The Gun
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103. Pravda.Ru, a Russian news site, published its version on August 2, 2003, thirteen years after Lyuty died.
104. Vlasyuk, Zerkalo Nedeli.
105. Personal communication to author from Maksim R. Popenker.
106. Kalashnikov with Joly, The Gun that Changed the World, p. 65.
107. Small Arms World Report, December 1992, pp. 7–8.
108. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, pp. 225–26.
109. In 1989, according to the transcript of their interview, Kalashnikov told Ezell he met Degtyarev during his early work at NIPSMVO, when Kalashnikov was still “a single country bumpkin.” Small Arms World Report, December 1992, p. 6.
110. Zhukov, Second Birth, pp. 146–47.
111. Ronald F. Bellamy and Russ Zajtchuk, “Chapter 3: The Evolution of Wound Ballistics: A Brief History,” Textbook of Military Medicine, Part 1: Warfare, Weaponry and the Casualty Conventional Warfare: Ballistic, Blast and Burn Injuries (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 1989), pp. 83–106.
112. Sergeyev, Tekhnika i Vooruzheniye, p. 27.
113. Robert H. Clagett, Jr, “How the Infantry Tests a Rifle,” American Rifleman, October 1953, pp. 27–30. Clagett, a major, was a test officer for Army Field Forces No. 3 at Fort Benning, Georgia.
114. G. E. Hendricks, “Test Results Report on AK-47,” November 7, 1962, Report No. DPS-800, to U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, and “Trial Report Soviet Machine Carbine 7.62mm Kalashnikov (AK),” August 1958, from the G-2 to the Netherlands General Staff. The Dutch report is on file at the Leger museum in Delft.
115. Small Arms World Report, December 1992, p. 7.
116. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, p. 231.
117. Kalashnikov with Joly, The Gun that Changed the World, p. 66.
118. Malimon, Otechestvenniye Avtomaty, chapter 9. Kalashnikov has written that tests ended on January 10.
119. Novikov, from Volksarmee.
6. The Breakout: The Mass Production, Distribution, and Early Use of the AK-47
1. A. A. Grechko, The Armed Forces of the Soviet State: A Soviet View (Moscow: Ministry of Defense of the U.S.S.R., 1975). Translated and published by the U.S. Air Force, pp. 6–7.
2. Such reasoning has anchored popular assessments of the Kalashnikov line. The conventional wisdom runs like this: The AK-47 is an excellent and almost failsafe assault rifle, therefore it is ubiquitous. This is insufficient.
3. This sentiment informs Russian pride in Russian firearms to this day. Russia cannot point to a wide range of industrial successes. Against this background, the AK-47 and its related arms are Russian products that actually work.
4. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, p. 234.
5. Kalashnikov with Joly, The Gun that Changed the World, p. 70.
6. Val Shilin and Charlie Cutshaw, Legends and Reality of the AK: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the History, Design, and Impact of the Kalashnikov Family of Weapons (Boulder, Co.: Paladin Press, 2000), p. 28. There is no question that Kalashnikov, by mid-1948, began work here. But sources other than Kalashnikov point to a roundabout route, and say he first worked in Tula and Kovrov, but was unsatisfied with his professional life at both places, perhaps because of competition with other designers. (Bulkin, Simonov, and Tokarev worked at Tula, Degtyarev in Kovrov.)
7. Malimon, Otechestvenniye Avtomaty, Chapter 10.
8. Ibid.
9. Shilin and Cutshaw, Legends and Reality of the AK, p. 28.
10. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, pp. 247–51. The dates here shift in Kalashnikov’s multiple tellings; he said the meeting was in 1944, when Kalashnikov was working at Kovrov. But in 1944 Kalashnikov was not yet working on the AK-47, and was not yet assigned to Kovrov.
11. Kalashnikov with Joly, The Gun that Changed the World, p. 74.
12. This work fell to Valery Kharkov. Malimon, Otechestvenniye Avtomaty, Chapter 12.
13. Malimon, Otechestvenniye Avtomaty, Chapter 11, translation by Michael Schwirtz. Other changes were driven by economic concerns, including substituting expensive materials used on the prototypes with less expensive materials better suited for cost-conscious mass production. A few changes were minor: The screw fixtures in the stock and near the barrel were replaced with stronger fittings. The accessory panel at the butt plate, which provided access inside the stock for storing small items, such as rifle-cleaning materials, was changed to be similar to that of a carbine designed by Evgeny Dragunov, another Soviet armorer. One change was to an accessory: Because it could fire automatically, the AK-47 built up more heat than most of the rifles and carbines that preceded it. A steel clip was added to the shoulder strap to prevent it from burning where it came into contact with the barrel.
14. For data on its imprecision, see the ballistic studies performed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, including G. E. Hendricks, “Test Results on AK-47 Rifle,” published on November 7, 1962, and filed as Report #DPS-800.
15. Dmitri Shirayev, “Who Invented the Automatic Kalashnikov?” Soldat Udachi (Soldier of Fortune), Moscow, September 2000, pp. 30–34.
16. Personal communication to author in July 2009 from Norbert Moczarski, a German biographer of Schmeisser. Almost twenty years after the end of the Soviet Union, Schmeisser’s activities at the time of the AK-47’s development remain shrouded. There is no question of his presence in Izhevsk during the 1950s. But the Soviet archives have not been opened to allow an examination of how Schmeisser passed his time there and the reasons he had been sent to such a place. His biographers in Germany remain unsure what role, if any, he played in the development of the Kalashnikov prototypes, the fine-tuning and mass production of the AK-47 design, and the tooling of the Izhmash assembly line.
17. The first view was put forth by Russian Life magazine. Shirayev’s quotation is from a personal communication to the author.
18. Shilin and Cutshaw, Legends and Reality of the AK, p. 29.
19. The heavier AK-47 that resulted from it probably reduced recoil, too.
20. Shilin and Cutshaw, Legends and Reality of the AK. Shilin does not provide his source.
21. Malimon, Otechestvenniye Avtomaty, Chapter 12.
22. After the monetary reform in 1947, the typical urban worker in the Soviet Union received a salary of five hundred to one thousand rubles a month (data of the Soviet State Statistics Committee; research conducted by Nikolay Khalip).
23. Irina Kedrova, in the Russian-language newspaper Tribuna, quoted Nelly Kalashnikov, Mikhail Kalashnikov’s stepdaughter, in November 2004.
24. Mikhail Kalashnikov, in public remarks at sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the AK-47, in offices of Rosoboronexport, Moscow, in 2007, in presence of the author.
25. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, pp. 429–30.
26. Kalashnikov with Joly, The Gun that Changed the World, p. 98.
27. Ibid., p. 104.
28. Ibid., p. 105.
29. William Taubman, Khrushchev (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). Taubman provides a vivid description of Beria’s last minutes on p. 256. The excerpt from Beria’s letter, written on July 1, 1953, is from the translation of the document posted on the Virtual Archive of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, at www.wilsoncenter.org.
30. Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne, A Cardboard Castle: An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact 1955–1991 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005). The documents quoted were retrieved from archives and translated by the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The document cited here, “General Provisions of the Warsaw Treaty Armed Forces Unified Command,” is from pp. 80–81.
31. Mastny and Byrne, A Cardboard Castle. The language is from the Statute of the Warsaw Treaty Unified Command, Part II, Section B, p. 81.
32. Grechko, The Armed Forces of the Soviet State: A Soviet View, p. 342.
33. The Czechs resisted developing an AK
variant and produced their own assault rifle, the vz-58, which fired the M1943 cartridge and superficially resembled the AK-47 but was otherwise a different rifle.
34. Guy Laron, “Cutting the Gordian Knot: The Post WW-II Egyptian Quest for Arms and the 1955 Czechoslovak Arms Deal,” Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 55. See also Jon D. Glassman, Arms for the Arabs. The Soviet Union and War in the Middle East (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955).
35. Much of the information about the Chinese delegation and the details and dates of technical transfers are from the memoir of Liu Zhengdong, titled Zhu Jian. The book, a limited-edition memoir (press run, two thousand copies), was published in China in 2007. Its contents have never been distributed in English, and begin to fill in blank spots in the history of communist Chinese small-arms production. The translated title is Casting of the Sword: Memoir of an Old Armorer. Liu Zhengdong held positions within the Chinese defense industries for several decades. The account of Liu Shaoqi’s visit to Stalin is from Together with Historical Giants—Shi Zhe’s Memoirs. Shi Zhe was Mao’s Russian-language interpreter. His memoirs were published in Beijing in 1992. The description of Mao’s telegram to Stalin in the Korean War is from Witness to Sino-Soviet Military Relations of the 1950s—Memoir of Military Staff of Marshal Peng Dehuai. The marshal was the Chinese minister of defense in the 1950s. Translations by Lin Xu, an independent arms researcher.
36. Jenó Györkei and Miklós Horváth, Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary (Central European University Press, 1956), pp. 54–61. The order of battle is published on p. 59.
37. László Eörsi, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Myths and Realities (New York: East European Monographs, 2006), p. 14, with further notes on p. 28.
38. Ibid., p. 11.
39. Testimony of József Tibor Fejes, at closed-court hearing on January 20, 1959. From the Fejes file at Budapest Municipal Archives. Translated by Kati Tordas.
40. Paul Lendvai, One Day That Shook the Communist World: The 1956 Hungarian Uprising and its Legacy trans. Ann Major (Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 58–62.
41. Eörsi, The Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
42. Transcript of conversations between the Soviet Leadership and a Hungarian Workers’ Party delegation in Moscow, June 13 and 16, 1953, appearing in Uprising in East Germany, 1953, Christian F. Ostermann, ed. (Central European University Press; republished in 2001 by the National Security Archive), pp. 145–46.
43. Ibid., p. 147.
44. Ibid., p. 149.
45. Erwin A. Schmidl and László Ritter, The Hungarian Revolution, 1956 (Oxford: Osprey Publishing Ltd., 2006), p. 7.
46. Ibid.
47. From the “Working Notes from the Session of the CPSU CC Presidium, October 23, 1956,” an electronic briefing book prepared by the National Security Archive, Washington, 2002, and in The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents, eds. Csaba Békés, Malcolm Byrne, and János Rainer (New York: Central European University Press, 2002), pp. 217–18.
48. Eörsi, The Hungarian Revolution, p. 8.
49. The first translation is from Eörsi, The Hungarian Revolution, p. 191. The second is from The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents. The sources excerpt from the same document.
50. Györkei and Horváth, Soviet Military Intervention, pp. 54–61.
51. Schmidl and Ritter, The Hungarian Revolution, 1956, p. 57.
52. Court record Nb. XI. 8083/1958. szam. In the Budapest Municipal Archive, hereinafter referred to as the Fejes Court File. Fejes admitted to shouting “Russkies Go Home” but said he shouted no other demands.
53. Fejes Court File.
54. Fejes Court File, in this case, testimony by Fejes in response to a question from the presiding judge on January 20, 1959.
55. Fejes Court File. Prosecutors accused Fejes of stealing the watch from a Russian officer; he denied this in court and said he had taken it from a civilian.
56. The background on Fejes was from the court file. Further details were provided by László Eörsi, the Hungarian historian, who has spent years studying the Hungarian fighting groups and their members. The material from Eörsi was translated from Hungarian by András B. VágvÖlgyi, director of the film Kolorado Kid, which chronicles part of the revolution.
57. Götz, German Military Rifles, p. 223. The MP-18 was too well regarded to disappear outright; a license was issued by the German firm that made them to the Swiss Industrial Company, SIG, which manufactured them for export in the 1920s.
58. Appointment letter of Captain John T. Thompson to the board of officers tasked with conducting the test. U.S. War Department. October 6, 1903.
59. La Garde, Gunshot Injuries, p. 135.
60. Report of the Surgeon General of the Army to the Secretary of War for the Fiscal Year ending June 30, 1893, pp. 73–96.
61. The quotations and descriptions of the Thompson–La Garde tests are from the officers’ account of the tests, in the forty-three-page “Preliminary Report of a Board of Officers Convened in Pursuance of the Following Order, War Department, Office of the Adjutant General, Washington, Oct. 6, 1903,” which was submitted to the War Department on March 18, 1904.
62. Ibid.
63. The cadaver-livestock tests did confirm that bullets encased in metal—so-called full-metal jackets—tended to cause less serious injuries than bullets that had lead exposed. The latter expanded on impact, often causing larger wounds.
64. William J. Helmer, The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar (Highland Park, N.J.: Gun Room Press, 1969), p. 77.
65. Ibid., p. 53.
66. Ibid., pp. 78–79.
67. From Memorandum of Discussion at the 302nd Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, November 1, 1956, 9–10:55 A.M., in The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents, p. 324.
68. Györkei and Horváth, Soviet Military Intervention, p. 257.
69. The chronology here is drawn from the fuller timeline published in The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents.
70. Report of Georgy Zhukov to the CPSU, November 4, 1956, in The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents, p. 384.
71. Y. I. Malashenko, “The Special Corps Under Fire in Budapest. Memoirs of an Eyewitness,” in Györkei and Horváth, Soviet Military Intervention. Malashenko led the operations section of the Special Corps.
72. The casualty estimates come from various sources, which all acknowledge the uncertainty of their numbers due to complicating factors: closed Russian archives, secret burials, wounded people who sought treatment in homes and not in hospitals, where they might be discovered, and so on.
73. Fejes court file.
74. Fejes court file, from the minutes of his police hearing on March 31, 1958.
75. Production of the solid-steel-receiver AK-47 was ceased in the Soviet Union, though its replicas would be made in other places—including China, North Korea, and Europe—for many years, and a few of these early style AK-47s are still made in the United States by Arsenal Inc. of Las Vegas, primarily for collectors. Mikhail Miller’s work on the Soviet AKM is briefly discussed in Shilin and Cutshaw, Legends and Reality of the AK. Different sources give different weights for AK-47 and AKM. The weights used here are from Maksim Popenker.
76. Kalashnikov with Joly, The Gun that Changed the World, p. 87.
77. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, p. 278.
78. Ibid., p. 275.
79. Bolotin, Soviet Small Arms and Ammunition, pp. 175–77.
80. The myriad knockoffs of the Kalashnikov would come with changes in barrel lengths, stocks, sights, muzzle brakes, flash suppressors, and other components, giving each weapon its distinctive differences. In later years some variants would change the caliber, often to the NATO-standard .223 round. None fundamentally altered the main Soviet design. All are often referred to as Kalashnikovs, some even (erroneously but almost universally) as AK-47s.
81. Design of the SVD began in earnest in 1958,
when Evgeny F. Dragunov, a former army gunsmith who had become a designer in Izhevsk, competed against another konstruktor, Aleksandr Konstantinov, to make a prototype. As with the PK, longer range was necessary, and the prototypes were chambered to fire the Russian 7.62×54R cartridge. The competition lasted five years, and gradually, as Soviet officials demanded modifications, the two weapons—like Bulkin’s and Kalashnikov’s prototypes—began to grow similar. Dragunov’s version remained more accurate, and in July 1963 it was selected as the new Soviet sniper rifle. A special solid-steel bullet was designed concurrently, which gave the rifle the ability to penetrate body armor and helmets, and to be a greater threat to vehicles, helicopters, and other heavy equipment.
82. This Soviet-era manifestation of rancor would resurface later, when Kalashnikov’s colleagues would claim he had not given adequate credit to the people whose work had made the AK-47 possible.
83. Kalashnikov, From a Stranger’s Doorstep, pp. 285–88.
84. Götz, German Military Rifles, pp. 154–58. Götz offers a plant-by-plant description of end runs on the treaty by German industrialists and military officers. Many German people considered the treaty an insult and did not betray work that should not have been hard to detect.
85. From Christa and Erika Schreiber, descendants of Kurt Schreiber. Interview with author in Wiesa, February 2005.
86. From Heinz Muhler, former employee, in interview with author, February 2005.
87. Interview with Dietrich Thieme, local historian, January 2005.
88. Details of the hiring procedures, the work conditions, and the oath were provided to the author by former employees of the gun works, and other residents of Wiesa, during the author’s visits to the plant and the town in January and February 2005.
89. Personal communication to author from Dr. Thomas Mueller, former curator of Waffenmuseum in Suhl.
90. Interview with Peter, a former worker who asked that his surname be withheld. February 2005.
91. Schreiber interview, February 2005.