The Gun

Kalashnikov was not the first. Many had tried a similar design elsewhere. And other Soviet designers had been working on similar systems during the late war and postwar period. But this particular Soviet push for a gas- operated automatic rifle was different. The Red Army’s designers were cogs in a much larger machine, working within a government that was hungry for a new weapon, and willing to expend deep human and material resources on finding a satisfactory result. The only hurdle, once a design was worked out, would be the judges’ review.

Sergeant Kalashnikov’s packet had been submitted to the Main Artillery Department by a deadline in late 1945, along with fifteen other entrants from around the Soviet arms-design community.⁴ The test commission planned to review the competing proposals and select several entrants to proceed to the next phase— constructing their guns for firing trials. The sergeant wanted what all designers wanted: to see his ideas take shape in metal. The Russian winter gripped the test range. He waited.

The sergeant, a small and intent man with pale blue eyes and a face pitted by the faint scars of childhood disease, was worried. Over the course of a week, he had heard that other collectives had been notified that their designs had met approval, and they could proceed to the next stage. For his case, there was only silence. Perhaps he had failed again. He knew well that his path to arms design, and his entry into the inner workings of the Soviet military complex, had been unlikely. He had been born in near penury and raised from peasant stock on the steppe of central Russia, just north of the current border with Kazakhstan. Though he did not talk openly about his past with his army peers, his and his family’s lives had been a tour through many of the characteristic miseries of the early Soviet period. The sergeant worked in secrecy. He kept secrets of his own. He dared not speak of his family’s suffering at the hands of Stalin’s state, including that his father, Timofey A. Kalashnikov, had been declared a kulak, and exiled as an enemy of the people, when the sergeant was an eleven-year-old boy. He spent the rest of his childhood and early teenage years in Siberia, a run of bitter and difficult years. But the Great Patriotic War had reshaped him, just as it reordered much of Stalin’s Russia. He had made his peace with the Communist Party, the institution that had nearly destroyed his family.

Kalashnikov had been conscripted into the Red Army’s tank forces in 1938. In 1941, soon after Hitler betrayed his nonaggression pact with Stalin and launched the invasion of Russia, he had been wounded in battle. Kalashnikov’s wartime experiences, and his newfound access to educated and accomplished people inside the Red Army, had given him the handholds he needed for a social and professional climb. The sergeant had many talents, not the least of which was a twinkling charm. His politics took shape: He became an ardent nationalist and patriot, committed to the Soviet Union and to its survival. In addition to his mechanical abilities, Sergeant Kalashnikov possessed a mind informed by an unerring survival instinct. He repeatedly endeared himself to the officers and party officials who determined his fate. The war against Germany drew him into the system that had brutalized his family, and he had come to align his interests with the interests of the national cause. He knew what was at stake, and how to articulate his place in it. “Nazi enslavement or victory!” he would later write. “The potential for a man worrying about the fate of his homeland in years of trouble is really unlimited!”

Now he was at a critical moment. He had found a place in the army’s armaments-design branch, and had found security as well, as much security as was possible for a young man in Stalin’s Soviet Union. His salary was fifteen hundred rubles a month, several times more than many Soviet workers received, and at least twice the national average.⁵ Still, he was nervous. The contest was a chance to excel even more and to earn greater security yet. Under the Soviet system, successful konstruktors, as the state arms designers were called, were given status, prizes, awards, and perks. But Sergeant Kalashnikov was only twenty-six years old. He lacked the reputation and sense of protocol of other designers. Moreover, the submission papers had to be completed with bureaucratic Soviet precision, and he was competing against some of the most established names in Soviet arms circles. He expected rejection.

Yekaterina Moiseyeva, the draftswoman, appeared at his door. Kalashnikov knew her as Katya. In their months working together, the pair had fallen in love. Other members of the collective had played endless practical jokes on them, sending them each on contrived errands or with contrived questions so that the two might meet. “May I come in?”⁶ she asked.

She brought news. “Our bureau has authorized me to congratulate you on your victory in the contest,” she said, and held out her hand.

The sergeant turned his back. He thought it was another of his colleagues’ jokes. She seemed confused, too, and walked away, leaving him to stare at the winter outside. He had failed again.

More members of the team rushed to his door. “Come on, hurry over to the headquarters and then to the shop!” one said. This was Russia; they suggested toasts. Inside the polygon’s headquarters, he was told officially. His proposal for an automatic rifle had been selected for the next phase.

* * *

From this moment forward, by his own telling, Mikhail Kalashnikov was on the path of designing the weapon that would be designated by the Soviet military as its new standard infantry arm. The result would become an object familiar to the world’s eyes: a stubby black rifle, with a banana-shaped magazine, a steep front sight post, and a dark wooden stock. After many modifications over many years, from Sergeant Kalashnikov’s initial design would flow the family of assault rifles now universally known as the AK-47—an acronym for Avtomat Kalashnikova-47, the automatic by Kalashnikov designed in 1947. The significance of this secret contest was unknown in the West and not immediately evident even within the circle of officers who made the equipment decisions for Soviet land forces. But of all the many programs pursued in the Soviet arms complex in the years ahead—the ballistic submarines and transport and attack helicopters, the intercontinental missiles and strategic bombers, the armored vehicles and titanium-hulled tanks, and even the atomic bomb itself, which at the same time was the focus of a team of physicists in a project supervised by Lavrenty Beria, the feared leader of the secret police—none would claim as many lives as this seemingly mundane and uncomplicated invention. The man credited with its design would benefit, too. Sergeant Kalashnikov, a low-ranking konstruktor in a sprawling bureaucracy, was destined to receive promotions that in time would elevate him to the honorary rank of lieutenant general. His surname would become an informal global brand. He would receive state prizes, ruble bonuses of enormous value in the parsimonious Soviet Union, an apartment, and eventually a dacha, or summer cottage, on the shores of a wooded lake. His second wife—Katya of NIPSMVO —would wear fur.⁷ And he would be appointed by the authorities as a deputy in the Supreme Soviet, the rubber-stamp national legislature that seated itself before Stalin and his successors in grand sessions within the Kremlin’s tall red walls. For a peasant once in exile, he was now in a breathtaking climb.

How exactly would all of this come to pass? Rough accounts of the contest, and of the early development of the Kalashnikov series, are known from official and personal versions. The basic outline is familiar. Sergeant Kalashnikov, the story goes, was a gifted young soldier, undeveloped but eager to serve his nation. His intuitive design skills, coupled with a desire to confront the marauding Germans and drive them from Russian soil, was given an outlet and direction by the Red Army and the Communist Party, enabling him to rise from obscurity and invent for his imperiled nation a rifle that was more reliable and effective than any previous design. By this account, everyone is put in a good light. Kalashnikov is the quintessential proletarian hero, a simple and seemingly unassuming man, a commoner, whose natural gifts and loyal dedication helped the Soviet Union arm itself and its friends against the encroaching West. And the Red Army, through the wisdom of its commanders and the timely and prescient intervention of Communist Party officials, channeled his raw talent for the workers’ good. The durable frame of this story has been passed down through government accounts and repeated often enough over the decades to have entered twentieth-century martial lore. But what were the precise circumstances and events that led to the creation of this weapon, now a centerpiece of modern war, and led to this previously unheralded man receiving credit for it?

The story becomes trickier at a finer grain of detail. The broad history of the evolution of military arms, deduced through ordnance reports, ballistic and technical studies, sales brochures, transcripts of officer and designer seminars, soldiers’ accounts, medical records, and a host of materials in institutional archives, is crowded with legends, quacks, apocryphal tales, and deliberately deceptive characters. Military secrecy has obscured many chapters; trade secrecy has prevented a full understanding of others. With the history of many weapons, the task is further complicated by the fact that essential sources have often not been fully trustworthy. Richard Gatling hewed in public to a profoundly naive dream and presented himself as a proper Southern gentleman who pitched up ready for America’s industrial age. In private he plotted with no small amount of cunning—hiding and shifting his company’s debt, paying a uniformed British army officer under the table to promote the weapon at officers’ clubs, and concocting cagey plans to boost government support and sales, even if it meant planting stories in the