The Gun

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. Jeno Gyorkei and Miklos Horvath, Soviet Military Intervention in Hungary (Central European University Press, 1956), pp. 54–61. The order of battle is published on p. 59.

37. Laszlo Eorsi, 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 Jozsef 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. Eorsi, 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 Laszlo 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 Bekes, Malcolm Byrne, and Janos Rainer (New York: Central European University Press, 2002), pp. 217–18.

48. Eorsi, The Hungarian Revolution, p. 8.

49. The first translation is from Eorsi, 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. Gyorkei and Horvath, 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 Laszlo Eorsi, the Hungarian historian, who has spent years studying the Hungarian fighting groups and their members. The material from Eorsi was translated from Hungarian by Andras B. VagvOlgyi, director of the film Kolorado Kid, which chronicles part of the revolution.

57. Gotz, 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.