As a military sidearm, the pistols saw service in various colonial wars, as well as World War I, the Easter Rising and the Irish Civil War, where the gun was nicknamed the Peter the Painter after the contemporary London gangster of that name who was believed to use one, and because the pistol grip looked like a brush handle, the Estonian War of Independence, the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, and World War II. During the Warlord Era in China, European embargoes on exporting rifles to Chinese warlords meant that the C96 became a mainstay of the period's armies, and the basic form of the pistol was extensively copied. The C96 also became a staple of Bolshevik commissars from one side and various warlords and gang leaders from another in the Russian Civil War, known simply as "the Mauser". Communist revolutionaries Yakov Yurovsky and Peter Ermakov used Mausers to execute the former Russian imperial family in July 1918.