The Gun

secret police, who tracked Fejes down. The Hungarian Revolution marked the AK-47’s true battlefield debut. (Photo from the Budapest Municipal Archives)

AN INSTRUMENT OF REPRESSION

(Photo courtesy of AKG–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)

(Photo courtesy of Hermann–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)

One essential element of the Kalashnikov legend, as told by Mikhail Kalashnikov and the Soviet and Russian governments alike, is that the AK-47 was designed for national defense and then distributed for liberation struggles. The script misses a characteristic use: as the strongman’s tool for crackdowns. The case of Peter Fechter (inset), an East German teenager, provides a more complete view.

(Photo courtesy of Bera–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)

Fechter tried to scale the Berlin Wall in 1962. Border guards opened fire on him with bursts of Kalashnikov fire. One round struck his hip. His fingers tell the rest of the story—they are coated in clotted blood from his efforts to save himself while the men who shot him watched. The Kalashnikov has been turned by government troops against civilians in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Tbilisi, Almaty, Moscow, Beijing, Baku, Bishkek, and a long list of other places where regimes have used violence to hold power.

…AND PROXY WAR

The weapon continued to spread far from its makers’ hands. By 1962, the breakout had accelerated. A Dutch soldier, from Bravo Company. 41st Infantry Battalion, in Western New Guinea. He is holding what may be the first AK-47 captured by conventional Western forces in battle, a rifle picked up after being abandoned by an Indonesian Special Forces team. The Soviet Union had provided the rifles to Indonesia. The new period of the Kalashnikov proliferation had begun. (Photo courtesy of a former officer in the unit who wished to remain anonymous)

VIETNAM: WHERE BOTH SIDES USED ASSAULT RIFLES AS PRIMARY ARMS FOR THE FIRST TIME

The young men of Second Battalion, Third Marines, were among the first Marines in Vietnam to receive the American answer to the AK-47: the M-16 assault rifle. From left to right are four lieutenants whose troops were issued rifles that failed: Mike Chervenak, Roger Gunning, Chuck Woodard, and Bill Miles. (Photo courtesy of Chuck Woodard)

The M-16 and its ammunition had been rushed into production. The early versions were plagued with reliability problems. The problems were largely resolved later, but its bungled and bloody introduction was a searing experience for men asked to put their faith in their commanders and their country, which failed them in war. The nature of war had abruptly changed. For the first time, the soldiers from an industrial nation were outgunned by an agrarian local population, for whom the Kalashnikov assault rifle was a battlefield leveler.

The military identification of Mike Chervenak, who spoke out publicly against the failures of M-16 rifles in combat—and was punished for it. (Courtesy of Mike Chervenak)

Staff Sergeant Claude E. Elrod, who led First Platoon, Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines, on July 21, 1967. The photograph was taken shortly before the fight against the North Vietnamese Army for Ap Sieu Quan, the day that ultimately would force the Marine Corps to admit its rifles were failing—and demand replacements.

After the battle, Hotel Company settled into the deserted village. First Lieutenant Chervenak is standing on the left, in a dark tee shirt. He was enraged, and set out to document the problems.

Marines inside Ap Sieu Quan, with M-14s against a wall. The Marine Corps had issued M-16s to replace M- 14s, which were not supposed to be carried. Many Marines, not trusting their M-16s, procured M-14s through underground means and ditched their newer weapons. At Ap Sieu Quan, when at least forty of Hotel Company’s M- 16s jammed, the M-14s allowed the grunts who had them to protect Marines whose rifles had gone silent. (Photos courtesy of Claude Elrod)

THE TEENAGERS’ WEAPON

The 1986 log book of preconscription training of Soviet students in Pripyat, the worker’s town beside the nuclear reactors at Chernobyl. The book was left behind after the power station exploded, bombarding Pripyat with radiation, and remained on the contaminated grounds in 2005.

Results of the students’ timed drills with Kalashnikov assault rifles—part of the curriculum in Soviet schools. The log book was a marker of both the rifles’s ease of use and the extent to which assault rifles had penetrated Soviet society. The practice persists in post-Soviet Russia. (Photos by Joseph Sywenkyj)

The Kalashnikov’s durability in the field and its ease of use, along with its slight recoil, have made it a weapon most anyone can use. These traits, coupled with its near ubiquity, have made it a primary arm of child soldiers. A boy soldier in the Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka, 1992. (Photo by Suzanne Keating)

Drawing by a former child soldier from the Lord’s Resistance Army, an millennial insurgent group that originated in Uganda in the 1980s. Armed with simple and lightweight assault rifles, the group has survived more than a quarter century in the field. (Photo by C. J. Chivers)

KILLING TOOLS, AND OBJECTS WITH MANY MEANINGS, AND REACTIONS

After its introduction, the AK-47 crept into national and insurgent propaganda alike, and can be seen in statuary, symbols, banners, and posters from Central America to North Korea. The caption reads of this poster was typical of its form: “Imperialism and all anti-revolutionists are paper tigers.” The weapon has similarly been appropriated as a mark of martial credibility and determination by dictators, criminals, rascals, and jihadists, a malleable icon that can convey whatever those who carry it wish to convey.

In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Army held classified tests examining the weapon’s lethality against that of American rifles. With cadavers procured in secret from India and with live goats, testers at Aberdeen Proving Ground fired into defatted and decapitated human heads that had been filled with gelatinous pseudobrains. The tests—hurried, macabre, free from peer review or public scrutiny, and ultimately useless—were a milestone of strange Cold War “science.” An embarrassed army covered them up for nearly fifty years. The effects of a bullet fired by an early American assault rifle passing through a human head were recorded, on a high-speed camera. The so-called terminal effects of an AK-47 round were displayed on another panel, after a tester fired into the skull. (Photos from “Wound-Ballistics Assessment of M-14, AR-15 and Soviet AK Rifles,” U.S. Army, 1964)

Sometimes, choosing not to display a Kalashnikov can have meaning, too. A member of Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, the Palestinian terrorist group, brandished an M-4 in an interview with the author in 2002. Carrying a rifle used by Israel signified defiance or fighting skill—to acquire its enemies’ rifles, the group depends on corruption or battlefield capture. Displaying the enemies’ guns is a common propaganda device, used the world over.