The PPD officially went into military service with the Red Army in 1935[3] as the PPD-34, although it was not produced in large quantities.

[4][5] During the Winter War in 1939 with Finland, an acute lack of individual automatic weapons even led to the reintroduction of the stockpiled Fedorov Avtomats into service.

[citation needed] Shpagin's great innovation in Soviet automatic weapons manufacturing was the large-scale introduction of stamped metal parts, particularly receivers; the PPSh also had a muzzle climb compensator which significantly improved accuracy over the PPD.

A number of PPD-like submachine guns were also manufactured in a semi-artisanal way by gunsmiths among the hundreds of thousands of Soviet partisans.

These guns, even when made as late as 1944, used milling because metal stamping requires large industrial facilities that were not available to the partisans.