No surplus ammo has ever impressed me in 7.62x25 Tokarev. Bulgarian ammo fails to go off allot and you can't hit the broad side of a barn with it. I have some US made ammo that kicks harder, but that's probably due to the light grain, high speed charge cycling the slide very fast while not actually being that bad in chamber pressure. What usually causes handgun slides to snap is what happens before the shell extracts. In this regard, Bulgarian ammo is very nasty, pumping out chamber pressure reserved for PPSH SMGs. The communists had a tendency to limit their costs by making ammo loads specific to each specific gun rather then make a whole bunch of guns in a whole bunch of different calibers. We do this too to some extent, but not in ways that might make one load safe for one gun while unsafe for another. As with most people who follow this stuff, I am under the impression that the Bulgarian ammo WAS NOT intended for pistols, but for SMGs.
As for Romanian, recoil is fine and chamber pressure is probably lower then you might expect from 7.62x25, but accuracy isn't all that impressive (though better then Bulgarian) but I myself suffered more failure to fire from the Romanian ammo then the Bulgarian.
I often hear people joke about com block surplus ammo, saying that the communists must have been insane to consider war with the USA using these garbage loads. The real truth is, these countries are selling this ammo to the USA because they think the same of it that we do, and are sending it our way because they do not trust it to be used in their military, whether because it's old and expired, defective questionable manufacturing conditions etc.
So the bottom line is to stay away from surplus ammo all together if you can. It's cheap for a reason. Seller&Bellot, Winchester, Wolf and Quality Cartridge (if they are still around and making 7.62x25) are the way to go.
When I went shooting regularly, I usually hit a 3ft iron plate at 300 yards with my CZ-52 off-hand using Winchester and Seller&Bellot. In one case, at the same setting that I hit the 300 yard plate 15 out of 16 shots with a box of Winchester, I was barely on the paper of a 2x3 foot target at 10 meters using Bulgarian surplus, and I tried the Bulgarian surplus AFTER I had gotten warmed up having just spent the box of Winchester. I could literally get better groups throwing rocks at the paper, and I was a poor pitcher in baseball. None of this is joking or exaggerating.
Surplus ammo has one great use. If you have a bullet puller, I bet you can have allot of fun making M-80s with the powder. At the price, it's probably not a bad deal.
