people alive.
Where did all these rifles go? Huge numbers filled state arsenals, issued to Eurasian communist armies and stockpiled around the Cold War’s anticipated fronts. Untold millions were sold, others simply given to those thought to need them by the KGB and the Soviet army or their cousins in other communist states. During decades of influence jockeying, the Cold War saw the shipment of enormous quantities of Kalashnikovs to proxy forces, from the Viet Cong to militias in Beirut. Lists resemble tour guides to troubled lands: Russian, Chinese, and North Korean Kalashnikovs were carried by the North Vietnamese Army; Polish Kalashnikovs were shipped to the Contras; East German Kalashnikovs went to Yemen; Romanian AKs armed the Kurds; Russian and Bulgarian AK-47s supplied Rwanda; the United States directed Chinese and Egyptian Kalashnikovs to Afghanistan’s anti-Soviet mujahideen. Chinese Kalashnikovs are abundant in Uganda and Sudan. By the time the Iron Curtain fell, it had become difficult to travel outside Western democracies without seeing Kalashnikovs in some form. There are more Kalashnikovs circulating now than then; when state socialism collapsed, arsenals were looted and weapons locked within were trucked away for sale. For people who study the universe of disorder, automatic Kalashnikovs serve as reasonably reliable units of measure. Arms-control specialists and students of conflict look to the price of Kalashnikov assault rifles in a nation’s open-market arms bazaars to determine both the degree to which destabilized lands are awash in small arms and the state of risk. When prices rise, public anxiety is considered high. When they sink, the decline can indicate a conflict is ebbing. Because there is no surer sign that a country has gone sour than the appearance of Kalashnikovs in the public’s grip, they can also function as an informal social indicator, providing another sort of graduated scale. Anywhere large numbers of young men in civilian clothes or mismatched uniforms are carrying Kalashnikovs is a very good place not to go; when Kalashnikovs turn up in the hands of mobs, it is time to leave.
In the aftermath of the Cold War the overabundance of automatic Kalashnikovs has remained a persistent factor in terrorism, crime, ethnic cleansing, and local and regional destabilization. Their widespread presence empowers unflagged and undisciplined forces to commit human rights abuses on a grander scale, raises the costs and exacerbates the dangers of peacekeeping missions, emboldens criminals of many sorts, stalls economic development, and increases the social burdens of caring for the wounded, the orphaned, and the displaced. Having been shipped to regions rife with the tensions of poverty, poor governance, and high ethnic, religious, or nationalist sentiment, the
Studies of military small arms have documented their role in a stubborn toll of instability, injury, and death. The United Nations convened a conference in 2001 by noting that small arms were principal weapons in forty-six of the forty-nine major conflicts in the 1990s, in which 4 million people died. In 2004 Human Rights Watch identified eighteen nations where child soldiers are still used. For most of these wars and most of these young conscripts, Kalashnikovs are the primary arm. The available American casualty data from Iraq show that bullets fired from the Eastern bloc’s family of firearms remain, injury by injury, the most lethal wounding agent on the battlefield. (In Afghanistan and Iraq, bombs have killed more soldiers. But of all the ways a soldier could be wounded there, bullets have been more likely to kill than any other. Put another way, soldiers wounded in bomb blasts have a statistically greater likelihood of survival than those who have been shot.) Moreover, Kalashnikovs outlive strife; bandits find them as useful as soldiers ever did. Even a single Kalashnikov can set a nation in motion. In 1989, after the drifter Patrick Purdy opened fire with a Kalashnikov on a schoolyard in Stockton, California, striking thirty-four children and a teacher, Congress began work on the assault weapon ban. Purdy did not use a true automatic Kalashnikov. His rifle was not an automatic. It had been modified to shoot a single bullet with each trigger pull, making it no more dangerous (and arguably less, considering the medium-powered cartridges it fired) than the rifles in many a deer camp. The facts hardly mattered. The mere appearance of a Kalashnikov in a schoolyard crowded with children,
Look is important to Kalashnikovs. In their march from secrecy to ubiquity Kalashnikovs have become more than weapons. They have become symbols—first of the industrial success of Stalin’s Soviet Union and the socialist way, later of popular insurrection, armed liberation, and gangland stature, more recently of jihad. A Kalashnikov can be appropriated for most any cause. An AK-47 with bayonet attached appears on the flag of Mozambique; it shares that flag with a hoe and a book, as if it were one of a young nation’s foundational tools. Another Kalashnikov-like rifle, held aloft by a defiant fist, adorns the emblem of Hezbollah. Here its meaning is different. The flag is not about victory, not yet. It’s about the fight. In Hollywood the Kalashnikov suggests the bad guy, the lunatic, the connoisseur tough. “AK-47—the very best there is,” the actor Samuel L. Jackson said in one of his well-known roles. “When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room.”
These mixed meanings make a potent brew. The Kalashnikov stirs feelings, for and against, and the savvy have learned to tap its many meanings for their own purposes. In Missouri in mid-2009, when Mark Muller, the owner of a car dealership, wanted to generate interest and lift flagging sales, he offered a voucher for an AK-47 with the purchase of every pickup truck. The offer was a gimmick. True AK-47s cannot be legally owned by most people in the United States, and the dealership offered a coupon worth only half the price of the semiautomatic version sold in American gun shops. Once again, as is often the case in conversations related to the Kalashnikov, facts did not matter. Nonsense prevailed. Muller’s sales promotion generated international attention: A broadcast team from Al Jazeera turned up, as did another from Russian state television news. The coverage triggered old arguments. What does this weapon mean? Is it the sinister product of sinister forms of government, set loose on the world via dark processes that were, and often remain, all but unchecked? Or does its reliability and simplicity make it a symbol of the virtue of our best tools, a companion to the utility of a well-performing pickup truck? Muller was pleased. He appeared before the cameras brandishing a Kalashnikov in its semiautomatic form, enjoying free publicity while spurring business and tweaking the anti-gun crowd at the same time. Like many a man who has used a Kalashnikov, he held up his rifle for the cameras and grinned—the rascal’s pose. The Kalashnikov was put to yet another use.
Several declarations are necessary.
First, a matter of classification: For the purposes of this book, the Kalashnikov series includes the original forms and common descendants of the AK-47, including the AKM, the AKS, the Chinese Type 56 and North Korean Type 58, the Type 68, the East German MPiK, the Hungarian AMD, the Polish PMKM, the Egyptian Misr and Iraqi Tabuk, the Yugoslav M70, the AK-74, and a host of other derivatives and copycats. These rifles are commonly— although incorrectly—lumped together and referred to as the AK-47 by many commentators. To be precise, the actual AK-47 was an early model in the line and is not nearly as widespread as the varieties that followed. But the name has become, in public discourse, a shorthand for an entire family of arms. This work also examines, to a much lesser degree, the original and follow-on forms of the RPK (a light machine gun that closely resembles the AK and is often mistaken for it), the PK (a general-purpose machine gun also designed by a team working under Mikhail Kalashnikov’s name), and the SVD (a semiautomatic sniper rifle designed by Evgeny Fedorovich Dragunov and approved by the Soviet Army in 1963; Dragunov worked in the same factory as Kalashnikov and his SVD incorporated several design features of the Kalashnikov system). Why cover these arms together? Because this group forms a system of arms created from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s to equip the Eastern bloc. They are an interrelated bunch, often made in the same factories by the same people, and designed to be distributed and used together. They share essential characteristics—ruggedness, reliability, simplicity, and profligate mass production. And because they use only three basic cartridges, made in factories that have been tooled globally to feed these now widely distributed weapons, as a group they provide a means to examine the methods and consequences of military small-arms proliferation around the world.
Second, this book, though covering a wide expanse of time and geography, attempts a comprehensive account, not a complete account, of these weapons and their place in a larger history. There are two reasons. The first is obvious. The Kalashnikov series is a sprawling subject. No single treatment can address all of its uses. An effort of such scale would require volumes and cover much of the history of more than a half-century of ground war. To cover every weapon and step in the evolution would require more time and space than one book allows. But there were milestones along the way, and consequences that fit categories. Many of these central processes and moments can be readily described. The second reason is less obvious but an even more limiting factor. On the subject of the assault rifles made by the former and current socialist worlds, impregnable obstacles block full illumination. Important matters will remain unknown until archives are open and independent researchers are
