Washington press. Ultimately, late in life, he admitted that he had offered his weapon for sale before it was ready. Hiram Maxim, an accomplished cad, suspected draft dodger, and accused trigamist, presented multiple and conflicting accounts of the origins of the Maxim gun. His ego was so immeasurably large that much of what he left behind in writing and in the transcripts of his public remarks was a celebration of himself. He was mischievous to boot, a prankster, which lent his memoirs and many of his statements the feel of an inside joke. This has made tracing a complete set of independent and verifiable details of his weapon’s development, at least through what might seem its most important source—Hiram Maxim—a frustrating if not impossible task. The result is that it is often easier to evaluate any given weapon’s impact and significance than it is to determine the exact circumstances of its invention.
But little in any independent inquiry into the evolution of automatic arms can compare in degree of difficulty to an examination of the origins of Kalashnikov’s AK-47. The reasons are manifold. First and foremost, the weapon came into existence inside one of the most secretive and paranoid military systems the world has known. Within this system, the state-directed process was long, fundamentally bureaucratic, scattered across multiple cities and testing sites, and conducted in a cone of near silence by scores, if not hundreds, of participants. The rules muzzled contemporaneous accounts beyond the limited statements made by the authorities, and Soviet authorities were given to lies. Later, when Mikhail Kalashnikov and his namesake weapon entered proletarian lore, the Soviet mythmaking mill produced simplified distillations and outright false official accounts. Inventions, handy fables, and propaganda wormed away at the story for decades, institutionalizing falsehoods and calcifying legends, many of which then became part of the narrative in the West, where further repetition hardened and certified official Soviet accounts. As for Mikhail Kalashnikov himself, he sometimes complained of the false accounts and at other times participated in them, including in his first encounter with a researcher who eventually became a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. At their first contact, by letter in the early 1970s, Kalashnikov recommended a clumsily and transparently falsified official account of his personal biography and the weapon’s history.8 The subterfuge was understandable in its context, part of both a bureaucratic and a diplomatic dance. Kalashnikov consulted with a senior KGB official in the region where he worked before replying to the letter, and his response was passed through the acting Soviet military attache in Washington. Such conditions left little room for candor. The caution was characteristic of its time. Perhaps it was justified. Though Kalashnikov did not know it, the civilian researcher was quietly collaborating with, and seeking advice from, a senior American technical intelligence official, the very man whose primary responsibility for the United States government was to examine and evaluate Eastern bloc small arms. Whether the researcher’s role was intentional or not, from a Soviet perspective he was acting as an agent.9 Kalashnikov’s deception was expected, to the point of being reflexive. The reflex fit the time.
Years later, toward the end of the Soviet period, Kalashnikov presented, in both his writings and his scores of public interviews, a somewhat more expansive account of the weapon’s development and design. This brought more detail to the discussion. But as Kalashnikov circulated more accounts, he sometimes contradicted himself and thereby made the history even more debatable. Memoirs might be expected to help, as they would presumably be rendered with more deliberation and care than extemporaneous remarks in interviews, and Kalashnikov would be able to consult his own records to check facts and shape revisions. And yet for a man with a reputation for mechanical precision, his memoirs are a sloppy affair. He has written several, or, put another way, several have appeared under his name (two were cowritten with other authors, and at least one of his critics suspects there has been a ghostwriter, too).10 They beg for an editor, and not just because his accounts veer between sentimental, doctrinaire, folksy, and at times scalding. Stylistic shifts are a mere nuisance. Deeper problems lie in the shifting facts. Accounts of key events differ from text to text. Simple errors intrude in some places; in others, he has reclaimed chunks of the official history or other writers’ work and recast it.11 Throughout the memoirs, his recollections and the dates, even the years, for important events change. The dialogue changes as well, often in ways that alter the meaning of events as he recalls them. Even what might seem the most basic details come unmoored. (Was the AK-47 accepted as the winner of the design contest in late 1947 or in early 1948? Kalashnikov’s memoirs have said both. The answer, from other sources, is clear: January 1948. How exactly was Kalashnikov wounded? Again, there are many answers, depending on the memoir.) An independent researcher is left to wonder: Is Kalashnikov simply imprecise? Or is he a serial embellisher and cunning censor? The record indicates that he was, variously and sometimes simultaneously, all three.
Sorting through these varied accounts and small details might be possible with extended and detailed interviews with Kalashnikov, or with unfettered access to primary documents. But Kalashnikov, while he makes himself accessible, is nearing senescence. He spent his life in a system that discouraged openness, encouraged deception, and punished disobedience, and he arrived at old age adept at evasion; in his memoirs, he openly admits to misleading Soviet officials and the public about his past, and in interviews he mixes a proletarian and peasant persona with gentle refusals to answer almost all questions he labels “political.” He often answers questions with stock lines he has repeated for years, or decades. When pushed, he grows dismissive. The Soviet legacy endures in other telling ways, too. In the matter of archives, important collections that would be expected to contain information on the weapon’s development, and the roles of participants, remain closed. Primary documents have not been shared, even with the museum that bears the designer’s name and celebrates his work. And many documents are presumed to have vanished. “Here if something is once classified it will in most cases be classified until destroyed,” said one prominent Russian firearms researcher.12
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which created possibilities for more openness, other factors added to the uncertainty. Freed from silence by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the fall from power of the Communist Party, two participants in the competition in the 1940s, including a Red Army major who helped evaluate the prototype assault rifles, staked partial claims on the weapon’s parentage. Moreover, further research suggested that the renowned German arms designer Hugo Schmeisser, who was captured by the Red Army after Nazi Germany’s defeat, worked at the same arms-manufacturing complex where the AK-47 was first mass-produced and modified—raising the possibility that the weapon’s production, if not its design, was directly influenced by an expert and innovator who was effectively held as a prisoner. Kalashnikov was also accused in a Moscow newspaper of lifting important components of a competitor’s design and applying them to his final submission, the prototype that became the basis for the AK-47. Two post-Soviet Russian-language accounts using official sources—one by a participant in the contest’s evaluation, and another by an arms museum curator—lend support to counterclaims, though they do not dismiss the central narrative outright.
Mikhail Kalashnikov is a proud, energetic, and sometimes intense man, and as a lingering proletarian hero, whose narrative has served both his interests and the interests of the state, he always rebutted such claims emphatically, often with thinly masked fury. But strong and angry denials serve only as denials; absent full access to the primary documents, sorting through the exact lines of parentage remains impossible, at least without taking leaps of faith, which many of the people who embrace the stock story have been willing to do. These leaps fit patterns. First they were expected as part of the Communist Party’s recasting of history; history, during the bulk of Kalashnikov’s work life, was as the party defined it, and the public was to accept the fabricated and debased versions as presented. Later, accepting the updated but still self-serving versions that emerged in post-Soviet years was a requisite part of access to Kalashnikov, which many writers cherished and did not jeopardize with inconvenient questions. Fighting this tide was not easy. In Russia, the simple story is a minor industry. Its upkeep has been a determined project.
As a result of these processes, the precise circumstances are, at best, historically unsettled. But a middle view is possible within a wider context. It is this: Any distillation that treats the AK-47 as a spontaneous invention, the epiphany of an unassuming but gifted sergeant at his workbench, misses the very nature of its origins as an idiosyncratic Soviet product. The weapon was designed collectively, the culmination of work by many people over many years, and the result of a process in which Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov was near the center in the mid and late 1940s. This process was driven not by entrepreneurship or by quirky Russian innovation and pluck, but by the internal desires and bureaucracy of the socialist state. The motivations that fueled it were particular to a moment in history. The Soviet Union, once a technologically backward society that had been brutalized and organized by Stalin’s police state, had been militarizing throughout its existence, and it had recently been fully transformed into a military-industrial economy by war and its fear and hatred of Hitler. As Hitler exited the stage, this economy’s potential for arms-making was harnessed again, this time to a mix of almost religious revolutionary ideology— socialism was, according to the party’s core teaching, to sweep the world in an irresistible advance—and to a rational suspicion of the United States, with which it was compelled to compete.