After 10 days of rolling this idea around, I think we need to add on John Browning's 1895 Winchester levergun to this list. I have fired a couple of these arms, and they don't spare you any recoil impulse--and the crescent metal buttstocks enhance that lethality markedly. (Shotgun butt, if you don't mind). My samples were in 30/40 Krag, and the 220 grain softpoints that the rounds were loaded with kind of gilded that lily on the recoil impulse for me. The other one had a very interesting history--a "return" of sorts, won in a card game on Kamchatka peninsula in the late 1990s by a hunting buddy of mine. It is a rifle-length barrel in its original 7.62 x 54R, as issued to the Imperial Russian using services. We verified it as a New Haven "actual", not a Tula or Izhevsk knock-off. While very scarce in North America, according to my buddy these were almost common in Siberia in the hands of subsistence hunters and fisherman. Its condition was decent, a lot of honest use as a tool in wild places--but mechanically-sound and fully functional. Many of these rifles still in use have had their barrels shortened to make them more handy in their various taskings.
The morning after a rather deeply-irrigated evening of bull session and arm-twisting to enlist me into one of his Kamchatka adventure travel sequences, we and others awoke to a glorious Montana morning of "hopper season" trout fishing with Muddler-pattern flies on suicidal trout. Few things on this earth can clear morning cobwebs and hangovers like a series of 15"-18" trout on a #5 Orvis rod--and no Dirty-Thirties yuppie girls from Dallas or Charleston to spoil the morning's ambiance with their tittering. Close to Heaven. The fish lost interest by about 9:30 A.M., so we breakfasted on a potluck of MREs and Mountain House meal packs. That done, out came the war toys--to include the subject of this meandering account, the Win 95 in 30 Rooskikh. By this time (1999) the 7.62 x 54R was no longer a scarce, exotic chambering in the USA. Nor was Tula ammo in that caliber, and 100 rounds of milsurp corrosive Soviet-era ammo had been purchased at one of the Bozeman toy emporia to crank off through the 95. Recoil, even with the crescent butt, wasn't too bad with the 154 grain FMJs our ammo-of-the-day featured. Fun rifle.
The stilted loading sequence (cartridge butt-first, then pivot down 90*) required to fill the 95's box magazine was the system's sole drawback, in comparison to the Savage 1899's far more user-friendly spool system.