There was one additional problem to the East of the Iron Curtain: the wartime experience had proved beyond reasonable doubt that the 7.62 x25 Tokarev round is too powerful to have a controllable compact SMG chambered for it. It was so, because the level of technology available in 1950s did not allowed to cut down the intermediate-round assault-rifle any smaller, and the classical SMG was too large and bulky to fill the billet: something completely new was needed, and quick.
More, it takes an awful load of money to train one – and so, to protect this investment, a PDW-style weapon had to be devised from the scratch. Their jobs, indispensable in the modern warfare, were much more important than wandering around in the boonies, wielding a decent rifle. A new wave of compact SMGs, or even machine pistols, were meant to be the self-protection weapons for the commanders, gunners, drivers, pilots and the like. Yet, it was this very same process of warfare modernization that brought it down to the brink of extinction, which paradoxically brought it up back again – although in a completely different guise. The re-armament of armies with automatic rifles chambered for intermediate caliber ammunition throughout the 1950s and 1960s resulted in growing marginalization of the classic pistol-caliber submachine gun. And at the time, when boxy just started to seem sexy, those classy, curving lines of the Rak pleased the eye of beholder. It was lightweight, compact, capable of serious firepower, yet could be holstered to leave the hands free for whatever job they were needed for. It was officially called the Pistolet maszynowy wzór 1963 (PM-63), but most people refer to it as the ‘Rak’ (Polish for cancer). Almost twenty years before the West went PDW-crazy with advent of the micro-caliber rounds that made the concept viable at last, a machine pistol was created in Poland, showing all the features required from that seemingly so novel class of automatic weapons.
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