The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  The first Soviet step was not to make an assault rifle. It was to make a cartridge comparable to the Kurz. Exactly when the Red Army began to work on its own intermediate bullet remains an open historical question,29 though its interest predated the sturmgewehr. In czarist times, an armorer and inventor, Vladimir G. Fedorov, understood that overcoming the design problems inherent in automatic rifles would require developing a smaller cartridge. His experiments demonstrated the difficulties of using high-powered cartridges in smaller weapons. Little came of his ideas. His work stalled. In Soviet times, when denouncing imperial figures was welcome and safe, he blamed the lack of enthusiasm for his work on Czar Nicholas II. The czar, Fedorov said, had spoken openly against an automatic rifle at a lecture at an artillery school in 1912, and worried aloud about the amount of ammunition it would consume. The czar’s opinion, Fedorov said, was influential, and became “widespread at the time amongst the high-ranking military commanders. That was why armourers, myself included, could not obtain noteworthy assistance in work on the automatic rifle.”30 The truth was more complicated. Soviet authorities did not offer much initial support either. In the 1920s, the Red Army discontinued production of Fedorov’s rifle and stopped purchases of the slightly smaller Japanese cartridges it fired. For two more decades the Soviet military committed itself to its own traditional rifle cartridge, the 7.62×54R—the same high-powered round that had been in service since the early 1890s.[8]

  But at roughly the same time that the sturmgewehr was appearing in battle, opinions were shifting, and the Red Army was developing an intermediate cartridge of its own. Soviet officials claimed that Russian designers had begun working in earnest on this cartridge in 1939, and the project had been suspended after Germany invaded Poland that year, which was followed by the Soviet invasion of Finland and the start of the Winter War. The demands of wartime production, by this account, pushed the pursuit of an intermediate cartridge aside.31 Interest intensified on July 15, 1943, when at a conference of Beria’s intelligence service, the NKVD, analysts presented two smaller cartridges used by other armies in the war—the German 7.92 Kurz and the American .30 Carbine, which was fired by a small, semiautomatic rifle issued to support troops.32 That year, two Soviet cartridge experts, Nikolai Elizarov and Boris Semin, were at work refining the idea, and soon the pair had made a cartridge satisfactory to the Main Artillery Department: the M1943, a .30-caliber round with an overall length of 56 millimeters. The cartridge looked like little else in mainstream circulation. It was more than a full inch shorter than the standard .30-06 Springfield cartridge used in American rifles. But it was not entirely new—it closely resembled the M35 round developed by the GECO firm in Nazi Germany and used in Vollmer’s rifle. The similarities between the M35 and M1943 raise the possibility that Soviet spies obtained them even before the sturmgewehr was fielded, or that German technicians had shared details of the round or samples during trade agreements between Germany and the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941, when, with Hitler’s permission, Soviet military delegations extensively toured German munitions plants.33 Whatever its genesis, the M1943 fulfilled for the Red Army the niche that the 7.92 Kurz had filled for the Wehrmacht. Like the Kurz, the M1943 round flew from the muzzle at velocities closer to two thousand feet per second than the nearly three thousand feet per second traveled by the American round. In the eyes of ballisticians who favored high-velocity cartridges, such numbers marked the M1943 as a bantamweight, a round with limited range and knockdown power. To Soviet arms designers, these numbers were academic. Results were more important. Tests had shown that at six hundred meters, the new cartridge penetrated three pine boards each 2.25 centimeters thick, nearly three inches of wood in all.34 Soviet ballisticians thought this was more than enough power and penetration to wound or kill a man at that considerable distance, which was beyond the range at which most fire from rifles found a mark. Experience had also shown that the sturmgewehr was not a weapon infantrymen wanted to face, at least not when armed with bolt-action arms with which to fire back. The M1943 had economic advantages, too. The army’s engineers noted that for every million rounds manufactured, the M1943 saved four tons of the alloys used for cartridge cases, a ton and a half of propellant, and more than a ton of lead. By March 1944, the M1943 was in production.35 Now weapons would have to be made to fire it.

  Soviet willingness to experiment with an intermediate cartridge, and the urge to field a new class of weapons around it, marked another instance of Russian ordnance officials recognizing the value of nascent military technology before many competing nations. Both imperial Russia and the Soviet system that replaced it had proven adept at this sort of intelligent mimicry. The Kremlin’s armies had not been early leaders in machine-gun design, but they had been smart borrowers of technologies and ideas from elsewhere. The results had been impressive. In the nineteenth century, czarist military officers had been among the first to see the value of Gatling and Maxim guns, and had integrated them into Russian formations and put them to effective combat use ahead of almost all the world’s other armies. Soon after the turn of the century, Russia started the work that in time put it at the vanguard of the shift to automatic rifles. Vladimir Fedorov had understood the utility of machine guns in the Russo-Japanese War, and had been intrigued with the idea of a small automatic rifle. From 1909 through 1913 he led a research program to design a suitable weapon. Working with the slightly smaller Japanese cartridges, he made a nine-and-a-half-pound automatic rifle that saw limited service in World War I. His rifle never saw mass production. Thirty-two hundred were made over roughly ten years,36 and production was cancelled after the October Revolution. But Fedorov’s program bridged the Bolshevik coup. He survived the revolution and offered his services to the new socialist state. In 1918 he was sent to Kovrov, a center of arms production to Moscow’s east, to help open new gun works there. He supervised much of the factory’s early development, recruiting designers and workers and helping to make the plant a principal producer of machine guns and submachine guns used in the Great Patriotic War.37 During his decades as a prominent armorer, he published widely on military and ordnance topics and became a giant in the insular clique of Soviet firearms designers. Through his outsized influence, an appreciation for automatic arms became entrenched among the Red Army design teams, and informed Soviet arms development.

  This institutional affinity for automatic arms took another shape in the Great Patriotic War, when the Red Army embraced submachine guns. The Soviet Union had few submachine guns at the war’s outset. As German armor and artillery neared Moscow, Stalin discovered that the Red Army had almost none of the weapons to issue to troops tasked with the city’s defense. “The enemy was threatening the capital, and we had to look for two hundred submachine guns needed for those going behind the enemy’s lines,” he said later. “We did not let anyone sleep then.”38 The shortage was in no small part his own fault—the dictator’s purges of the Red Army’s senior officer corps had sent many experts and proponents of automatic arms to their deaths.39 But the Soviet Union found that its submachine guns were easy to manufacture. State arms factories and small “victory workshops,” many of them under siege in Moscow or Leningrad, produced huge quantities of the PPSh, a stubby eight-pound weapon with a distinctive circular magazine and a vented cooling shroud. The PPSh, which fired pistol ammunition, had completed its design and trial phase only in 1940. It was compact, simple to operate, and inexpensive to manufacture, and gave Soviet infantrymen firepower at close range. Its ease of manufacture was related to its design, which envisioned its being produced in part with electric welding and cold stamping, techniques considered beneath firearms by many Western manufacturers. The Soviet choice made sense. “The technology of manufacture of the PPSh ensured a considerable saving of metal, reduced the production cycle, and did not require complicated specialized tools and equipment,” one Soviet officer noted.40 This also meant that highly skilled workers were not needed for its production, and were available for other
work.

  As weapons go, the PPSh was neither handsome nor refined. It was a triumph of pragmatism, expediency, and unpretentious Soviet ideals. One reviewer said it fit a pattern: “The Russians excel in calculated crudity. In these burp guns, the plumbers have all but eliminated the gunsmiths.”41 Aesthetics matter to many gunsmiths. They mattered not at all to a nation that risked falling under Nazi control. Known among Soviet conscripts as the pe-pe-sha, the dumpy submachine gun was popular with Red Army troops and was regarded well enough that when German soldiers captured them, as they often did, they carried them, too. This is the highest vote of confidence an infantry arm can achieve, and this submachine gun, rushed into production to save the nation, became a familiar prop in Soviet symbols of the Great Patriotic War, appearing endlessly in murals and statuary. But the effect of the PPSh, and of other Soviet submachine guns that appeared later in the war, was deeper than its tactical or symbolic power. It helped cement in the Red Army an appreciation for automatic arms that could be wielded by a single man.

  For all of these reasons, in 1945, the Soviet military was well positioned, intellectually and industrially, to pursue a concept that had little traction in the West: a rifle of reduced power. By the time of the Nazis’ collapse, the Red Army had experienced decades of satisfactory service from the Mosin-Nagant rifle line, with roots in czarist times, which had followed the traditions of the era and fired a powerful round down a long barrel and achieved velocities in excess of twenty-eight hundred feet per second. And the Red Army had been similarly satisfied with its line of submachine guns. The idea of a weapon roughly midway between the two was not radical. It was evolutionary, and a matter of common sense.

  The Red Army knew this, and as the Cold War began it leaped ahead of the Pentagon. The United States, the heavyweight among Western military powers, whose arming decisions would eventually determine which weapons NATO militaries would carry, retained its commitment to powerful cartridges. Inside Stalin’s Soviet Union, the approach to arms design was more flexible, more informed, more interested in what other nations had tried. The intensity of the police state also played a role. The internal risks and frantic subcurrents, along with the preeminence of the intelligence service as an instrument of bureaucratic power, kept the system and its participants alert. Pride in the intellectual pilferage of the enemy’s weapon designs made Soviet design processes less convention-bound. By early 1946, the Red Army had chosen its candidates to give a new class of weapon a Soviet form. Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov had made the first cut. He was an unlikely contender, given his history and credentials. But he was in the race.

  Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in the remote village of Kurya, in the Altai region of south central Russia, in 1919, two years after Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks he led had toppled imperial Russia and begun to force upon the Russian peasantry their vision of the proletarian state. Kurya rests just north of the Kazakh steppe and west of the Russian and Mongolian highlands. It is a flat, dry, windswept place bisected by the winding and turgid Loktevka River, a lonely agricultural zone far from the capital that claimed it. Kalashnikov’s illiterate mother and semiliterate father were religious Cossacks, and had moved from the Kuban region of the North Caucasus and settled on the steppe after Czar Nicholas II had granted land to peasants willing to relocate.42 Mikhail was the eighth of his mother’s eighteen children, and suffered the privations of his time. Frontier hardships were shared. The family lived in a dank log cottage lit by kerosene lamps; the structure shook and groaned in storms. Some of the rooms had dirt floors. Only eight of the family’s children would survive childhood. His mother, Alexandra Frolovna, buried so many of her children that she recycled names, giving two of her deceased sons’ first names—Ivan and Nikolai—to boys she delivered later.43

  Kalashnikov was weak himself, small and prone to illness. He contracted smallpox at age five and carried the disease’s scars for life. He was sick enough at age six that his parents had a casket assembled for him, though he recovered to outlive everyone who watched over him. The coffin maker spat with anger. “Such a snotty little one,” he said, and added, “pretended he was dead.”44 (In another account, Kalashnikov said the carpenter offered a different insult: “So young, and he’s already pulling a fast one! He’s a good actor, make no mistake!”)45 As he grew, Kalashnikov saw himself as a weakling, and was eager to be a muzhik, a real Russian man. Work served as an early outlet and a means to develop a sense of self. From age seven to nine he guided a horse and plow in the fields around the village and took pride in the labor, using his stature as a plowman to tease the boys not assigned to the fields. “I know the price of bread,” he would think. “And you are small fry.”46 Kalashnikov enjoyed working with his hands and using tools. He attended school, learned to read and write, and took a liking to poetry, including writing simple verses. He understood that he was being raised in a traditional, elemental way: a Russian from hearty Russian bloodlines, eager for work, capable, steeped in vital folk values.

  In 1928, after Lenin had succumbed to dementia and strokes, and Joseph Stalin had succeeded him as general secretary, Stalin and the party turned their attention to private agriculture. Stalin was dissatisfied. The agricultural sector, much of it in the hands of small landowners, was a nettlesome anticommunist symbol. As the nation industrialized, and more food was needed in the cities, he was angered by grain prices and production levels. The party tried requisition. Threats of expropriation of food drove production further down. Stalin decided to bring the peasants to heel, and to reverse the czar’s redistribution of land by bringing food production under state control. By 1929 the solution was selected. Peasants’ land would be seized, and peasants forced to work on collective farms. Agriculture was to be a state enterprise.

  In the pogroms to subdue farmers and to pursue the party’s plans, Kalashnikov’s village was not spared. Government commissioners appeared and surveyed homes, livestock, and food stores; meetings with the villagers were held, sometimes overnight. The commissioners confiscated property and grain. Their plans assumed shape. Agriculture was to be centralized to stamp out a Soviet invention—the parasitic and counterrevolutionary kulaks—and to increase food production for the nation. The farmers were to be forced together to work on kolkhozy, the collective farms. Those deemed unsuited for communal work were to be exiled, so as not to disrupt the party’s plans.

  The effects were immediately evident. Tensions simmered in Kurya, pitting families against one another and dividing households. Even classrooms were not immune; children were listed as rich or poor. Those fortunate enough to be classified as poor enjoyed newfound social leverage, which some officially poor children used as license to taunt classmates labeled rich. True wealth was scarce. In 1930 the commissioners returned. The Kalashnikov family was blacklisted, too. As part of collectivization, the state had taken to seizing the grain and slaughtering the livestock of suspect farmers. Kurya suffered a social frenzy. The small jealousies of the less-well-off families were given an outlet in the denunciation and public hounding of more successful families. The means of identifying kulaks were crude. Large families often kept more livestock to feed the larger number of mouths in the home. And a family that possessed more livestock than its neighbors could attract the commissioners’ attention. The Kalashnikov family was large. Mikhail Kalashnikov was confused. “It was not that easy to understand who was who,” he said.47 In 1929, at the age of ten, Kalashnikov experienced his first heartbreak in a manner peculiar to the police state. His childhood crush, Zina, a dark-eyed girl he knew from school, stopped attending class. Zina’s parents had been denounced and blacklisted, and her entire family was deported in the night. Kalashnikov heard of her fate the morning after she had been shipped away. “I passed her house several times a day, hoping for a miracle,” he said. “What if I saw her tender face again, what if she smiled at me again? But that was not destined to happen.”48

  A group of men drove farm animals seized from several kulak families i
nto their yard and hacked the animals to death with axes. The yard filled with terrified, bellowing animals, and then with carcasses as the blood flowed. The family was gripped with fear. It was divided as well. Mikhail had two older sisters. One, Nyura, had married a poor peasant. Her household was spared attention. The other, Gasha, had married Kurya’s most ardent party man. She severed ties with her parents and siblings ahead of their deportation; her siblings pretended not to know her. A few days after the slaughter in the yard, government sleighs arrived. The Kalashnikovs were taken away in the cold, except for Viktor, one of Mikhail’s brothers, who hid in a neighbor’s home. He was turned in by another villager and arrested. He served several years of forced labor, including time spent digging the White Sea Canal. (Kalashnikov has given different accounts of his brother’s sentence. By one, Viktor was sentenced to seven years of labor, but when his sentence ended two more years were added because he dared ask the camp chief why he had been convicted. In another, Viktor was sentenced three years, but had three years added because he tried to escape three times. In this version, he asked why he was sentenced and received an immediate sentence of another year. Kalashnikov’s memoirs are crowded with such jarringly inconsistent recollections.)49