The Gun

by C. J. Chivers

  Such a rifle does not exist. It probably never will. There are many reasons for this, but they all come down to compromises. In choosing one feature, designers eliminate other traits. Take muzzle velocity, which is an element of effective range. The instant a bullet departs a rifle’s muzzle, gravity and the environment work on it, and it begins to decelerate and to drop. To achieve the high velocities required for long range, barrels must be long enough for a bullet to build up speed. In this manner, they depart the muzzle at such velocity, say twenty-five hundred or more feet per second, that they do not drop significantly over the course of two hundred or three hundred yards. But as barrel length increases, more steel is used, and the rifle becomes heavier, more cumbersome, and more expensive. Want a rifle that has long range and loads itself between shots? Adding such features adds complexity. A manually loaded bolt-action rifle can be as straightforward in construction as in use. Self-loading abilities require new components, and choices of gas tubes, springs, pistons, and rods. Add automatic fire, and the rifle needs some sort of selector switch that lets the shooter choose between settings: safe, semi, and automatic. And adding automatic fire means that the rifle will be subjected to more strain and much more heat. This requires a stronger, heavier design to withstand these burdens and remain reliable and safe. This will drive up weight and costs, too.

  Until World War II, when rifles were designed, they were designed to have some, but not all, of these traits. Then came the breakthrough couples—the 7.92 Kurz and the sturmgewehr, followed by the M1943 cartridge and the Kalashnikov design bureau’s final prototype. As compromises go, these cartridges and rifles represented a pair of design feats. And after the German models fell out of production, their Soviet offspring appeared. Like the 7.92 Kurz, the M1943 claimed the largely uncharted ballistic territory between pistol and rifle rounds. But it cheated a little toward the rifle. And the AK-47 prototype took its place between the submachine gun and the traditional infantry rifle. But it cheated toward the submachine gun in size and weight. The result was a weapon that had the necessary firepower within the ranges at which most combat occurred, and yet was, at last, light enough to be carried by one man, along with a robust load of ammunition. The numbers made it clear. Rifles often were too big for the full range of uses. The Russian semiautomatic rifles in the Great Patriotic War, designed by Tokarev, exceeded four feet in length and weighed nearly nine pounds unloaded. The M1 Garand, the standard American infantry arm in World War II, exceeded forty-three inches and weighed almost ten pounds. Submachine guns were of a welcome size, but lacked range. The PPSh was thirty-three inches long and weighed eight pounds. The early American Thompson gun was almost a yard long and weighed nearly eleven pounds; a later form shed almost two inches but still came in heavy, at ten pounds and nine ounces. The Kovrov design bureau’s final prototype was just over thirty-four inches long and weighed slightly more than eight pounds—it was, at a glance, a weapon the size of a submachine gun that had much of a rifle’s power.

  More than four years after the introduction of the M1943 cartridge, at last came time for the final field trials for an automatic weapon that would fire it. Tests began in NIPSMVO in mid-December 1947. Evaluating a proposed infantry rifle is an intensive process, typically involving engineering examinations, a series of firing tests for durability, accuracy, and reliability, and troop trials examining ergonomics and ease of use. The ballistics of the rifle and cartridge combination are also studied, including the so-called terminal ballistics—the effects the rounds have on objects they strike, from a wooden board to a car windshield to various parts of the human body, which can be determined, to a degree, by shooting large live mammals (adult pigs are a favorite; goats have often been used) or human cadavers.111 Rifles are subjected to extreme cold and heat, and subjected to firing courses at various ranges and rates of fire. Some weapons face lengthy firing drills while slicked with excessive lubricant, others with no lubricant at all.112 Testers try to break prototypes, and submit others to such extended firing, without rest or time to cool, that barrels can melt and wooden stocks can smolder, even burst into flames.113 Kalashnikov has provided few details over the years of the engineering testing of the weapon, and scant other details have been made public, though Western technical intelligence officials would conduct engineering tests on Kalashnikov rifles in the 1950s and early 1960s after defecting Soviet soldiers were dispossessed of their arms as they slipped through the Iron Curtain.114 Parts of the environmental testing have been shared.

  At NIPSMVO, the loaded rifles were submerged for long periods in swamp water, then expected to fire. Then came the “sand bath,” with each rifle dragged through ash, broken bricks, and fine sand—first by the barrel, then by the stock—until the rifles were filthy and every opening in the weapon was clogged. “After that, without any sort of cleaning… they were fired,” Kalashnikov said.115 Again uncertainties stalked the designer. “Despite myself, I began to doubt that further shooting would proceed without failures,” he wrote. Zaitsev consoled him. The prototype fired almost flawlessly. “Look, look,” Zaitsev said, during one course of fire. “The sand is flying in all directions, like a dog shaking off water—look.”116 This was the result of two design choices: loose fit and massive operating parts.

  The weapons were subjected to extreme cold in a special chamber. Kalashnikov said the weapons were also exposed to salt water to determine how they would withstand its corrosive effects. The AK-47 proved more reliable than the others, though accuracy remained a Soviet army concern. “The advantages of my modification were blindingly obvious,” he said. “I was jubilant.”117 Next the weapon was dropped from heights onto a concrete floor so it would land on its barrel, then its stock. The weapon survived and functioned normally afterward. For assessing terminal ballistics, Kalashnikov said, the rifles were fired at dead animals. The soldiers requested vodka for this duty, Kalashnikov added; this was considered an unpleasant task.

  Tests continued until January 11, 1948.118 The results were presented to a thirteen-member technical and scientific commission, which decided Kalashnikov’s avtomat most closely fulfilled the requirements of the 1945 order. Mikhail Kalashnikov’s submission had won. It was not without flaws, and needed much follow-on work, which would be assigned to other engineers. But it was an acceptable descendant of the sturmgewehr. As the news was released, an assistant rushed to Kalashnikov. “Today you must dance, Mikhail Timofeyovich,” he said. “The Avtomat Kalashnikova has been accepted as the standard weapon.”119 The AK-47, a rifle that had existed only for weeks, was heading for production.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Breakout: The Mass Production, Distribution, and Early Use of the AK-47

  K. Marx and F. Engels taught that in order to win victory over the class enemies the proletariat had to be armed, organized and disciplined. A resolute rebuff had to be given to any attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie to disarm it.

  —Andrei A. Grechko, Soviet minister of defense1

  THE AK-47 ARRIVED TO A TIME AND GEOPOLITICAL SITUATION like no other. Through technical intelligence and the dedication of enormous resources, Stalin’s military had developed a firearm with promise to be the standard weapon for legions of socialist workers and peasants. A working prototype of a compact automatic rifle had been made that was well suited for most uses in modern war and could be readily mastered by conventional conscripts and violent revolutionaries alike. Yet the assault rifle’s practical merits do not explain the proliferation that followed. The AK-47 was not to break out globally because it was well conceived and well made, or because it pushed Soviet small-arms development ahead of the West.2 Technical qualities did not drive socialist arms production. It was the other way around. Soviet military policies mixed with Kremlin foreign-policy decisions to propel the output that made the AK-47 and its knock-offs available almost anywhere. Were it not for this more complicated set of circumstances, the AK-47 would have been a less significant weapon, an example of an evolutionary leap in automa
tic arms that became one nation’s principal infantry rifle. Mikhail Kalashnikov would have remained an obscure figure, a man with a surname—like that of Schmeisser or Garand—recognized by specialists, not as an informal global brand.

  In the long history of automatic arms and their roles in war, there were periods when everything changed. In the 1860s, Richard Gatling began selling the first rapid-fire arms that worked well enough for battle. His guns offered small or isolated military detachments a one-sided advantage in colonial actions. In the 1880s, Hiram Maxim contributed an awesomely lethal efficiency when he invented the first truly automatic gun and peddled it in Europe’s officer courts. From 1916 through 1918 machine guns became common to all modern ground forces, at terrible cost to men led by officers whose tactics had not kept pace with the instruments of war. Then came the Soviet Union and the design stimuli resulting from World War II. From 1943 to the early 1960s, and centered on the 1950s, automatic arms reached an evolutionary end state. Everything changed once more. In the 1950s, socialist assault rifles gained international acceptance, and the sprawling infrastructure for their mass production in multiple countries was created and set in motion. The developments were often subtle and seemingly unrelated—a technical decision here by one entity, a political decision there by another. The result, as decisions accumulated, was an improved AK-47 and assembly lines opening in one nation, then another, while these weapons began to show up in battle, first as rarities, then curiosities, and then almost everywhere.

  What fueled proliferation? Two larger phenomena drove the AK-47’s spread from the secrecy of Schurovo to near ubiquity in conflict zones. They can be distilled into categories: the Kremlin under Stalin, and the Kremlin under Khrushchev. Viewed through the prism of the Soviet Union’s industrial psychology, Stalin was the AK-47’s creator, the impatient dictator whose engineers conjured to existence weapons of all kinds, and whose arms plants perfected and assembled them at a hurried pace. This phenomenon predated the development of the gun. The same forces that led to the avtomat’s creation predicted a certain degree of its abundance, even—perhaps especially—during a time when Kalashnikov-producing nations lagged in producing consumer goods. The assault rifle was a priority product in the planned economy of Stalin’s police state, which saw itself under threat and was preparing for inevitable war. The emphasis on fielding assault rifles fit neatly into the larger pattern. As the Soviet Union expanded its nuclear arms programs, it overhauled its conventional equipment and engaged in arms races with the West across an array of items: attack aircraft, submarines, radar systems, tanks. Cold War urgency pressed Soviet engineers to improve the AK-47 and its follow-on arms and rush them to mass production. Production was linked to the strength, even the survival, of the state. All the while, as the force of Stalin’s personality and the particulars of his fears gave rise to the Soviet assault-rifle industry, the world was being divided into camps. The AK-47 emerged in time to become the principal firearm of one of them. These historical pressures forged the AK-47 into something more than a mere defense product; it was a national, then an international, requirement. But even Stalin could not last forever. Someone else would send the rifles around the world. Nikita S. Khrushchev, who would replace him, became the Kremlin’s arms dealer, the man whose government passed the weapons out and whose decisions would serve to expand assault-rifle production to outsized levels.

  In the mid-1950s, while the Soviet Union staggered out of Stalin’s reign, the Kremlin was in a unique position. It was both the world’s standard bearer for socialism and a nation with the military power to help fraternal nations with their armament desires. Soviet arms became a form of Soviet political currency. Nations queued up, seeking their share, as did revolutionary groups, and, later, terrorist organizations. As the AK-47 gained acceptance and approval in the Soviet army, the Kremlin used it as a readily deliverable tool in the game of East-West influence jockeying, both as a diplomatic chip to secure new friendships and as an item to be distributed to those willing to harass or otherwise occupy the attention of the West. The trends gave energy to each other. As AK-47 production gathered momentum, the Kremlin also began pursuing a more activist foreign policy, and this policy shift encouraged the distribution of more military technology, for reasons practical and political. On the practical side, convincing allies and potential allies to select Soviet equipment expanded standardization. By circulating Soviet patterns across the contested world, Kremlin arms deals made interoperability with Soviet troops easier in the event of future wars and as notions of socialist revolution spread. This was an especially useful pursuit for cartridges and firearms, those most basic tools of war. Standardization also made client states accept that in the event of their own local wars, they would need to be resupplied via the Kremlin. The result was a logistical and psychological arrangement that created dependencies serving Kremlin interests. On the political side, sharing military technology cemented allies and made new friends for the Kremlin, all the while helping to frustrate the West. Clients and customers brought an intangible benefit, too. Foreign acceptance of Russian firearms created the impression that Soviet equipment was preferable to Western military products. For a nation that struggled to manufacture decent elevators and shoes, in a system in which wool shirts were not necessarily wool, approval of a Soviet weapon served as a refreshing endorsement of an industrial base often making shoddy goods.3

  For all of these reasons, the period centered on the 1950s marked the most important years for the Kalashnikov line. The weapon had been developed. Now it would be debugged, and the man credited for its invention would be given public stature and material rewards and would be regarded as a proletarian hero—the role he would live for decades. The infrastructure would be built to manufacture the assault rifle across the socialist world, and the Russian assault rifle would see its first combat use—both by conventional forces and by insurgents. The United States military, all the while, would misjudge the meaning and significance of the AK-47’s arrival. Beyond dismissing the value of the socialists’ main firearm with parochial superiority, it would develop weapons for its own forces that would fail when it mattered most, losing one of the most important but least-chronicled arms races of the Cold War.

  For the initial step in these processes, the Soviet army had to organize a base of domestic production, first to improve the AK-47’s design and then to equip its combat divisions. The avtomat was a standout compromise firearm, but like all compromises it was not perfect—not at all. The prototypes had flaws, and initial production proved problematic without extensive fine-tuning and a few major changes. In 1948 the army ordered rifles for field trials to be assembled in Izhevsk, one of the country’s rifle-manufacturing centers.4 The accounts of when this occurred vary. By one, Mikhail Kalashnikov said that in January 1948, the day after the announcement of the AK-47’s victory at Schurovo, he and a small team were transferred to the Izhevsk Motor Plant No. 524, which was officially manufacturing motorcycles.5 Izhevsk was an isolated industrial city almost six hundred miles east of Moscow, a community closed to most outsiders, hemmed off by dense forests and Russian suspicions. It had been a center of rifle production since czarist times. During the revolution, the gun works had gone over to Lenin and his party and helped arm Trotsky’s new forces. If socialism promised a grand new order of workers’ rule and higher living standards, it did not happen here. Izhevsk was a dingy factory town, with block upon block of bland apartment buildings surrounding factories belching dark smoke. The Orthodox church at the city’s center had been converted into a movie house. The brick-walled gun works, near the shore of a cold polluted lake, was sealed off by foreboding iron fences. A nearby steel plant kept it fed. Far from Moscow and Leningrad, this drab milieu was to be Kalashnikov’s new home.6