The Gun

subsisted in poverty, but wood outside could be used for heat, and with it they built a new log home. Mikhail Kalashnikov resisted settling into an exile’s life. As a young teenager, he was homesick and decided to return to Kurya. There he found the ashes where his family home had stood. It had been razed. He returned to Nizhnaya Mokhovaya, but soon, hoping to begin again in a place where he was not known as an exile, he fled with a friend to the small outpost of Matai, in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, near the border with China. The pair moved in with his friend’s relatives, and Kalashnikov began working as a clerk at a rail yard of the Turkestan-Siberian Railway. Within a few months, he was recruited into the Komsomol, the Young Communist League. He had taken steps that would change his life. Kalashnikov remained in Matai for two years. During this time, a period of surreptitious rehabilitation, he became a tovarisch again, though he lived with the worry of discovery. “I was haunted by the fear that someone might learn about my past as a deportee,” he said.⁵¹

In late 1938, Kalashnikov was drafted into the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army and assigned to duty in western Ukraine, near Poland. As a small-statured man, he was well suited for the tight confines of tank service, and was sent to a school for tank mechanics and drivers. His small size also meant that he was bullied in indoctrination camp, and he struggled to develop military bearing. But the Red Army was a social leveler, and in time Kalashnikov found a place in its ranks, though he was not impressed with all aspects of his service, particularly in matters of readying for war. Hitler’s attack was to catch the Red Army in a Stalin-enforced slumber. This was the army—out of touch with its responsibilities—that had conscripted Kalashnikov. It did little to ready him for the tasks ahead. “We weren’t at all prepared,” he said. “The soldiers hadn’t been given the necessary training. We’d hardly learned how to shoot.”⁵²

Tanks require continual maintenance and frequent repair, and Kalashnikov’s assignment to a tank unit put modern tools in his hands. The workshops became his new outlet, as the horse and plow had been years before. He soon designed a device that measured the hours on a tank’s engine and submitted it to a competition sponsored by the Red Army in 1939. The army was struggling to determine the actual number of engine hours on its fleets of tanks, due to the behavior of Soviet tank crews.

Why? Because when you work in a tank you get dirty very quickly. They would put all their clothes into petrol and then hang them out to dry. They would then write down all the petrol they used and fake the petrol receipts. That is why the fuel was used in such huge amounts. After a certain number of hours a tank is supposed to be repaired. Since they did not start the tank but instead wrote down the hours of work, the equipment was repaired but without needing it. Therefore we needed a device that would count the real numbers of hours that the tank was used.⁵³

The tank was a central instrument of the Soviet army. Kalashnikov said his interest in such a machine and its well-being earned him both a commendation and a meeting with Georgy K. Zhukov, the general commanding the military district that covered Ukraine. The general transferred Kalashnikov to a tank plant in Leningrad in 1941, to work on the device.[9] Kalashnikov’s conversion was nearly complete. With war threatening, the Red Army was a repository of national pride and a sense of communal commitment. Kalashnikov had limited contact with his scattered family. The party and the army were becoming surrogates, anchoring him in the complex and formerly hostile Soviet world. Young Kalashnikov, a son of an enemy of the people, whose brother had just finished a long term of hard labor, was being drawn into the system that had set upon his family. He was finding purpose, community, respect—and perks.

Then came the war, in June 1941, which would turn Kalashnikov finally and completely into a right-thinking Soviet man. The Wehrmacht’s opening actions surprised Stalin and his generals. While German planes and artillery attacked their targets, the Blitzkrieg rolled over the borders and smashed an army that had not armed itself adequately and was not on alert. The Germans pushed on. As they overpowered Soviet defenses, front-line Soviet commanders either were in disbelief or dismissed the sounds of battle as noise from maneuvers.⁵⁴ The Kremlin seemed paralyzed; Stalin did not make a public statement for almost two weeks. Propaganda filled the air. The German columns advanced across Russian soil.

The Red Army and the party leadership sank into confusion and recrimination. In Leningrad, Kalashnikov was ordered from the tank factory back to his regiment, promoted to the rank of senior sergeant, and sent to fight as the commander of a newly issued T-34 tank.⁵⁵ The T-34 was one of the more successful pieces of military equipment in Soviet history, a durable, quick machine, and a technical match for the German Panzers. It was a welcome replacement for the aging T-26s that Kalashnikov’s regiment had driven before. But the Red Army units remained inadequately trained and poorly led, and the soldiers were mismatched against the German Blitzkrieg.

Not too many years later, after Kalashnikov became an approved symbol of the proletariat, a biography was necessary for him. This manufactured biography required whitewashing entire chapters of his life and inventing approved substitutes to bring him to this moment: the transformative experience of combat against the Germans. Such were the demands of saccharine Soviet mythmaking, part of the propagandists’ norm for framing the population’s understanding of their nation and figures the party chose to make historic. (Marshal Zhukov’s memoirs were to become a classic case).⁵⁶ In one moment in the tale built around Kalashnikov, he was at a bunker on the front lines reading a letter from his mother, who had written, “How are you whipping the enemy there?” She then described the secure condition of the Kalashnikov home in the Altai steppe, in lovely Kurya, where the family had recently repaired the roof. Sergeant Kalashnikov closed his eyes and dreamed of the home he had left behind. Everything was about progress.

How many beautiful hours he had spent as a child there! There was a tower from which it seemed one could see a whole miraculous world which lay beyond the Altai steppe; filled with shavings from the shop in which they were born, everything like now, tractors or machinery thundering so that in tens of courtyards chickens flew up into the sheds from fright.⁵⁷

The story was Soviet invention, a fabricated homespun yarn. It was also striking in the audacity of its deception, which Kalashnikov tolerated and participated in for years. Sergeant Kalashnikov’s mother tended to no home in the Altai. The home had been seized during collectivization when she and her family had been exiled. And there was not much need for fixing a roof on a home that party arsonists had burned to the ground. As for fond memories of the family’s life at the edge of “the miraculous world,” Kalashnikov later said he returned to the ruins of his childhood house once. The collective farmers complained of his visit. “Misha was looking for something on the site of your house,” one of them said to his sister. “Must have been after gold.”⁵⁸ There was no such letter from Kalashnikov’s mother. And the Germans were not being whipped. Rather, by October, German Panzers were overrunning Bryansk, a city in western Russia along the route between Kiev and Moscow. Kalashnikov’s regiment, newly equipped and reorganized, was fighting them in the rolling countryside to the city’s south. And his experience of the war was much different from the predetermined struggle described in the party’s propaganda organs.

What really happened in Kalashnikov’s tank company has been lost in the multiple retellings. But he and the legends alike say he was wounded, apparently by an exploding shell during a skirmish. In one account, Kalashnikov said a group of Soviet tanks had become separated from the main unit, and he opened his turret hatch to look around. At that instant, he said, a shell exploded nearby, blasting shrapnel through his chest and back.⁵⁹ In another account, a shell slammed into his tank. “A big boom echoed in my ears and an amazingly bright light blinded my eyes for an instant,” he said. He was knocked out. In the explosion a piece of the tank’s armor struck him. “I do not know for how long I remained unconscious. Perhaps, I was out for a considerable time…. Somebody was trying to undo my overalls. I felt as if my left shoulder and arm were someone else’s…. A fragment of the tank armor had passed through my left shoulder after a direct hit.”⁶⁰ The official Soviet account, formerly embraced by Kalashnikov, was the most dramatic of all. In this version, Kalashnikov’s platoon commander, his head bandaged and bloodied, fought off a German assault on his regiment’s right flank. The officer managed to maneuver his platoon of T-34 tanks behind a group of Panzers, scattering the German infantry with machine-gun fire. The commander’s tank was immolated in an explosion, and Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov— shouting, “The dirty swine, they set fire to our commander!”—rushed his own T-34 forward to help. Kalashnikov’s tank was struck. A bright light flashed. He passed out. The account continues: “How long this went on, Kalashnikov