Kalashnikov, the man, pushed on. He slowed in his eighties and yet remained active, even spry—a case of will and Cossack hardiness besting advanced age. In the weeks and months between trips, he split time between his apartment in Izhevsk’s center and a rustic but modern two-story dacha outside the city on a lake. He passed time with guests, often writing or listening to classical music; Tchaikovsky, he said, was a favorite.
His luck never quite turned. Many people tried to make money off him, and he became involved in private ventures, none of which proved lucrative. Local businessmen, backed by the government, borrowed his last name for a brand of vodka. But the Russian vodka market was as crowded as the international assault-rifle trade. The brand never captured market share. It filled store shelves in Izhevsk, but was almost unseen outside Udmurtia or the occasional duty-free shop, where it was packaged as overpriced kitsch. (One vodka offering at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow, in a bottle shaped like an AK-47, carried a price tag of 150 euros. The vodka inside was worth a few dollars, at most.)88 Kalashnikov’s family groused about business arrangements that provided small returns for Kalashnikov and profits for the vodka producers; ill feelings lurked beneath the surface. The designer himself all but sighed when discussing his experiences in business—a concept foreign to an elderly worker from a state enterprise. “I do it very poorly,” he said. “Private commercial interests were never realistic options for us.”[44]89 In interviews, he often downplayed the importance of money. “I am told sometimes, ‘If you had lived in the West, you would have been a millionaire long ago.’ Well, they value everything in that green stuff. But there are other values. Why don’t they see these values?”90 At other times, disappointment emerged. “Stoner has his own aircraft,” he said of the inventor of the M-16. “I can’t even afford my own plane ticket.”91
If his own security was precarious, that of the rifles was not. The Kalashnikov line retained its place in Russian military life and in larger society. Preconscription training in public schools did not fade away with the Soviet Union, though the Kremlin, first under Putin and again under Medvedev, insisted the nation was shifting to a volunteer military force. The old pattern became the new. Russian students continued to study the Kalashnikov at school, including gaining hands-on experience with the assault rifles as tenth and eleventh graders.92 By 2010, virtually every adult male in the nation less than seventy years old had handled Kalashnikov’s rifle and knew the designer’s storied name and official history.
What of his legacy? One element was beyond dispute. Whatever notoriety the AK-47 and its knock-offs realized, Kalashnikov the man would be sure to defend to the end his nostalgic ideas of Soviet days. He was fastidious, proud of labor, and attuned to the rituals of Slavic collegiality. In formal settings, he would drink small glasses of cognac and vodka, shot by shot, gamely making toasts and wishing his many well-wishers well. Russia might have suffered its many deteriorations. He would not let that be said of him. He insisted on neatness. In public he often produced a comb and fussed his white hair into place. In his home, he offered pickles and fresh kvass. He could be a bewitching host, a man with a smile alternately warm and mischievous, if at times he grew evasive or combative on the central subjects of his life.
And he could confound. In one interview, he suggested that it was a compliment for his family to have been selected by party commissars in Kurya for exile during collectivization. As Kalashnikov framed it, Stalin knew which families were hardy and resourceful enough to tame Siberia. He chose the Kalashnikovs to help build a greater Soviet Union.93 It was a sign of the dictator’s wisdom, in this view, that he had chosen so well.
In his Russian-language writing, Kalashnikov stood in many different places at once. He wrote of his desire for peace and communal friendship, and of the perspectives of common soldiers. He wrote of international bonds between people and of his respect for, and relationships with, foreign arms designers. He also expressed disdain for American craftsmanship and American consumer attitudes, and gave voice to his satisfaction that his weapons had stymied American military operations—a roundabout way of expressing satisfaction that his weapons had killed American troops.
Americans like to think that everything that is best is “Made in USA” and they would like very much that the period after World War Two would pass under the sign of their achievements and that “according to the law of the markets their American products would fly like a swarm.” Unfortunately, everything was the opposite. The second half of the twentieth century is marked by the fact that the Americans could not feel themselves absolutely unpunished either in Cuba or in Korea or in Vietnam or in tens of other places, which they believed were their zone of vital interests. And everywhere it was the AK that had a sobering effect on them.94
His zigzagging statements were unsurprising. He had lived a complicated life. With a complicated life came a complicated file—that of a survivor in a dystopia that first tormented his family, then championed him as a national hero. He presented a mass of ideas that cannot be squared.
Ultimately, Kalashnikov was left, by both his circumstances and his decisions, atop his contradictions. He clung to his mixed accounts of the rifle’s origins and insisted upon respect while speaking of his own humility. To one interviewer he said: “As for the star sickness, I do not have it.”95 Yet when a museum was built in his honor in Izhevsk,[45] it compared him, with seriousness, to Galileo, and in his dacha, on the stair landing leading to the second floor, he hung a large Central Asian carpet bearing an image of himself. These were not marks of modesty. Kalashnikov also claimed to have bitterly told President Boris N. Yeltsin in writing that a pistol Yeltsin had presented him was a “mediocre decoration” that “humiliated the President of Russia even more than it did me.”96 This in spite of the fact that Yeltsin had made an exception to army personnel policies that forbade the appointment of a general in peacetime and elevated Kalashnikov from the rank of colonel to general grade.97
The references to Galileo and the outbursts were significant. They underscored the most consistent qualities of Kalashnikov’s innumerable comments after the Communist Party’s fall: his pride of association with the AK-47 and his sense of extraordinary accomplishment. This was his real position. It sometimes flashed itself in starkly unconventional terms. “With arms you have to understand it is like the idea of a woman who bears children,” he said. “For months she carries a baby and thinks about it. The design work is similar. I felt like a mother—always happy when her baby achieves something.”98 He added: “I have always tried to knock down that annoying stereotype: if you are a weapons designer, you are a murderer…. For people in my profession, all that comes down to one notion: Motherland.”99 Ultimately, in the service of this position, he assembled carefully disconnected lines of thought. He sought credit for the rifle when it was put to uses he liked. He rejected the notion that he was in any way responsible for problems the rifles caused.
These positions made him much different from another renowned figure in Soviet arms design: Andrei D. Sakharov. Sakharov, one of the physicists who led the Soviet nuclear-arms program, had contributed to the successful detonation of RDS-1 outside Semipalatinsk in 1949 while Kalashnikov was involved in outfitting the gun works in Izhevsk. His later work was a cornerstone of the development of the hydrogen bomb. He was a giant in Soviet weapons programs, a three-time Hero of Socialist Labor—one of the rare Soviet men more decorated than Kalashnikov. By the mid-1960s, burdened by the moral responsibilities of his work, he urged an end to the arms race that had been the center of his professional and intellectual life. Sakharov dared to question the entire socialist world. In doing so he rejected its rewards and brought upon himself its wrath. He called for rapprochement with the West and the development of a pluralistic society rooted in human rights and free expression. The Soviet Union ordered him into internal exile and restricted his travels and his writing. In 1973, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, who had been the Soviet ambassador to Hungary durin
g the crackdowns in 1956, labeled him “a person involved in anti-social activity.”100 The world saw Sakharov differently. In 1975, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mikhail Kalashnikov was no Sakharov. But expectations of a Sakharov-style reorientation, implicit in the many questions he fielded over the years about what the AK-47 had become, were diversionary. For just as Kalashnikov was not the sole creator of the original AK-47, he was not responsible for the manufacture, distribution, or illicit use of the long line of derivative rifles that followed it. He was a midlevel player in a large system, and never its engine. The larger processes, globally and within Stalin’s military complex, were in motion long before he participated in them, and the Soviet Union was determined to produce, and would have produced, a simple and reliable assault rifle for mass production whether or not Kalashnikov had lent his energies to the pursuit. This was a far simpler task than creating an atomic bomb. And once this new rifle was made, it would have been standardized throughout the communist bloc, as were many other martial products of Soviet provenance.
For all of Kalashnikov’s unyielding insistence that he was accountable for nothing beyond being a gifted inventor, and for all of his moments of nationalism, he occasionally expressed remorse—at least at the rifle’s association with atrocity, crime, ethnic war, and terror. His regret at times sounded tactical. A prepared statement about the perils of illicit small-arms proliferation read in part like a capitalist’s complaint that other manufacturers had cut into Russia’s business. At other times his misgivings sounded genuine. “Do you think it’s pleasant seeing all of these hoodlums using your gun?” he once said, and then pointed to the post-Soviet war for Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed territory along the border between the two former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. “Armenians and Azeris killing each other. We all lived so peacefully before.” His memoirs touched difficult themes. “Arms makers have strange destinies!” he wrote. “They are saluted with shots they never expected, and it is not orations or music that remind one of jubilees but moans and screams.”101 These were hints at private pain. But almost always, after allowing such a tantalizing glimpse, he turned back to his fuller answers, the jumbled medley of a man whose name was attached to the world’s most common rifle, and a killing machine.
The constructor is not the owner of the weapon—it is the state. It does of course feel good when I know that many states used the arm. That something very worthy had been created… they spread the weapon not because I wanted them to. Not at my choice. I made it to protect the Motherland. Then it was like a genie out of the bottle and began to walk on its own in directions that I did not want. The positives have outweighed [the negatives] because many use it to defend their countries. The negative side is that sometimes it is beyond your control—terrorists also want to use simple and reliable arms.102
To this, on a summer day late in life, he added an answer to the victims, to men like Karzan Mahmoud, crippled by a terrorist carrying everyman’s gun. “I sleep soundly,” Kalashnikov said.
EPILOGUE
The Twenty-first Century’s Rifle
Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, early 2006
The fourteen Marines, ready to dash, waited for the signal. It was a cold February morning on a firing range just inland from North Carolina’s coast. The Marines, members of Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, were preparing for a deployment in the Anbar province of Iraq, and on this day they had set aside their M-4s and M-16s. In front of them, a short jog away, were fourteen Kalashnikov assault rifles, disassembled, unloaded, resting on the ground. At the signal, the Marines were to sprint to the rifles, reassemble them, perform a function check, load a magazine, and fire into a man-shaped target, aiming for the face and chest. Their rifles were a mix of Kalashnikov variants. They came from Romania, Russia, China, and North Korea. One was an original AK-47 from Izhevsk, assembled from solid machined steel, date-stamped 1954.1 It was fifty-two years old—almost three times the age of some of the men about to fire it.
The Corps had a nickname for this test: Just In Case. In the tour ahead for these Marines, their officers wanted to be sure that they could pick up a Kalashnikov, in any condition, whether from an allied Iraqi soldier or from an insurgent in a close-range fight, and use the weapon immediately and well. The signal was given. The Marines were sprinting. Thirty seconds or so later, the first of them were firing. Holes began to appear in their targets’ heads.
After almost six decades, the long travels of the Kalashnikov assault rifle had achieved the inevitable state: full saturation. Decades earlier the first AK-47s had left Soviet hands, and in the years since they had become the hand weapon of choice for strongmen, criminals, terrorists, and messianic guerrilla leaders. In time the Kalashnikov had also become a preferred arm for those who fought against the Soviet Union or Russia, and those who organized genocide. And now it was institutionalized in the training of American infantrymen. It could not, with all prudence, be any other way. In the battles ahead, every one of these Marines would encounter Kalashnikovs in the hands of allies and enemies alike. To see Marines prepare themselves around these simple facts, training with the signature socialist arm on one of the most prominent American military bases, was to grasp the extent of Kalashnikov saturation in modern war.
What does saturation mean? It would be naïve to think that war would stop without these weapons. It wouldn’t. It would be just as naïve to think that many of the consequences of war as it has been waged in recent decades might not be lessened if these rifles were in fewer hands, and not so available for future conflicts. For how long will battlefields be so? The answer is straightforward—as long as the rifles exist in the outsized numbers the Cold War left behind.
Much attention is paid to accountability, security, and destruction of potential materials for weapons of mass destruction. With lesser urgency and smaller budgets, efforts to secure and destroy antipersonnel land mines have become widely accepted. In the past decade or so, similar attention has been given to efforts to eliminate stocks of shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons, whose existence threatens the security of air transportation. The notion of regulating military firearms and destroying excess stockpiles enjoys much less support and faces considerable opposition, no matter that illicit uses of assault rifles have killed and wounded far more people than have all of these other weapons combined.
There are many reasons for this. Part of it is that surplus small arms are regarded as foreign-policy tools to be kept in reserve. Part of it is that to many government officials, honest and corrupt alike, surplus small arms are commodities, items to be converted to cash. Part of it is the manner in which priorities are set. Infantry arms that are loose in the field are exceedingly difficult to account for or collect. Surplus arms, locked up in armories, do not seem to cry for attention. Domestic and international politics play a role, too. The governments most responsible for the widespread distribution of military assault rifles—Russia, China, and the United States—have, for different reasons, shown little to no interest in destroying their excess weapons or those of other governments, even when they are not needed by standing military forces, and even when they endanger their own troops.
The United States has underwritten destruction programs. These have been small in ambition and scale, low in priority and funding, and undermined by official incoherence. Moreover, domestic politics in the United States have hindered any American government from trying to undo assault-rifle proliferation, at least as more than a backwater project. The climate of mutual distrust—between those who would seek to regulate and destroy more military assault rifles and those who claim that any such steps risk infringing the right of American citizens to bear arms—is of such an order that those who direct American foreign policy often steer clear of the issue. There is also a psychological hurdle. The near ubiquity of military assault rifles in conflict zones can send the subliminal signal that nothing can be done, except perhaps to arm more people against those who already
have the guns. This is a typical course. Where armed groups threaten a perceived American interest, a common solution is to send in more guns to counter them. In this way, the United States military, since 2001, became one of the largest known purchasers of Kalashnikov assault rifles, which it has handed out by the tens of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The processes of arms reduction are not completely idled. Some aspects of nonproliferation have broad international support, and certain procedural and legislative elements of trafficking control are here to stay. But the efforts are patchwork and are undermined by inattentive and uninterested governments, and by governments that actively flout the rules. Local successes have occurred. More successes remain possible. Diligent researchers and nongovernment groups, along with individual officers, can stop bad practices here and there. But there is little momentum and many loopholes, and there is little reason to think that on the grand scale much will be done to keep the flow of illegal infantry arms in check. The case of Leonid Minin, the Ukrainian-Israeli arms dealer arrested near Milan, illustrated the state of affairs. Caught with documents describing the illegal shipment of nearly fourteen thousand Kalashnikovs and 9 million rounds of ammunition, Minin was released from custody after Italian courts ruled that Italy had no jurisdiction over his black-market brokering activities elsewhere. He walked. Had he been convicted and remained in jail, the trade would have continued. Where assault rifles are wanted, recent history shows, they appear. They move across borders like any other contraband, like heroin or hashish, like illegal immigrants, almost like rain. They are liquid. Demand ensures supply.
The comparison to illicit drugs has its limits. Like narcotics, assault rifles are difficult to find, secure, and remove once they have been distributed within a population. Unlike narcotics, they are not consumable. They remain in their users’ possession, sometimes for decades. From 2001 through 2009, it was possible to find Kalashnikov assault rifles in Afghanistan bearing manufacturing stamps from as far back as 1953.2 These were some of the very first AK-47s made. They had been forged, machined, and assembled nearly six decades before in Izhevsk. If they had been accompanied by log books revealing the names of those who had carried them, each would likely tell of years in the hands of Soviet conscripts, then of a period of reissue to the Soviet Union’s Afghan forces. They survived from there, in militias and caches, until they resurfaced in the hands of the current generation of Afghan police officers and soldiers, the proxies of the United States, alongside Kalashnikovs that originated in arms plants throughout the former communist bloc—Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Russia, China, and elsewhere. The wooden stocks of these most aged AK-47s showed dents and dings. Otherwise most of these rifles appeared to be in excellent order, ready to fire for decades more.
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