The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  But little in any independent inquiry into the evolution of automatic arms can compare in degree of difficulty to an examination of the origins of Kalashnikov’s AK-47. The reasons are manifold. First and foremost, the weapon came into existence inside one of the most secretive and paranoid military systems the world has known. Within this system, the state-directed process was long, fundamentally bureaucratic, scattered across multiple cities and testing sites, and conducted in a cone of near silence by scores, if not hundreds, of participants. The rules muzzled contemporaneous accounts beyond the limited statements made by the authorities, and Soviet authorities were given to lies. Later, when Mikhail Kalashnikov and his namesake weapon entered proletarian lore, the Soviet mythmaking mill produced simplified distillations and outright false official accounts. Inventions, handy fables, and propaganda wormed away at the story for decades, institutionalizing falsehoods and calcifying legends, many of which then became part of the narrative in the West, where further repetition hardened and certified official Soviet accounts. As for Mikhail Kalashnikov himself, he sometimes complained of the false accounts and at other times participated in them, including in his first encounter with a researcher who eventually became a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. At their first contact, by letter in the early 1970s, Kalashnikov recommended a clumsily and transparently falsified official account of his personal biography and the weapon’s history.8 The subterfuge was understandable in its context, part of both a bureaucratic and a diplomatic dance. Kalashnikov consulted with a senior KGB official in the region where he worked before replying to the letter, and his response was passed through the acting Soviet military attaché in Washington. Such conditions left little room for candor. The caution was characteristic of its time. Perhaps it was justified. Though Kalashnikov did not know it, the civilian researcher was quietly collaborating with, and seeking advice from, a senior American technical intelligence official, the very man whose primary responsibility for the United States government was to examine and evaluate Eastern bloc small arms. Whether the researcher’s role was intentional or not, from a Soviet perspective he was acting as an agent.9 Kalashnikov’s deception was expected, to the point of being reflexive. The reflex fit the time.

  Years later, toward the end of the Soviet period, Kalashnikov presented, in both his writings and his scores of public interviews, a somewhat more expansive account of the weapon’s development and design. This brought more detail to the discussion. But as Kalashnikov circulated more accounts, he sometimes contradicted himself and thereby made the history even more debatable. Memoirs might be expected to help, as they would presumably be rendered with more deliberation and care than extemporaneous remarks in interviews, and Kalashnikov would be able to consult his own records to check facts and shape revisions. And yet for a man with a reputation for mechanical precision, his memoirs are a sloppy affair. He has written several, or, put another way, several have appeared under his name (two were cowritten with other authors, and at least one of his critics suspects there has been a ghostwriter, too).10 They beg for an editor, and not just because his accounts veer between sentimental, doctrinaire, folksy, and at times scalding. Stylistic shifts are a mere nuisance. Deeper problems lie in the shifting facts. Accounts of key events differ from text to text. Simple errors intrude in some places; in others, he has reclaimed chunks of the official history or other writers’ work and recast it.11 Throughout the memoirs, his recollections and the dates, even the years, for important events change. The dialogue changes as well, often in ways that alter the meaning of events as he recalls them. Even what might seem the most basic details come unmoored. (Was the AK-47 accepted as the winner of the design contest in late 1947 or in early 1948? Kalashnikov’s memoirs have said both. The answer, from other sources, is clear: January 1948. How exactly was Kalashnikov wounded? Again, there are many answers, depending on the memoir.) An independent researcher is left to wonder: Is Kalashnikov simply imprecise? Or is he a serial embellisher and cunning censor? The record indicates that he was, variously and sometimes simultaneously, all three.

  Sorting through these varied accounts and small details might be possible with extended and detailed interviews with Kalashnikov, or with unfettered access to primary documents. But Kalashnikov, while he makes himself accessible, is nearing senescence. He spent his life in a system that discouraged openness, encouraged deception, and punished disobedience, and he arrived at old age adept at evasion; in his memoirs, he openly admits to misleading Soviet officials and the public about his past, and in interviews he mixes a proletarian and peasant persona with gentle refusals to answer almost all questions he labels “political.” He often answers questions with stock lines he has repeated for years, or decades. When pushed, he grows dismissive. The Soviet legacy endures in other telling ways, too. In the matter of archives, important collections that would be expected to contain information on the weapon’s development, and the roles of participants, remain closed. Primary documents have not been shared, even with the museum that bears the designer’s name and celebrates his work. And many documents are presumed to have vanished. “Here if something is once classified it will in most cases be classified until destroyed,” said one prominent Russian firearms researcher.12

  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which created possibilities for more openness, other factors added to the uncertainty. Freed from silence by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall from power of the Communist Party, two participants in the competition in the 1940s, including a Red Army major who helped evaluate the prototype assault rifles, staked partial claims on the weapon’s parentage. Moreover, further research suggested that the renowned German arms designer Hugo Schmeisser, who was captured by the Red Army after Nazi Germany’s defeat, worked at the same arms-manufacturing complex where the AK-47 was first mass-produced and modified—raising the possibility that the weapon’s production, if not its design, was directly influenced by an expert and innovator who was effectively held as a prisoner. Kalashnikov was also accused in a Moscow newspaper of lifting important components of a competitor’s design and applying them to his final submission, the prototype that became the basis for the AK-47. Two post-Soviet Russian-language accounts using official sources—one by a participant in the contest’s evaluation, and another by an arms museum curator—lend support to counterclaims, though they do not dismiss the central narrative outright.

  Mikhail Kalashnikov is a proud, energetic, and sometimes intense man, and as a lingering proletarian hero, whose narrative has served both his interests and the interests of the state, he always rebutted such claims emphatically, often with thinly masked fury. But strong and angry denials serve only as denials; absent full access to the primary documents, sorting through the exact lines of parentage remains impossible, at least without taking leaps of faith, which many of the people who embrace the stock story have been willing to do. These leaps fit patterns. First they were expected as part of the Communist Party’s recasting of history; history, during the bulk of Kalashnikov’s work life, was as the party defined it, and the public was to accept the fabricated and debased versions as presented. Later, accepting the updated but still self-serving versions that emerged in post-Soviet years was a requisite part of access to Kalashnikov, which many writers cherished and did not jeopardize with inconvenient questions. Fighting this tide was not easy. In Russia, the simple story is a minor industry. Its upkeep has been a determined project.

  As a result of these processes, the precise circumstances are, at best, historically unsettled. But a middle view is possible within a wider context. It is this: Any distillation that treats the AK-47 as a spontaneous invention, the epiphany of an unassuming but gifted sergeant at his workbench, misses the very nature of its origins as an idiosyncratic Soviet product. The weapon was designed collectively, the culmination of work by many people over many years, and the result of a process in which Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov was near the center in the m
id and late 1940s. This process was driven not by entrepreneurship or by quirky Russian innovation and pluck, but by the internal desires and bureaucracy of the socialist state. The motivations that fueled it were particular to a moment in history. The Soviet Union, once a technologically backward society that had been brutalized and organized by Stalin’s police state, had been militarizing throughout its existence, and it had recently been fully transformed into a military-industrial economy by war and its fear and hatred of Hitler. As Hitler exited the stage, this economy’s potential for arms-making was harnessed again, this time to a mix of almost religious revolutionary ideology—socialism was, according to the party’s core teaching, to sweep the world in an irresistible advance—and to a rational suspicion of the United States, with which it was compelled to compete.

  Out of these forces, the competition for an automatic rifle was ordered. Unlike the Maxim and Gatling guns, the Soviet result, as near as a close reading of the available accounts can allow, flowed from official directives and widespread collaboration and not from a flash of inspiration. The AK-47 was a product of Stalin’s state, not of a single man; it was the work of a government and the result of the vast resources the government applied to creating it. Kalashnikov himself has hinted at this himself. “When I grew older, I understood that my invention was not only the culmination of the fervent desire of all of our soldiers to have a worthy weapon to defend our Homeland but also what is often described in seemingly trite words—the ‘creative energy of the people,’” he said. “I am sure that the AK-47 has become the embodiment of this energy. And let it be a common monument to us all—people whose names are known and the nameless. Let it be a symbol of the people’s unity in a time of trial for the homeland.”13 Later, in a public presentation in Russia commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the weapon’s design, he expressed the fuller view more clearly. “Today we are celebrating the work of a big collective,” he said. “I was not by myself sitting at a desk. It was a thousand-strong collective working at different factories.”14

  Such declarations are, of course, narrow. What makes the origins of the AK-47 interesting are not these easy platitudes, but the larger insights its story provides. The Soviet Union of the late 1940s was at a high point in its history. When it focused on technical tasks, it could excel. And when it focused on creating an automatic weapon that could be carried and managed by almost any man, it was able to quickly make one of the world’s superproducts, and one of the truest symbols of itself. The weapon, which Kalashnikov emphasizes as a defensive tool and a shared monument to the population’s creative energy, was rather a marker of the planned economy under totalitarian rule, a nation that could make weapons aplenty but would not design a good toilet, elevator, or camera, or produce large crops of wheat and potatoes, or provide its citizens with decent toothpaste and bars of soap. This is not to say that the planned economy was completely inefficient, though broadly it was. In the planned economy, when the plan worked, the nation got what its planners ordered. Main battle tanks became sturdy, reliable, and fearsome. Refrigerators barely worked. The AK-47 and its descendants in many ways form an apt emblem of the Soviet legacy, a wood-and-metal symbol of what the socialist experiment came to be about.

  * * *

  Certain aspects of the history are unchallenged.

  The project that would change military rifles as combatants understood them began in strict secrecy in the Soviet Union just after the end of the Great Patriotic War. The Workers-Peasants Red Army was seeking a replacement for the infantry rifles, some of them dating to the turn of the century, that had served for decades as a standard arm for Russian and Soviet land forces. The Soviet Union had tried fielding automatic rifles for years, with disappointing results in battle. In the fight against the much more fully equipped German troops many Red Army soldiers found themselves carrying a Mosin-Nagant rifle largely unchanged since 1891.15 A hurried effort during the late war years by a prominent Soviet designer, Sergei G. Simonov, had produced a serviceable but not quite satisfactory carbine that was matched to a new, smaller cartridge than previous Soviet rifles had fired. Simonov’s result, the SKS, Samozaryadny Karabin Sistemy Simonova, the self-loading carbine system by Simonov, was a semiautomatic. It was light, simple, and inches shorter than most infantry rifles of the time, which made it easier to handle in thickets, in urban combat, in armored vehicles, or on parachute duty. But it fired only one round for every pull of the trigger, and was fitted with a fixed ten-round magazine. The Red Army’s Main Artillery Department was interested in an individual soldier’s weapon with more firepower. For more firepower, something else was needed.

  The project’s early luck had not been good. Another konstruktor, Aleksei I. Sudayev, had been working on a true automatic rifle for the new cartridge, and soon after the war his project had undergone two cycles of prototypes and tests. Sudayev was a young man, but already a celebrated figure among Soviet designers. Working in Leningrad during its encirclement and long siege, he had designed a submachine gun and helped oversee its production within the city, all in conditions approaching starvation. The weapon was issued to the Red Army soldiers who finally pushed the Germans back.16 His energy seemed boundless, his talents immense. His second prototype for an assault rifle, the AS-44, was submitted in 1945. The evaluators found it promising, but heavy. They directed Sudayev to develop a third prototype of lesser weight. Sudayev fell severely ill in 1945 and died the next summer at the age of thirty-three, stalling the rifle’s development. By then the Main Artillery Department had decided to commit the country’s military infrastructure more fully to the cause. It had issued a new set of instructions. A competition among design collectives throughout the arms complex would be held, and each would offer proposals for an automatic rifle—for the army’s review.

  The contest’s timing all but predicted its result: A weapon would be created and it would be mass-produced. The Great Patriotic War had radically altered the Soviet Union. Since the October Revolution, the population of the former Russian empire had suffered civil war, collectivization, purges, and labor camps. The revolutionary promises of socialism had given way to the centralization of a police state and single-party rule. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, had grown in size and role, and its secret police had become a principal arm of a government that ruled by violence and fear. By the time of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, show trials had thinned the ranks of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and party luminaries. Much of the senior military leadership had been liquidated. Within schools, factories, and families, people were forced to denounce those near them, producing fresh crops of counter-revolutionary suspects to be arrested, tortured into confession, and sentenced to execution or forced labor in the network of GULAG camps. Stalin’s personality cult had overtaken the land, and the national conversation was smothered by official propaganda and state lies. The nation was being consumed by the general secretary’s whim, and the whims of those who acted under his hand.

  The German invasion changed the national mood. The Third Reich’s thrusts onto Russian soil had rallied a terrified people with a sense of shared peril and common purpose, and provided an impetus for militarization and industrialization on a scale not imagined immediately after the Bolshevik coup. Hitler’s armies drove almost effortlessly through the Soviet Union’s outer defenses, upending the Russian belief, central to the party’s propaganda, that the Red Army would stop all enemies at the edge of Soviet soil. “We will never concede an inch of ground” was one popular slogan.17 The reality was different. Many divisions along the border were not dug in. Many units had no maps. Many officers were on leave. As the Germans attacked, Stalin issued an order that deepened the confusion. Awakened in the predawn hours and told of the attack by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the general secretary was in disbelief. “That is provocation,” he said into the phone. “Do not open fire.”18 Russian units were routed.

  Ukraine and much of western
Russia, the location of a large portion of the Soviet Union’s population and the nation’s industrial base, fell under Nazi occupation, abandoned by the battered Red Army as it retreated. A drive for modernization had preceded the war. Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, coupled to prison labor made available through repression, had rushed the Soviet Union through centralization and development apace, and the military sector had benefited. A huge pool of talent had been directed toward arms production and design. Laboratories, design bureaus, and research centers were dedicated to help.19 As the German Blitzkrieg bore down on Moscow, creating cascades of refugees, the nation was energized more. The Soviet Union tottered. Its defense establishment swelled.

  By 1944, three years later, the ordeal and the turnabout had both been spectacular. The Soviet Union had lost as many as 20 million of its citizens, including nearly 8 million soldiers—losses that dwarfed those of all other participating nations. But the tide had shifted. Germany’s army, pressed from east and west, was nearing collapse. As the war approached its end in 1945, the Red Army, its ranks swelled by mass conscription, pursued the retreating German forces. The Kremlin gained control or primary influence over an expansive swath of territory extending from the Baltic states through Central and Western Europe and looping back to the banks of the Black Sea and almost into Yugoslavia, where Tito’s resistance had evicted the Germans and a socialist state had taken hold. Stalin’s prewar visions of socialist expansion had come to pass. This belt of nations would fall under Soviet influence and become the front line of the Eastern bloc, the buffer zone.