Beria’s last breath was not far off. He was tried in the fashion he would recognize: in secret, on largely fabricated charges, before a court that offered no appeal. After the verdict on December 23 he was blindfolded, gagged, and shot.29
The events of 1953 allowed the Kremlin to reconsider its role at the international socialist vanguard. The changes—first in personnel, then policies—were integral to the assault rifle’s spread. Khrushchev became general secretary in the autumn, inheriting both the foreign-policy portfolio and the military-industrial complex. He grasped ways the two could be linked.
One early challenge was in institutionalizing security arrangements in the European buffer zone. In World War II, the Soviet military had moved onto foreign territory previously under German occupation and become the region’s premier military power. During the war the Red Army equipped and trained fighting units in Eastern Europe that became foundations for new national armies, all subordinate to Soviet command. For the Cold War’s opening years, such relationships were sufficient for the Kremlin. But in 1949, Western powers had formed NATO and sponsored the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Kremlin replied by founding the German Democratic Republic on the portion of Germany under Soviet occupation. Moves and countermoves continued. In 1955, West Germany joined NATO. The Kremlin’s parallel step would stoke assault-rifle proliferation in ways that persist: It bound its satellites together into a mutual-defense agreement of its own, the Warsaw Pact. The treaty was signed by eight nations—the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—in May 1955. Its initial significance was retaliatory and symbolic, a tit-for-tat escalation. In the event of armed attack on any one member, the others agreed to come to the attacked nation’s aid. The parties also declared, in a bit of doublespeak boilerplate, that they would strive for “effective measures for universal reduction of armaments.” The armaments buildup was actually just about to begin, spurred by the treaty’s fifth article, in which the members accepted a unified command.30 In fall 1955, when the details of the command were circulated via a top-secret memorandum from Moscow, the commander’s deputies were instructed that they would be responsible for supplying “military items, in accordance with accepted systems of armaments.”31 The language referred to Soviet-pattern weapons, including the most common weapons of all—cartridges and firearms. The instructions formalized the idea of standardizing equipment in the Eastern bloc, a concept that became a Warsaw Pact cornerstone. The goal became:
…constant modernization of weapons and combat equipment and the development of new and more sophisticated prototypes of weaponry. The Soviet Union plays a leading role here. Possessing a powerful military-economic potential and scientific-technological base, it gives the necessary assistance to fraternal countries in strengthening their defensive might. Not only direct deliveries of new types of weapons and combat equipment are made, but also licenses and technical documentation are transferred for their production. Joint scientific research and test-design work is conducted, and scientific-technological consultations are widely employed.
The Soviet state plays a large role in the creation and development of the defense industry in the fraternal countries. One of the important ways for coordinating military-technical policy is to standardize weapons and combat equipment of the allied armies, which simplifies their materialtechnical support in case of military operations.32
In this way, most Eastern bloc soldiers would carry the same weapons,33 which fired the same ammunition, thereby streamlining production and training while reducing the expenditure of research-and-design energy for weapons that had already met the state’s standards. This made military sense, albeit for a war that never came. Looked upon years later, a different result is obvious: The political and industrial groundwork for overcapacity in assault-rifle production had been laid. Plants producing AK-47s, their derivatives, and the ammunition they fired were sponsored and subsidized in Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. These countries not only would arm their military and security services with them, but would become assault-rifle exporters. Dangerous rules applied. The assault rifle was a socialist military product. Its production, sale, and distribution were not controlled by market forces. They were connected to centralized decisions and national goals. The fine print of the Warsaw Pact had put the Kalashnikov assault rifle at the center of a socialist arms franchise, an example of the law of unintended consequences viewed through the prism of the Cold War. Production would surge under the the unified command’s directives. And the bloc’s members would provide arms for conflicts long after their alliance was no more, extending the treaty’s influence beyond the region in indelible ways.
Under Khrushchev, the Kremlin also distributed arms and arms technology beyond its European vassals. There were two principal types of arrangements: first, direct transfers of finished goods, and later the transfer of licenses and technical specifications to produce them. In September 1955, within months of the Warsaw Pact’s signing ceremony, Khrushchev had discovered the political practicality of the arms industry and the new alliance, too. Using Czechoslovakia as a cover, the Kremlin organized a huge arms sale to Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.34 The deal included tanks, airplanes, artillery, and Czech small arms, and equipped Egyptian forces for war with the young Israeli state. It also thrust the Kremlin into Middle Eastern brinksmanship, putting it into competition with the West and presaging arms deals with Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere.
As Khrushchev’s agents closed his deal with Nasser, the Soviet army was arranging for the first arms plant outside Russia to manufacture AK-47s. The plant, an urgent project for China, had origins reaching to a secret collaboration between Stalin and Mao. In late May 1951, Xu Xiangqian, chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army, had led a delegation to Moscow. Mao’s victory over the Kuomintang, the party of Chiang Kai-shek, and the founding of the People’s Republic of China had reinforced Stalin’s almost religious conviction of the allure of socialism and global revolution. The Chinese wanted to update their arms industry. The Soviet Union was the natural source. There was precedent. Soviet arms technicians had surreptitiously helped Mao’s arms production since at least 1949, even while the Kremlin maintained diplomatic ties with the Kuomintang. In the summer of 1949, a senior Chinese revolutionary, Liu Shaoqi, who later became China’s head of state, secretly traveled to Russia, where he met Stalin and appealed for help in arming the People’s Liberation Army. The Soviet Union sent two hundred technicians to assist the effort, including eighty who rode back to Manchuria on the same train with the Chinese delegation. This was part of a slyly hedged Kremlin bet to put the Soviet Union in the winner’s camp. In November 1950, as the Korean War was accelerating, Mao asked Stalin for a long list of weapons for the war, including more than 140,000 rifles, 9,000 machine guns, and 1,000 pistols for pilots. Within two days, Stalin personally approved a list. In August 1951, Mao sought more aid, enough to arm as many as sixty divisions. The Soviet army agreed to provide specifications for eight weapons, including Mosin-Nagant rifles, 82-millimeter mortars, machine guns, pistols, and an antiaircraft gun. Documents were transferred and a Russian delegation traveled to China for at least four months, to outfit plants and train workers. By 1953, production had begun, and cooperation expanded to include artillery and tanks. The AK-47 was still in its earliest production runs; the Soviet army did not initially share the specifications.
Four years later, under Khrushchev, the impetus for Chinese production of Kalashnikov-pattern rifles began, by one account, with a minor diplomatic jolt. In June 1955 a Chinese delegation toured the arms plant in Tula, where China’s second machinery minister, General Zhao Erlu, saw Slavic laborers producing the SKS. The minister was furious. The only data for rifles provided in 1951, by this account, had been for the M-44 Mosin-Nagant rifle, a weapon based on designs that were decades old. China wanted newer guns. Negotiations resumed. The Soviet army promptly agreed to share th
e technology behind the M1943 cartridge and both rifles that fired it—the SKS and the AK-47.35 (Another Chinese account described a less dramatic transfer of SKS and AK-47 technology. In this version, as part of Khrushchev’s courting of China early in his tenure as general secretary, the Soviet military offered the technical specifications for the two rifles, beginning with an exchange of letters in early 1955. The AK-47, by this account, was offered as a replacement to the PPSh, which the Chinese had been manufacturing with Soviet approval for several years.) This much is clear: Production of the Type 56, the first Chinese version of the AK-47, began in a blandly named arms plant, Factory 626, in Beian.
Khrushchev had moved quickly. At the time of Stalin’s funeral, the AK-47 had been made only in Izhevsk. Three years later, with the beginning of Chinese production, the world’s two largest military forces had parallel assembly lines. By 1958, the Kremlin would share AK-47 technology with North Korea. The Soviet Union’s escalating military aid to Egypt would then expand to tool a Kalashnikov plant there. Between these deals and the rolling openings of assault-rifle assembly lines in the Warsaw Pact[16] the Kremlin had ensured production of the Kalashnikov at a scale no other firearm had ever seen. The next questions were not industrial or political. They were tactical. How would the assault rifle be used?
The armored column growled through the streets of Budapest and came to a stop in Boráros Square, idling near the eastern embankment of the Danube River. Leading the formation were six Soviet tanks, including three T-54s, the most powerful tank the Soviet Union had yet made. Behind them were armored personnel carriers, bitterly known as “open coffins,” in which Hungarian soldiers had been crowded against the better judgment of their commanders, who worried for their lives. These vehicles were followed by more tanks still.36 This was an assault group staging to attack. Their objective would not be easy. Several blocks away, behind dense rows of buildings and warrens of narrow streets, stood the Corvin Theater, an insurgent stronghold. It was the morning of October 28, 1956. The armed popular uprising in Hungary was entering its sixth day.
The Hungarian fighters waiting to meet the column’s advance hid in four- and five-story buildings, watching from windows to the streets below, waiting for whatever came next.37 Circumstances had transformed them into impromptu urban fighters. They had seen enough of Hungarian state terror and Soviet occupation to turn out spontaneously, an unanticipated force that had leaped onto the world’s stage. Some were not yet old enough to shave. Others were veterans who had been Soviet prisoners of war. The adults came largely from the workers’ ranks.38 Together they formed a hard-nosed group: clean-cut, lean, rugged, intent. The weather was chilly by day in Budapest in midfall; the nights cold. Rebels wandered their turf in trench coats, lending them a sartorially proper air. One worker fought with a bowler on his head. He had found it in the rubble. After he brushed off the brick dust, it became a whimsically unforgettable highlight to his rebel dress.39 Though many insurgents were spread throughout Budapest, the Corvinists, as they were called, were among the most daring and determined of the lot. Their stubbornness made them a priority. Soviet generals and Hungarian hard-liners wanted to crush them as a lesson for the rest. But how? The area was an urban trap. Most of the neighborhood’s buildings were constructed of thick stone and highly defendable. Within them the Hungarians had selected shooting positions from which they could pour out interlocking cones of fire. The Kilián Barracks—a fortress—stood nearby, and rebels took positions here as well, expanding their zone of control. Details had been tended to. To give warning of approaching threats, the rebels had posted spotters on rooftops. They had organized medical care and a field kitchen. They had made a jail for captured troops. They had assembled obstacles and barricades on the streets, so that fighting vehicles would have to slow down and pick their way through tight passages, exposing them to attack.40 They placed cooking pans on the pavement to resemble mines, a trick to frustrate the tanks more. At the theater’s doorway, the Corvinists had an artillery piece.41
For the fight against the massing troops, the Corvinists had gathered arms. Some carried a Mosin-Nagant rifle or a PPSh submachine gun taken from government stocks. Others brandished pistols. This was not an especially impressive suite of small arms for an army in 1956. For a guerrilla force in existence for less than a week, it was a feat. And the insurgents were blessed by convenience: A gas station was located near the theater, providing fuel for Molotov cocktails19—bottles filled with gasoline and adorned with a wick to be lit before being thrown. When the glass shattered, the wick ignited the gasoline in a whooshing blaze. In the Corvinists’ kill zones, charred vehicles littered the streets. Dozens of soldiers had died. Now they waited for the next thrust. Soviet generals had ordered an advance in two prongs, ending with tanks blasting at the theater as the infantry stormed forward, finishing the insurrection at last.
In the story of the assault rifle, the mid-1950s brought milestones: the AK-47’s combat debuts. The first known use of the AK-47 outside of tests and exercises was in East Germany in 1953, when Soviet divisions put down a smaller and less-organized uprising in Berlin. But in 1953 the assault rifle had yet to be issued to Soviet forces in large quantities. It was not abundant. Three years on, as insurgents in Budapest gathered their bottled gas and looted guns, thousands of the Soviet Union’s frontline soldiers carried AK-47s into Hungarian neighborhoods. The newsreel footage of soldiers flowing into the capital, new rifles in hand, framed events to be repeated by centralized regimes for decades. They were a myth-buster. One point at the center of Soviet and Russian statements about the assault rifle and the immense industrial capacity behind it, and fundamental to Mikhail Kalashnikov’s descriptions of his life’s purpose and work, was that the AK-47 was made for national defense and distributed later as a liberation tool. These are the oft-repeated lines. Against this fable, the weapons’ premieres in Berlin and Budapest served as more than chronological markers. They informed a fuller understanding of the AK-47 and the political system that circulated it. The AK-47 was christened with blood not as a tool for liberation or to defend the Soviet Union from invaders. It made its debut smashing freedom movements. It was repression’s chosen gun, the rifle of the occupier and the police state.
The beginning established a pattern. The Kalashnikov was rarely a Soviet weapon of defense. It was to be the weapon of East German border guards who shot unarmed civilians fleeing for the West, and the firearm used in the state-directed violence against demonstrations and uprisings before the Soviet Union finally tottered and fell. It would be used in Prague, in Alma-Ata, in Baku, in Riga, and in Moscow. It would see crackdown service repeatedly in other strong-arm states—at Tiananmen Square in China, in Andijon in Uzbekistan, and Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan—almost any place where a government resorted to shooting citizens to try to keep citizens in check. It would be used by Baathists to execute Kurds in the holes that served as their mass graves. It would shoot the Bosnian men and boys who were herded to execution in Srebrenica in 1995. But this was all so obvious that it barely deserves elaboration, save as a corrective to the authorities’ distortions. The fight for Hungary had another value. The Kremlin’s image tenders could influence the conversation about their nation’s actions and the supposed purposes of its arms. They could not control the ways that war and violence actually worked. There would be too many Kalashnikovs for their uses to be determined, much less fully obscured, by the centralized states that made them. Once Soviet soldiers drove into Budapest the omen appeared, the hint of what was in store. No sooner had the AK-47 been carried into combat than it became the rebels’ arm, too.
Like the way power and personalities had changed in Moscow, the violence in Budapest in 1956 said much about the Soviet system. The Kremlin had a clear-eyed view of the hardships in Hungary. Since 1953, the leadership of the Communist Party had discussed in detail the ways its policies had failed the Hungarians, and how the national government it backed had alienated the nation. The Kremlin chose to crush
the popular uprising nonetheless, worrying less about Hungary than about the prospect of losing a nation in the socialist camp, or appearing weak.
Hungary had been under Soviet occupation since the end of World War II. The country was ruled through much of the period by a dictator, Mátyás Rákosi, who was propped up by the Kremlin and applied the tools of state terror wholesale. Repression, Rákosi-style, took pages from Stalin’s book: a sadistic secret police force, labor camps, kulak lists, show trials, executions. Religion was suppressed. Single-party rule was established. The dictator was unchallenged. Stalin and Rákosi forced Hungary through a program of industrialization, collectivization, and militarization. Sovietization deepened popular resentment and shifted part of the hatred for Rákosi toward Moscow. Three months after Stalin’s death, the party summoned Rákosi to the Kremlin and spelled out Hungary’s wretchedness with exactitude. Beria denounced Rákosi to his face while referring to him in a chilling third person. “It is not right that Comrade Rákosi gives directions regarding who must be arrested; he says who should be beaten,” he said. (Beria himself was to be arrested within two weeks, on orders of the comrades in the room.)42 Vyacheslav Molotov, the foreign minister, extended the line, describing a nation paralyzed. He questioned, if only rhetorically, whether socialism in this form was better than what it had replaced.
They initiated a persecution against 1,500,000 people in a population with 4.5 million adults in three and a half years. There were 1,500,000 violations in this time. They punish for everything, and punish insignificant acts arbitrarily… they resort to all kinds of manipulations to ensure a forced industrial development. For instance there was [only] 57% wool in a particular fabric. They left the name and price of the material, but they took the wool out of it. They significantly worsened the quality of milk. This resembles fraud. They have lost contact with the population, they do not express the interest of the population in many questions. Is this why we chased the bourgeoisie away, so that afterward the situation would be like this?43
The Gun Page 27