The Gun

Out of these forces, the competition for an automatic rifle was ordered. Unlike the Maxim and Gatling guns, the Soviet result, as near as a close reading of the available accounts can allow, flowed from official directives and widespread collaboration and not from a flash of inspiration. The AK-47 was a product of Stalin’s state, not of a single man; it was the work of a government and the result of the vast resources the government applied to creating it. Kalashnikov himself has hinted at this himself. “When I grew older, I understood that my invention was not only the culmination of the fervent desire of all of our soldiers to have a worthy weapon to defend our Homeland but also what is often described in seemingly trite words—the ‘creative energy of the people,’” he said. “I am sure that the AK-47 has become the embodiment of this energy. And let it be a common monument to us all—people whose names are known and the nameless. Let it be a symbol of the people’s unity in a time of trial for the homeland.”¹³ Later, in a public presentation in Russia commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the weapon’s design, he expressed the fuller view more clearly. “Today we are celebrating the work of a big collective,” he said. “I was not by myself sitting at a desk. It was a thousand-strong collective working at different factories.”¹⁴

Such declarations are, of course, narrow. What makes the origins of the AK-47 interesting are not these easy platitudes, but the larger insights its story provides. The Soviet Union of the late 1940s was at a high point in its history. When it focused on technical tasks, it could excel. And when it focused on creating an automatic weapon that could be carried and managed by almost any man, it was able to quickly make one of the world’s superproducts, and one of the truest symbols of itself. The weapon, which Kalashnikov emphasizes as a defensive tool and a shared monument to the population’s creative energy, was rather a marker of the planned economy under totalitarian rule, a nation that could make weapons aplenty but would not design a good toilet, elevator, or camera, or produce large crops of wheat and potatoes, or provide its citizens with decent toothpaste and bars of soap. This is not to say that the planned economy was completely inefficient, though broadly it was. In the planned economy, when the plan worked, the nation got what its planners ordered. Main battle tanks became sturdy, reliable, and fearsome. Refrigerators barely worked. The AK-47 and its descendants in many ways form an apt emblem of the Soviet legacy, a wood-and-metal symbol of what the socialist experiment came to be about.

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Certain aspects of the history are unchallenged.

The project that would change military rifles as combatants understood them began in strict secrecy in the Soviet Union just after the end of the Great Patriotic War. The Workers-Peasants Red Army was seeking a replacement for the infantry rifles, some of them dating to the turn of the century, that had served for decades as a standard arm for Russian and Soviet land forces. The Soviet Union had tried fielding automatic rifles for years, with disappointing results in battle. In the fight against the much more fully equipped German troops many Red Army soldiers found themselves carrying a Mosin-Nagant rifle largely unchanged since 1891.¹⁵ A hurried effort during the late war years by a prominent Soviet designer, Sergei G. Simonov, had produced a serviceable but not quite satisfactory carbine that was matched to a new, smaller cartridge than previous Soviet rifles had fired. Simonov’s result, the SKS, Samozaryadny Karabin Sistemy Simonova, the self-loading carbine system by Simonov, was a semiautomatic. It was light, simple, and inches shorter than most infantry rifles of the time, which made it easier to handle in thickets, in urban combat, in armored vehicles, or on parachute duty. But it fired only one round for every pull of the trigger, and was fitted with a fixed ten-round magazine. The Red Army’s Main Artillery Department was interested in an individual soldier’s weapon with more firepower. For more firepower, something else was needed.

The project’s early luck had not been good. Another konstruktor, Aleksei I. Sudayev, had been working on a true automatic rifle for the new cartridge, and soon after the war his project had undergone two cycles of prototypes and tests. Sudayev was a young man, but already a celebrated figure among Soviet designers. Working in Leningrad during its encirclement and long siege, he had designed a submachine gun and helped oversee its production within the city, all in conditions approaching starvation. The weapon was issued to the Red Army soldiers who finally pushed the Germans back.¹⁶ His energy seemed boundless, his talents immense. His second prototype for an assault rifle, the AS-44, was submitted in 1945. The evaluators found it promising, but heavy. They directed Sudayev to develop a third prototype of lesser weight. Sudayev fell severely ill in 1945 and died the next summer at the age of thirty-three, stalling the rifle’s development. By then the Main Artillery Department had decided to commit the country’s military infrastructure more fully to the cause. It had issued a new set of instructions. A competition among design collectives throughout the arms complex would be held, and each would offer proposals for an automatic rifle—for the army’s review.

The contest’s timing all but predicted its result: A weapon would be created and it would be mass-produced. The Great Patriotic War had radically altered the Soviet Union. Since the October Revolution, the population of the former Russian empire had suffered civil war, collectivization, purges, and labor camps. The revolutionary promises of socialism had given way to the centralization of a police state and single-party rule. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, had grown in size and role, and its secret police had become a principal arm of a government that ruled by violence and fear. By the time of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s plan to invade the Soviet Union in 1941, show trials had thinned the ranks of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and party luminaries. Much of the senior military leadership had been liquidated. Within schools, factories, and families, people were forced to denounce those near them, producing fresh crops of counter-revolutionary suspects to be arrested, tortured into confession, and sentenced to execution or forced labor in the network of GULAG camps. Stalin’s personality cult had overtaken the land, and the national conversation was smothered by official propaganda and state lies. The nation was being consumed by the general secretary’s whim, and the whims of those who acted under his hand.

The German invasion changed the national mood. The Third Reich’s thrusts onto Russian soil had rallied a terrified people with a sense of shared peril and common purpose, and provided an impetus for militarization and industrialization on a scale not imagined immediately after the Bolshevik coup. Hitler’s armies drove almost effortlessly through the Soviet Union’s outer defenses, upending the Russian belief, central to the party’s propaganda, that the Red Army would stop all enemies at the edge of Soviet soil. “We will never concede an inch of ground” was one popular slogan.¹⁷ The reality was different. Many divisions along the border were not dug in. Many units had no maps. Many officers were on leave. As the Germans attacked, Stalin issued an order that deepened the confusion. Awakened in the predawn hours and told of the attack by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the general secretary was in disbelief. “That is provocation,” he said into the phone. “Do not open fire.”¹⁸ Russian units were routed.

Ukraine and much of western Russia, the location of a large portion of the Soviet Union’s population and the nation’s industrial base, fell under Nazi occupation, abandoned by the battered Red Army as it retreated. A drive for modernization had preceded the war. Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, coupled to prison labor made available through repression, had rushed the Soviet Union through centralization and development apace, and the military sector had benefited. A huge pool of talent had been directed toward arms production and design. Laboratories, design bureaus, and research centers were dedicated to help.¹⁹ As the German Blitzkrieg bore down on Moscow, creating cascades of refugees, the nation was energized more. The Soviet Union tottered. Its defense establishment swelled.

By 1944, three years later, the ordeal and the turnabout had both been spectacular. The Soviet Union had lost as many as 20 million of its citizens, including nearly 8 million soldiers—losses that dwarfed those of all other participating nations. But the tide had shifted. Germany’s army, pressed from east and west, was nearing collapse. As the war approached its end in 1945, the Red Army, its ranks swelled by mass conscription, pursued the retreating German forces. The Kremlin gained control or primary influence over an expansive swath of territory extending from the Baltic states through Central and Western Europe and looping back to the banks of the Black Sea and almost into Yugoslavia, where Tito’s resistance had evicted the Germans and a socialist state had taken hold. Stalin’s prewar visions of socialist expansion had come to pass. This belt of nations would fall under Soviet influence and become the front line of the Eastern bloc, the buffer zone.

Stalin knew that large military forces would be necessary to occupy and administer this new socialist frontier, and to face down the West. These forces would need weapons. The timing was ideal for arming them. The Soviet Union had gone through an industrial transformation and remained on a war footing. It now had a labor force skilled in making weapons. Its arms and munitions factories, which had grown in size and number and worked around the clock in the war years, were producing weapons at an extraordinary rate. By one official estimate, in slightly less than four years of war, the Soviet Union managed to manufacture 12 million rifles, more than 6 million