As to the guns sent back to Mother Russia pictured here, I have to say they look a little too bourgeois for any Real Soviet officer to risk having made. Too nice, too foreign. Something the NKVD would be on the lookout for, particularly during the late days of Stalin.
Dave, that's EXACTLY the kind of 'trophy' the Soviet officers were willing to take home - and often did. The point is, looting was unofficially allowed - with Stalin's content if not direct order - 'to compensate for the hardships endured in war'. Pragmatically, there was the concern that having seen the life levels of the Western Europe, and comparing it with the poverty back home, the soldiers and officers would question the Socialism issue. Now, with the loot, they were feeling priviledged and superior and happy, and therefore conformist. So everyone could make believe that the reason for poverty was that 'the Nazis left the country in ruins', and the loot was OK because 'we're only bringing back what they stole from us'. Anyway, with literally carloads of spoils coming back home, the 'chic' lifestyle was OK - provided you had done active duty at war or otherwise served the country - but since almost everyone did, 'chic' was OK for all.
In Russian 'gun talk' such guns are often referred to as 'bread guns' as they were often traded for food and other bare essentials. They were often of very poor quality but richly decorated, because the officers who ordered them were, mostly, quite innocent souls - country or factory boys, who haven't seen much more than the officers' school and war, war, war. Quite competent in military guns, they were often innocent in sporting weapons, and couldn't tell good work from bad. They could tell if the gun looked 'rich' or not, though - and assumed lots of engraving and carving meant good quality.
I am not sure if the accusations of 'lifting' of the parts from Simson is valid. To my knowledge, Reif
was an official member of the Autovelo Trust / Ernst Thallman cooperative (the German umbrella company which de-facto acted as the Suhl Gun Guild), and they
all sourced from Simson.
However, postwar Soviet gun books all voice the same warning against buying richly decorated but poorly made guns (these books stated these guns were made for colonial trade, to fool innocent natives) and invariably gave Otto Reif as an example of such. The quality of the 'workmanship', if the books were to be trusted, was below any standard, the guns sometimes had the play in the action even when new! This is probably the reason why he was finally expelled from the trade, after the Soviet Army top brass which patroned him withdrew from administrating the country.
As for the Holland spelled Golland (too bad this site doesn't accept Cyrillic characters... shotgunworld does...). There is a tradition to transcribe the initial Latin 'H' with a 'G'. It goes back to early 18th century, from dealing with words borrowed from the German in the course of Peter I's reforms. At the time, the 'g'-letter stood for a friсative 'g'-phoneme, which sounded almost identical to the German hard 'h' of the time. Later phonetic variation moved the pronunciation from the spelling, but the tradition is still there. Even Hitler is spelled Gitler.
