The Gun

7.62?54R—the same high-powered round that had been in service since the early 1890s.[8]

But at roughly the same time that the sturmgewehr was appearing in battle, opinions were shifting, and the Red Army was developing an intermediate cartridge of its own. Soviet officials claimed that Russian designers had begun working in earnest on this cartridge in 1939, and the project had been suspended after Germany invaded Poland that year, which was followed by the Soviet invasion of Finland and the start of the Winter War. The demands of wartime production, by this account, pushed the pursuit of an intermediate cartridge aside.³¹ Interest intensified on July 15, 1943, when at a conference of Beria’s intelligence service, the NKVD, analysts presented two smaller cartridges used by other armies in the war—the German 7.92 Kurz and the American .30 Carbine, which was fired by a small, semiautomatic rifle issued to support troops.³² That year, two Soviet cartridge experts, Nikolai Elizarov and Boris Semin, were at work refining the idea, and soon the pair had made a cartridge satisfactory to the Main Artillery Department: the M1943, a .30-caliber round with an overall length of 56 millimeters. The cartridge looked like little else in mainstream circulation. It was more than a full inch shorter than the standard .30-06 Springfield cartridge used in American rifles. But it was not entirely new—it closely resembled the M35 round developed by the GECO firm in Nazi Germany and used in Vollmer’s rifle. The similarities between the M35 and M1943 raise the possibility that Soviet spies obtained them even before the sturmgewehr was fielded, or that German technicians had shared details of the round or samples during trade agreements between Germany and the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1941, when, with Hitler’s permission, Soviet military delegations extensively toured German munitions plants.³³ Whatever its genesis, the M1943 fulfilled for the Red Army the niche that the 7.92 Kurz had filled for the Wehrmacht. Like the Kurz, the M1943 round flew from the muzzle at velocities closer to two thousand feet per second than the nearly three thousand feet per second traveled by the American round. In the eyes of ballisticians who favored high-velocity cartridges, such numbers marked the M1943 as a bantamweight, a round with limited range and knockdown power. To Soviet arms designers, these numbers were academic. Results were more important. Tests had shown that at six hundred meters, the new cartridge penetrated three pine boards each 2.25 centimeters thick, nearly three inches of wood in all.³⁴ Soviet ballisticians thought this was more than enough power and penetration to wound or kill a man at that considerable distance, which was beyond the range at which most fire from rifles found a mark. Experience had also shown that the sturmgewehr was not a weapon infantrymen wanted to face, at least not when armed with bolt-action arms with which to fire back. The M1943 had economic advantages, too. The army’s engineers noted that for every million rounds manufactured, the M1943 saved four tons of the alloys used for cartridge cases, a ton and a half of propellant, and more than a ton of lead. By March 1944, the M1943 was in production.³⁵ Now weapons would have to be made to fire it.

Soviet willingness to experiment with an intermediate cartridge, and the urge to field a new class of weapons around it, marked another instance of Russian ordnance officials recognizing the value of nascent military technology before many competing nations. Both imperial Russia and the Soviet system that replaced it had proven adept at this sort of intelligent mimicry. The Kremlin’s armies had not been early leaders in machine-gun design, but they had been smart borrowers of technologies and ideas from elsewhere. The results had been impressive. In the nineteenth century, czarist military officers had been among the first to see the value of Gatling and Maxim guns, and had integrated them into Russian formations and put them to effective combat use ahead of almost all the world’s other armies. Soon after the turn of the century, Russia started the work that in time put it at the vanguard of the shift to automatic rifles. Vladimir Fedorov had understood the utility of machine guns in the Russo-Japanese War, and had been intrigued with the idea of a small automatic rifle. From 1909 through 1913 he led a research program to design a suitable weapon. Working with the slightly smaller Japanese cartridges, he made a nine-and- a-half-pound automatic rifle that saw limited service in World War I. His rifle never saw mass production. Thirty-two hundred were made over roughly ten years,³⁶ and production was cancelled after the October Revolution. But Fedorov’s program bridged the Bolshevik coup. He survived the revolution and offered his services to the new socialist state. In 1918 he was sent to Kovrov, a center of arms production to Moscow’s east, to help open new gun works there. He supervised much of the factory’s early development, recruiting designers and workers and helping to make the plant a principal producer of machine guns and submachine guns used in the Great Patriotic War.³⁷ During his decades as a prominent armorer, he published widely on military and ordnance topics and became a giant in the insular clique of Soviet firearms designers. Through his outsized influence, an appreciation for automatic arms became entrenched among the Red Army design teams, and informed Soviet arms development.

This institutional affinity for automatic arms took another shape in the Great Patriotic War, when the Red Army embraced submachine guns. The Soviet Union had few submachine guns at the war’s outset. As German armor and artillery neared Moscow, Stalin discovered that the Red Army had almost none of the weapons to issue to troops tasked with the city’s defense. “The enemy was threatening the capital, and we had to look for two hundred submachine guns needed for those going behind the enemy’s lines,” he said later. “We did not let anyone sleep then.”³⁸ The shortage was in no small part his own fault—the dictator’s purges of the Red Army’s senior officer corps had sent many experts and proponents of automatic arms to their deaths.³⁹ But the Soviet Union found that its submachine guns were easy to manufacture. State arms factories and small “victory workshops,” many of them under siege in Moscow or Leningrad, produced huge quantities of the PPSh, a stubby eight-pound weapon with a distinctive circular magazine and a vented cooling shroud. The PPSh, which fired pistol ammunition, had completed its design and trial phase only in 1940. It was compact, simple to operate, and inexpensive to manufacture, and gave Soviet infantrymen firepower at close range. Its ease of manufacture was related to its design, which envisioned its being produced in part with electric welding and cold stamping, techniques considered beneath firearms by many Western manufacturers. The Soviet choice made sense. “The technology of manufacture of the PPSh ensured a considerable saving of metal, reduced the production cycle, and did not require complicated specialized tools and equipment,” one Soviet officer noted.⁴⁰ This also meant that highly skilled workers were not needed for its production, and were available for other work.

As weapons go, the PPSh was neither handsome nor refined. It was a triumph of pragmatism, expediency, and unpretentious Soviet ideals. One reviewer said it fit a pattern: “The Russians excel in calculated crudity. In these burp guns, the plumbers have all but eliminated the gunsmiths.”⁴¹ Aesthetics matter to many gunsmiths. They mattered not at all to a nation that risked falling under Nazi control. Known among Soviet conscripts as the pe-pe-sha, the dumpy submachine gun was popular with Red Army troops and was regarded well enough that when German soldiers captured them, as they often did, they carried them, too. This is the highest vote of confidence an infantry arm can achieve, and this submachine gun, rushed into production to save the nation, became a familiar prop in Soviet symbols of the Great Patriotic War, appearing endlessly in murals and statuary. But the effect of the PPSh, and of other Soviet submachine guns that appeared later in the war, was deeper than its tactical or symbolic power. It helped cement in the Red Army an appreciation for automatic arms that could be wielded by a single man.

For all of these reasons, in 1945, the Soviet military was well positioned, intellectually and industrially, to pursue a concept that had little traction in the West: a rifle of reduced power. By the time of the Nazis’ collapse, the Red Army had experienced decades of satisfactory service from the Mosin-Nagant rifle line, with roots in czarist times, which had followed the traditions of the era and fired a powerful round down a long barrel and achieved velocities in excess of twenty-eight hundred feet per second. And the Red Army had been similarly satisfied with its line of submachine guns. The idea of a weapon roughly midway between the two was not radical. It was evolutionary, and a matter of common sense.

The Red Army knew this, and as the Cold War began it leaped ahead of the Pentagon. The United States, the heavyweight among Western military powers, whose arming decisions would eventually determine which weapons NATO militaries would carry, retained its commitment to powerful cartridges. Inside Stalin’s Soviet Union, the approach to arms design was more flexible, more informed, more interested in what other nations had tried. The intensity of the police state also played a role. The internal risks and frantic subcurrents, along with the preeminence of the intelligence service as an instrument of bureaucratic power, kept the system and its participants alert. Pride in the intellectual pilferage of the enemy’s weapon designs made Soviet design processes less convention-bound. By early 1946, the Red Army had chosen its candidates to give a new class of weapon a Soviet form. Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov had made the first cut. He was an unlikely contender, given his history and