The Gun

credentials. But he was in the race.

Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in the remote village of Kurya, in the Altai region of south central Russia, in 1919, two years after Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks he led had toppled imperial Russia and begun to force upon the Russian peasantry their vision of the proletarian state. Kurya rests just north of the Kazakh steppe and west of the Russian and Mongolian highlands. It is a flat, dry, windswept place bisected by the winding and turgid Loktevka River, a lonely agricultural zone far from the capital that claimed it. Kalashnikov’s illiterate mother and semiliterate father were religious Cossacks, and had moved from the Kuban region of the North Caucasus and settled on the steppe after Czar Nicholas II had granted land to peasants willing to relocate.⁴² Mikhail was the eighth of his mother’s eighteen children, and suffered the privations of his time. Frontier hardships were shared. The family lived in a dank log cottage lit by kerosene lamps; the structure shook and groaned in storms. Some of the rooms had dirt floors. Only eight of the family’s children would survive childhood. His mother, Alexandra Frolovna, buried so many of her children that she recycled names, giving two of her deceased sons’ first names— Ivan and Nikolai—to boys she delivered later.⁴³

Kalashnikov was weak himself, small and prone to illness. He contracted smallpox at age five and carried the disease’s scars for life. He was sick enough at age six that his parents had a casket assembled for him, though he recovered to outlive everyone who watched over him. The coffin maker spat with anger. “Such a snotty little one,” he said, and added, “pretended he was dead.”⁴⁴ (In another account, Kalashnikov said the carpenter offered a different insult: “So young, and he’s already pulling a fast one! He’s a good actor, make no mistake!”) ⁴⁵ As he grew, Kalashnikov saw himself as a weakling, and was eager to be a muzhik, a real Russian man. Work served as an early outlet and a means to develop a sense of self. From age seven to nine he guided a horse and plow in the fields around the village and took pride in the labor, using his stature as a plowman to tease the boys not assigned to the fields. “I know the price of bread,” he would think. “And you are small fry.”⁴⁶ Kalashnikov enjoyed working with his hands and using tools. He attended school, learned to read and write, and took a liking to poetry, including writing simple verses. He understood that he was being raised in a traditional, elemental way: a Russian from hearty Russian bloodlines, eager for work, capable, steeped in vital folk values.

In 1928, after Lenin had succumbed to dementia and strokes, and Joseph Stalin had succeeded him as general secretary, Stalin and the party turned their attention to private agriculture. Stalin was dissatisfied. The agricultural sector, much of it in the hands of small landowners, was a nettlesome anticommunist symbol. As the nation industrialized, and more food was needed in the cities, he was angered by grain prices and production levels. The party tried requisition. Threats of expropriation of food drove production further down. Stalin decided to bring the peasants to heel, and to reverse the czar’s redistribution of land by bringing food production under state control. By 1929 the solution was selected. Peasants’ land would be seized, and peasants forced to work on collective farms. Agriculture was to be a state enterprise.

In the pogroms to subdue farmers and to pursue the party’s plans, Kalashnikov’s village was not spared. Government commissioners appeared and surveyed homes, livestock, and food stores; meetings with the villagers were held, sometimes overnight. The commissioners confiscated property and grain. Their plans assumed shape. Agriculture was to be centralized to stamp out a Soviet invention—the parasitic and counterrevolutionary kulaks—and to increase food production for the nation. The farmers were to be forced together to work on kolkhozy, the collective farms. Those deemed unsuited for communal work were to be exiled, so as not to disrupt the party’s plans.

The effects were immediately evident. Tensions simmered in Kurya, pitting families against one another and dividing households. Even classrooms were not immune; children were listed as rich or poor. Those fortunate enough to be classified as poor enjoyed newfound social leverage, which some officially poor children used as license to taunt classmates labeled rich. True wealth was scarce. In 1930 the commissioners returned. The Kalashnikov family was blacklisted, too. As part of collectivization, the state had taken to seizing the grain and slaughtering the livestock of suspect farmers. Kurya suffered a social frenzy. The small jealousies of the less-well- off families were given an outlet in the denunciation and public hounding of more successful families. The means of identifying kulaks were crude. Large families often kept more livestock to feed the larger number of mouths in the home. And a family that possessed more livestock than its neighbors could attract the commissioners’ attention. The Kalashnikov family was large. Mikhail Kalashnikov was confused. “It was not that easy to understand who was who,” he said.⁴⁷ In 1929, at the age of ten, Kalashnikov experienced his first heartbreak in a manner peculiar to the police state. His childhood crush, Zina, a dark-eyed girl he knew from school, stopped attending class. Zina’s parents had been denounced and blacklisted, and her entire family was deported in the night. Kalashnikov heard of her fate the morning after she had been shipped away. “I passed her house several times a day, hoping for a miracle,” he said. “What if I saw her tender face again, what if she smiled at me again? But that was not destined to happen.”⁴⁸

A group of men drove farm animals seized from several kulak families into their yard and hacked the animals to death with axes. The yard filled with terrified, bellowing animals, and then with carcasses as the blood flowed. The family was gripped with fear. It was divided as well. Mikhail had two older sisters. One, Nyura, had married a poor peasant. Her household was spared attention. The other, Gasha, had married Kurya’s most ardent party man. She severed ties with her parents and siblings ahead of their deportation; her siblings pretended not to know her. A few days after the slaughter in the yard, government sleighs arrived. The Kalashnikovs were taken away in the cold, except for Viktor, one of Mikhail’s brothers, who hid in a neighbor’s home. He was turned in by another villager and arrested. He served several years of forced labor, including time spent digging the White Sea Canal. (Kalashnikov has given different accounts of his brother’s sentence. By one, Viktor was sentenced to seven years of labor, but when his sentence ended two more years were added because he dared ask the camp chief why he had been convicted. In another, Viktor was sentenced three years, but had three years added because he tried to escape three times. In this version, he asked why he was sentenced and received an immediate sentence of another year. Kalashnikov’s memoirs are crowded with such jarringly inconsistent recollections.)⁴⁹

After travel northward by sled and railway livestock car, the Kalashnikov family was relocated to western Siberia and assigned by a party superintendent to a run-down hut in Nizhnaya Mokhovaya, a village in the marshy taiga near Tomsk. They were classified as “special deportees” and forbidden to use the word tovarisch, or comrade, which was above them. They were told they were mere citizens, nothing more. The family was not under guard. The Kalashnikovs had not committed grave political crimes, and the area was too remote and inhospitable for it to be necessary to post guards over deported farmers. The authorities required Timofey Kalashnikov to report periodically to the local administration. The administration did not need to worry. A family had nowhere to run. Restarting an agricultural life in an unfamiliar climate, without seeds or the usual tools, the family found life worse than what it had known. In the spring Timofey Kalashnikov and his five remaining children—all sons—worked to clear an area for cultivating food, fighting off swarms of insects as they dug and tilled. Within a year Mikhail’s exhausted father fell sick. He succumbed in the winter, and the family was not able to bury him during a Siberian blizzard. Kalashnikov recalled watching over his father’s body, expecting the man to rise and speak.

A snow storm was raging while Dad lay dying, and after he died it got even worse. One could not leave the house in such weather. So Dad’s body was kept in a cold room in our house for a week. We had been so happy in such weather when we lived in Kurya. The wood in the stove would be burning, Mom would be combing yarn, my sisters knitting, my brothers making something, one of us would be reading verses from a book, and then Dad would begin to sing all of a sudden… Shivering from the cold I went up to the door of the cold room in which Dad’s body was lying and listened for a long time. It seemed to me that I was just about to hear him say something softly in his confident deep voice…. But no, he did not sing of the “sacred Baikal,” the tramp was not running down a narrow path and the Cossack was not galloping across a valley, across the faraway “Caucasian land.” There was only the vicious snowstorm raging around our hut.⁵⁰

The next year, Mikhail attended a school in which the teachers were deportees, too. The school, which was to prepare exiled children for adulthood and the modernity the Soviet Union craved, had no paper. Kalashnikov’s mother remarried to a Ukrainian exile with three children of his own, and their combined household endured. They