Mosin for "plinking"
Is still about as cheap as it gets if you're talking about "plinking" with a full-power rifle. Locally, Czech silvertip is 5-6 bucks a box, and bulk surplus is still around $0.10 / round. Selection isn't what it was a year ago, bt there's always something available. It's all corrosive, and accuracy can vary widely (true of the guns as well.) Given the cost of 7.62x54R reloadable brass, rifle bullets, and the amount of powder per load, you still can't reload for the Mosin cheaper than suplus ammo. Commercial ammo is available, around $21 / box where I buy it (Big 5).
Recoil from my M44 is stiff, to say the least. A $15 butler creek slip-on pad helped a lot, both by providing some protection from the great-for-bashing-in-Nazi-skulls steel buttplate, and for adding some length of pull to a stock that seems not to fit any known member of Homo Sapiens. Really, the "ergonomics" of the Mosin stock are so awful that it's hard to believe that it was an accident. Anything that sucks that bad has to have been designed that way on purpose.
Standing, I can shoot 60-80 rounds in a session, after owning the rifle for a year or so. From the bench, it's more like a box. When I first shot it from the bench, one magazine-full and I was done. You get used to it, and you learn to shoot it the "right" way. You'll know immediately if you're doing it wrong. "Wrong" is determined by the rifle, not by you!! There's something so basically Russian about that, it's almost part of their charm.
Reliability is legendary. The entire action has 5 moving parts. Trigger, sear/spring/striker block, bolt body, bolt head, magazine follower. When you take it apart, it's obvious that the #1 design goal was "it shall go 'bang'!"
Accuracy is wildly variable, and depends on both rifle condition and ammo quality. The latter is typically Communist, IE, all over the map, and never great. Condition is a function of when the rifle was made, and where, and how it was used. A rifle made in 1940, and given to one Red Army infantryman, with a couple of guys behind him waiting to pick up his rifle when he got shot, which was used in the most intense combat the human race has ever seen (nothing else even comes close to the Eastern Front for sheer brutality), will not be in any condition to shoot well. OTOH, if you have such a rifle, treasure it as a machine that has done far more than it's designers ever dreamed that it could, or would ever have to do. Post-war Warsaw Pact rifles were used far less roughly, and there's a lot of pre-war 91/30s that were pretty well-made, and depending on the units they were issued to, may not have seen the kind of service that the war-era guns did. It's a crapshoot. Sometimes in both senses of the word.
My Hungarian M44 will shoot the Czech silvertip into around 2.5 - 3.5" at 100 yards, if I'm shooting well. If my handloads can get me at or below 2", I'll be happy.
I love mine, although for refinement, quality, and accuracy, it doesn't hold a candle to my K31. But then, not much does, including many commercial sporting rifles. I also tend to shoot the two quite differently. With the K31, it's a careful, precise process, even more so since I scoped it. With the M44, it's more like, "Hey, I wonder if I can hit that rock/target/box/random object over there... BANG!!"
Mosins are fun.
--Shannon