ORIGINAL: Briman
My father owns a very old octagon receiver long (91/30?) model that was captured and re-worked at an arsenal in Finland....it is pristine and gorgeous, and it will shoot excellent groups at 100 yards with iron sights.
Those are at the very top end of the spectrum for Mosin Nagants. Finnish standards were for the rifles to be capable of accuracy of about 1.5 MOA and were rebuilt by factories with funny sounding names like Tikka and Sako. Not only are they very accurate, but the actions were slicked up, the triggers honed, and the barreled actions carefully bedded to the stocks.
The other end of the spectrum are the wartime soviet issued Mosins. They were made for relatively close engagements- the 91/30s had a bayonet that was to be attached semi-permanantly, and the accuracy ranges from ok to dismal. If all of the planets aligned correctly and fairly accurate rifle was made, it was turned into a sniper rifle. The wartime russian carbines tend to be even more poor of shooters.
If I were to pick a cheap milsurp for hunting it would be:
K-31- these are easy to mount a scope to and can potentially outshoot rifles that cost 4-5x as much with a little tweaking.
No4Mk1/Mk2 enfield- halfway decent accuracy, good sights, readily available ammo.
It should be noted that I do own M-Ns, in fact 6 of them. Only 2 of them are what I would consider accurate enough for hunting, one being a Finn rearsenalled 91/30 and the other being a pre-war Russian 91/30, both of which I consider too long and unwieldy for hunting. The other 4 are a wartime 91/30 and 3 carbines- none of which could reliably hit the vitals on a deer outside of 25 yards.
I set up a K 31 with a clamp on after market scope mount, and a Zeiss Conquest scope. I was getting some nice groupings of 1 inch without any tweaking. Had $400 in the scope, $200 in the walnut stocked K31 , and $80 in the mount. Not bad.
The K31, if you take it apart, doesn't have a mill mark on the metal ANYWHERE! Like a $1000 custom rifle!