The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  Exactly who was responsible for all of these final modifications is unclear. General Kalashnikov would describe a near epiphany, a eureka moment. “I came up with several new ideas that turned my life upside down. I completely altered the general structure. As the rules of the competition didn’t allow me to change its overall design, I had to pretend I was working on a mere improvement. Sasha Zaitsev, my faithful right-hand man from the start of the competition, was at this time the only person aware of my real plan.”97 He added, “Our design represented a real leap forward in the history of automatic weapons construction. We broke all the stereotypes that had dominated the field.”98 He also claimed the changes were related to an inherent flexibility in his design style.

  Often times designers become affixed to a certain idea and hesitate to discard it. They are so attached to their original concept, you could say, like a spinster to her cats! I am just the opposite. Today this idea seems good, tomorrow I might just toss it. The day after I might do the same until such a point, when I can feel the design is completed. When you work with somebody who is afraid to discard an idea that has outlived its usefulness, you notice that they find it difficult to part with it. They think their accomplishments should last for all times. I am referring here to the need for a certain flexibility (of mind), i.e., the ability to test as many ideas as possible and not get too attached to any one in particular. This enables one to develop models of high reliability…. There is no limit to improvement!99

  That was Kalashnikov’s version. Zaitsev remembered events differently. He said that in fact he had conceived of the changes. Kalashnikov, he said, opposed them. His recommendations were made at Kovrov after Kalashnikov returned from NIPSMVO with the judges’ recommendations. “I suggested the Kalashnikov assault rifle be entirely redesigned,” Zaitsev wrote. Kalashnikov resisted, Zaitsev said, because he thought there was not enough time to overhaul the design before the final trials. “I managed to convince him I was right.”100 D. N. Bolotin, a Soviet arms writer who was friendly with many designers, thought enough of Zaitsev’s account to include it without challenge in his published work.101 Aleksandr Malimon, an officer who worked as a test officer at the polygon, also chronicled Zaitsev’s contributions as matters of fact.102 These accounts present a credible challenge to Kalashnikov’s accounts, which blended the official Soviet biography with post-perestroika inserts and edits.

  Further challenges to the rifle’s parentage have also suggested that Kalashnikov had not been forthcoming about the origins of the AK-47. Central to these claims were two allegations that flowed from forces both historical and personal. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, many legends were questioned by a population weary of propaganda and state lies; this larger re-examination led to a revisiting of the official story of the AK-47. Kalashnikov appeared to have drawn some of the attention on himself. Several colleagues thought the designer, who had basked in state glory and enjoyed benefits and favored treatment for decades, had assigned in his writing and public remarks too much credit to himself. They came forward with a fuller story.103 Their counterclaims, largely ignored in the West, have proven long-lasting within arms circles in Russia.

  One allegation asserted that Kalashnikov’s final prototype included a primary design feature—the integrated bolt carrier and gas piston—lifted from Bulkin’s earlier submission. Bulkin led a design bureau from Tula, a city south of Moscow that was another center of Soviet arms production. Unlike Kalashnikov, who was adept at endearing himself to his army and party superiors, Bulkin had a quarrelsome personality. He was not well liked by the judges.

  The other allegation asserted that Kalashnikov had inside help from a testing officer at the range, Major Vasily Fyodorovich Lyuty, who provided Kalashnikov many ideas he applied to his prototype. Lyuty, who worked at Schurovo, claimed that he shepherded the early Kalashnikov design through a disappointing first showing and overruled a stern report from U. I. Pchelintsev, a testing engineer, which concluded: “The system is incomplete and cannot be further developed.” In all, Lyuty claimed, he recommended eighteen changes to the first prototype, which Kalashnikov accepted. Pchelintsev’s rejection letter was then rewritten.

  I felt the test frustration deeply with Mikhail, because we were friends. This is why when he asked me, as the chief of the testing unit, to have a look at the gun and Pchelintsev’s account to outline the improvement program, I agreed of course. In fact, I took up all the subsequent business in my hands, thank God I had the knowledge and experience needed for it. Having studied the test report scrupulously I came to the conclusion that the design had to be redone almost anew, since according to my calculations 18 improvements of different complexity had to be made. I told Mikhail about it and explained what, and most important, how, this can be done to the avtomat. With the account of my remarks, I changed Pchelintsev’s conclusion and recommended the gun for further improvement.104

  Major Lyuty added that after the first round of tests, he and Kalashnikov worked side by side, along with Colonel Deikin, and the trio made the prototype that became a finalist. Major Lyuty later fell into official disfavor. He was arrested in April 1951 and taken to Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Soviet intelligence service, where he was beaten and accused of preparing a terrorist act against party leaders, of circulating anti-Soviet propaganda, and of participation in a counterrevolutionary group. He feared he would be executed. After torture and with coaching from another inmate, he agreed to confess to involvement in anti-Soviet propaganda. He was sentenced to ten years. Lyuty served four years in a labor camp, cutting wood near Kansk, and then was transferred to a sharaga near Moscow, where scientists and designers served their sentences. In 1954, after Stalin died, he was rehabilitated and returned to work, but not before Kalashnikov had become a proletarian legend and model of socialist virtue. Kalashnikov’s public standing precluded serious challenge to his record in Soviet times.

  On one level, claims that the Kalashnikov design bureau, by appropriating elements of Bulkin’s design or accepting help from a test officer, tainted the contest do not account for the nature of the Soviet army’s pursuit of new arms. The Soviet Union did not operate by Western rules. Notions of intellectual property were incompletely formed. Officials encouraged designers to copy features of any weapon that could be usefully applied to their prototypes, even weapons in development by competitors.105 Kalashnikov’s final design did not copy Bulkin’s test model in full; it incorporated a central idea but changed details, including the location of the cams. Kalashnikov never denied that he was an aggressive borrower. Collecting good ideas from existing firearms was, to him, fundamental to sound design. One of his reflections was resonant on this point. Sometimes originality does not go with expediency, he said. The first avtomat that his bureau produced for the M1943 cartridge, the AK-46, borrowed from John C. Garand, the designer of the standard infantry rifle for the United States, and his bureau tinkered with variations on Schmeisser’s trigger assembly, obtained by studying captured German arms. More broadly, as tests for an automatic weapon proceeded from Sudayev’s AS-44 to Kalashnikov’s final prototype, many submissions by different designers came to resemble one another in significant ways. Design convergence seemed to have been a welcome byproduct, even an aim, of holding competitions.

  Kalashnikov always rebutted his accusers. He berated a Russian newspaper for publishing a story arguing that he had copied Bulkin’s work in an untoward way. “Certain people would like to cast doubt on the paternity of the AK-47,” he wrote. “I’m 83 years old, but fortunately I’m still here to reply to those mendacious accusations!” The questions persisted. The changes in his prototypes just before the final phase were so striking, and a central change bore enough physical and conceptual resemblance to Bulkin’s earlier design, that they pointed to the broader nature of the AK-47’s creation, which had been cocooned in a simplistic narrative for decades. They suggested that the weapon came into existence via expansive collaboration rather than springing from the
mind of one man.

  Whatever the exact origins of the final changes and whoever deserved the credit—Kalashnikov, Zaitsev, Bulkin, Lyuty, Deikin, and others—the AK-47 had taken its recognizable form. And many of its mechanical merits were evident. Kalashnikov described an encounter with Vasily Degtyarev, the general who had designed some of Russia’s most successful arms. The meeting, if the account is to believed, said much about the redesigned weapon’s potential. It occurred as the last prototype neared completion. The general and Kalashnikov met at Kovrov. Someone in the group proposed that they show each other their work. “Cards on the table,” he said.

  The graying sixty-six-year-old general and the twenty-eight-year-old sergeant presented their weapons. Kalashnikov had disassembled his, so the general could examine each part. These two men were not the sort who would be expected to meet like this. The general had been predestined to be an armorer. Born into a family of czarist gunsmiths in Tula in 1880, he began working in the city’s arms factory at age eleven. Like Fedorov, he endeared himself to the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and began working on automatics. As Leon Trotsky was building a socialist army, he worked at the gun works at Kovrov, which became his home. Fedorov was aging. Degtyarev was heir apparent to be the Soviet Union’s konstruktor emeritus. His chest was adorned with state prizes and medals; his party contacts were extensive. With his short gray hair, parted to the side, he vaguely resembled Nikita Khrushchev, though he had a restrained and dignified air. He looked at the AK-47, the work of unknowns. As Kalashnikov tells it, he was impressed.

  All of a sudden, General Degtyarev made this staggering declaration: “The way Sergeant Kalashnikov has put the components of his model together is much more ingenious than mine. His model has more of a future—of that I’m certain. I no longer wish to participate in the final phase of the competition.”

  He’d said all of that loud enough for everyone to hear. I can remember the moment perfectly well. The general was in uniform, decorated with his medal, the star of a Hero of Socialist Labour. I think that it was very brave of him to think in this way. It was an act of great honesty, and indeed nobility—especially in view of the fact that he was one of the “favourites” of the regime.106

  This story also shifted in its multiple tellings. Kalashnikov told a curator of the Smithsonian Institution, whom he befriended, that General Degtyarev made his declaration during the final testing.107 In another memoir, he recalled the moment differently. In this version, soon before the final tests, officials from the Main Artillery Department visited Kovrov.

  Degtyarev gave a tired smile, as if under the pressure of an invisible weight. His movements seemed sluggish to me and he shuffled noticeably. However, he quickly became animated when he saw our prototype. “Well, let’s see what the young are up to now.” Degtyarev started to examine each part, each component of the prototype which I was taking apart right on his table. “Yes, it’s a clever piece of work,” said Degtyarev as he took the bolt carrier and the receiver cover in his hands. “Your solution to the fire selector problem is certainly original.” Speaking aloud, Degtyarev did not conceal his opinion. At the same time, we were inspecting his assault rifle. It seemed rather heavy to us and more improvements could have been made as regards component interaction. But Degtyarev, after scrutinizing our prototype again, this time as an assembled unit, suddenly concluded: “I do not think there is much sense in sending our prototypes to the tests. The design of the sergeant’s prototype is better and more promising. You can see it with the naked eye. So, comrades,” he said addressing the officials, “perhaps we will have to send our prototypes to a museum.”… Degtyarev, a man of high morals, was most exacting and honest in everything.108

  The varying accounts of a meeting that obviously held high significance to Kalashnikov are important for another reason: They diverge not only from each other but from the official Soviet version. The jumble hints yet again at the unreliability of the long-standing narrative of the AK-47’s invention and of many of its sources. In his memoirs, Kalashnikov said he had never met Degtyarev until this moment. In interviews with the curator,109 and in the Soviet account, Degtyarev was a presence earlier. Kalashnikov, in the Smithsonian interview, said he met Degtyarev in a competition for an automatic rifle for the 7.62×54R cartridge; this would have been at least two years before. The Soviet biography both contradicted Kalashnikov’s chronology and produced a sentimental vignette that propagandists spun around the designer for decades. In it, Degtyarev had a cameo, serving as a wizened Soviet hero offering advice to an armorer-to-be at a firing range on a summer day. The sound of grasshoppers rose from the fields. Kalashnikov was nearly overcome with excitement, but dared to ask a question.

  “Comrade general,” the senior sergeant said suddenly, “What qualities in your opinion are necessary for a designer-gunsmith?”

  Degtyarev turned toward him. “A gunsmith? Ah then, have you been chosen as a gunsmith, Kalashnikov?”

  Surikov[11] pricked up his ears. So this was Kalashnikov! And it seemed that Degtyarev remembered his name. He looked first at Degtyarev then at the questioner, trying not to miss a word. The question was interesting.

  “Gunsmiths are made of the same clay as everyone else. So let’s simply say: what qualities does a gunsmith need. I think that first of all it’s a love of work and persistence. I have spoken more than once of creative fiber. I’ll say this to you now: this fiber is a love of invention which gives a man no rest. Even in your sleep you see your machine as it would be if it were manufactured real…” Degtyarev paused and looked up toward the top of the pine trees. “I don’t know if you can develop this creative fiber. I have felt it since my very earliest years. But as to persistence it is possible and necessary to cultivate it. I discipline myself constantly.”

  He was silent. No one wanted to break the silence.110

  This was the sort of narrative that informed the West’s understanding of the AK-47’s origins. To a large extent, it still does.

  In many ways, it is easier to describe what the first AK-47 was, than to describe its origins. To understand how this automatic rifle worked, it is necessary first to grasp the operation of a more simple firearm. The process begins with a cartridge, which provides both the bullet that will fly out of the muzzle and the energy that will propel it. The bullet is at one end, crimped watertight to a metallic case. Inside the case is a granular propellant, known, in layman’s terms, as gunpowder, though modern smokeless propellants are much different from the true gunpowder of the nineteenth century and before. The propellant stores latent energy. Once a cartridge is seated snugly in a weapon’s steel chamber, the rifle is fired when its firing pin strikes a small primer at the bottom of the cartridge case. In a flash, the primer ignites the propellant, which is converted at nearly explosive speeds to gases. The release of energy liberates the bullet from the crimp in a manner reminiscent of the way a champagne cork flies from a bottle. The bullet has nowhere to go but down the length of the barrel, so it accelerates through the open path toward the muzzle, pushed by expanding gases. As the bullet moves it picks up spin imparted by grooves in the barrel, known as rifling, that force the bullet to rotate on its central axis. The spin will stabilize the bullet in flight, reducing drift and allowing it to travel truer to the shooter’s aim. As the bullet leaves the barrel the excess energy that put it to flight is manifested in several ways—recoil, muzzle flash, noise, and a rush of gas venting into the air.

  To make a rifle that will fire automatically using energy from the cartridge, designers must capture some of that excess energy and convert it to the work of clearing the spent shell casing from the chamber, reloading, and firing the next round. In the design chosen by the Kalashnikov team, the rifle bleeds a portion of gas via a diversion. This is done through a small port in the top of the barrel, about 5.5 inches from the muzzle, that slopes backward at a forty-five-degree angle. Each time a bullet passes the port, pushed by the expanding gases, excess gas rushes through the por
t into a tube seated above the barrel that serves as an expansion chamber. Within the chamber is a piston. The gas forces the piston backward, toward the shoulder of the shooter, in the split second before the bullet leaves the muzzle. The piston is integrated with a bolt carrier, and as this entire assembly moves backward it unlocks and withdraws the bolt from the chamber and extracts the empty cartridge case. As the bolt continues backward and clear of the chamber, the spring-loaded magazine, mounted at the bottom of the weapon, forces the next cartridge up and into place. The piston and bolt’s journey is meanwhile arrested by a return spring, which now, fully compressed, pushes the piston forward and seats the fresh cartridge snug in the chamber, where it is struck by the firing pin, restarting the cycle. The system is theoretically simple. In the AK-47, it was mechanically simple, too. To describe it today is to describe a well-known technology, like that of a lightbulb, a water pump, or the carburetor on a 1965 Ford. In late fall 1947, a weapon that could do these things reliably at this size was more than new. It was a product that fit the aspirations and carefully cultivated image of the Communist Party, and the army that served it, and the needs of soldiers in war.

  * * *

  The Kalashnikov prototype would still undergo fine-tuning, but it was now the clear front runner. It was both imperfect and special at once. What made it special? Later, after extensive testing and considerable refinement, its simplicity and its reliability would become known. But even before those results were understood, both as a mechanical device and as a combat firearm, it marked a profoundly smart compromise. Whenever an army sets out to choose a rifle, it faces choices, and many of the choices inherent in rifle design are difficult. It is easy to draw up specifications, a wish list of what a rifle might do. The ideal rifle for a nation’s combat forces would be a weapon with a long range, a high degree of accuracy, and knock-down power against any man the shooter could see. It would be eminently reliable in a variety of climates and field conditions, light in weight, and small in size, with an intuitive, ergonomic design that would make it easy to master and comfortable in the hand. Soldiers would be able to move quickly with it through confined spaces, as when entering and exiting an armored vehicle, running though a doorway, climbing through a window, or rushing through underbrush. It would also be able to be fired semiautomatically (one round at a time) for shooting precisely at distinct targets, or automatically (in bursts) for overpowering close-in targets and for delivering a high volume of bullets to suppress an area or enemy force. When fired, this rifle’s recoil (or “kick”) would be light. Its muzzle rise would be minimal, so that when fired automatically its bullets could be fired level to one another, and not move gradually upward, first over the target, and with subsequent rounds, even higher, into air. Moreover, the ideal rifle would be easy to take apart, simple to clean, and a cinch to reassemble—so well considered that a user could put it back together intuitively. Not only would it have few moving parts, it would have no small or fragile parts that might be lost or broken when servicing a rifle at night, or in the woods, or in combat. It would resist rust inside and out, and would not tend to seize up or become sluggish when dirty, blackened with carbon, or coated in sand or mud. All of these traits would make it an ideal device for the infantry, or for arming civilians for civil defense. But it would not be enough for a rifle to be perfect in field use. The nation would have preferences, too. The treasurer would want the weapon to be inexpensive and long-lasting, so as not to be replaced for many years. And the generals would ask that it be easy to manufacture, so that it could be available now and mass-produced quickly in the event of war.