[1] Coming from a family of gunsmiths,[2] Dragunov worked as a factory machinist before beginning military service in 1939.

After 1941, Dragunov was a senior armorer working for the Soviet Union and also captured enemy weapons during wartime.

After 1945, he returned to Izhevsk and joined the Arms Design Bureau, working as a project engineer on sporting and civilian target rifles through the 1950s.

[3] Dragunov also participated in the competition that led to the adoption of AKS-74U with a gas-operated design called MA (malokalibernii avtomat).

Although Dragunov's avtomat was comparable in performance to Kalashnikov's, the latter had the advantage of sharing some parts with the AK-74 rifle already in production.