The Gun

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. Gyorkei and Horvath, 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 Gyorkei and Horvath, 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. Gotz, German Military Rifles, pp. 154–58. Gotz 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.

92. Personnel communication to author from Markku Palokangas, of the Finnish War Museum in Helsinki.

93. Personal communication from Markku Palokangas and Robie Kulokivi, a Finnish arms researcher.

94. Trial Report, Soviet Machine Carbine 7.62mm Kalashnikov (AK). Submitted to the Netherlands General Staff, August 1958. Copy provided to author by the Legermuseum, Delft, The Netherlands.

95. Yugoslavia had fought off the Axis without the Red Army’s direct support, and it emerged from World War II without Soviet troops on its soil and with pride in the success of its partisans. Relations were further strained by the Soviet crackdown in Hungary in 1956 and the Soviet Union’s deception during the arrest of Imre Nagy.

96. Personal communication from Branko Bogdanovic, a historian at the Zastava plant.

97. Ibid. The Yugoslavs had no Soviet license and were on tricky diplomatic trade grounds as they manufactured weapons based on Soviet patterns. After Yugoslavia was dissolved and the archives were assumed by Serbia, the identity of the nation that leaked its AK-47s did not become publicly known.

98. The Zastava team hoped to make an entire family of arms based on the Kalashnikov system and experimented with means to modify the line, changing barrel lengths and adding features.

99. Personal communication to author from Branko Bogdanovic.

100. In time, Zastava would become a major Kalashnikov supplier and exporter, including export to the Pentagon’s proxies in Afghanistan and Iraq, where Yugoslav Kalashnikovs are abundant.

101. Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats, p. 152.

102. La Garde, Gunshot Injuries, p. 33.

103. At least two studies challenged the old guard: “Rifle Accuracies and Hit Probabilities in Combat” by Leon Feldman, William C. Pettijohn, and J. D. Reed, November 1960; “An Estimate of the Military Value and Desirable Characteristics of Armor Helmets for Ground Forces,” a report published in 1950.

104. Those tests are covered in detail in the next chapter.

105. ORDI 7-101, Soviet Rifles and Carbines, Identification and Operation (published by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, May 1954), p. 1.

106. Report No. OTIO-471. The available documents accompanying the translation suggested that the United States military did not yet have possession of the new Soviet automatics and that technical intelligence officials had not yet tested and evaluated them. One line on the cover letter when the translation was submitted to the Army’s chief of ordnance noted that “the technical accuracy of the source data has not been verified,” indicating the military had not yet handled a specimen arm.

107. The Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), the successor organization of the Army Foreign Science and Technology Center, said that record searches had not found most of the relevant documents from the era. The author assembled the records discussed here independently, from a range of sources, including the National Archives and several museums. Among the reports the U.S. military did find under a Freedom of Information Act request was a 1961 technical report on what the American army called a “Chinese AK-47.” This report references two previous classified technical exploitations of the Soviet original—one published in mid-1956, the other in early 1957. The brief discussions of these reports in the 1961 document point to the first American military acquisition and tests of the AK-47.

108. Edwards’s scoop carried whiffs of an insurgency within the army’s ordnance department; reading between the lines suggests that his sources included American technicians who were testing the AK-47, and that they might have let him participate in a sample shoot.

109. William B. Edwards, “Russia’s Secret All-Purpose Cartridge,” GUNS magazine,