, and will be quite useful for the Republican cause.  I do plan to make head swaps with them, as the Soviet helmet will not look quite right and I have a selection of Minairons heads for the job.


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