didn’t know. When he opened his eyes, he saw Kuchum. ‘Mish, Mish, are you alive?’” In this version, Kalashnikov was wounded only in the shoulder; there is no mention of chest or back wounds.61
The account followed the mores of the Soviet hero tale. Soon Kalashnikov regained consciousness and was able to walk. Soaked in blood, he rode outside his damaged tank, exposed on the vehicle’s armor, to help his company pick a withdrawal route. He then refused medical treatment and left his unit only when his company commander ordered him to a hospital. In later accounts, Kalashnikov has said that in fact when he regained consciousness he found his tank company had vanished. By one of these later accounts, his wounds were serious enough that he could not fight, and after hiding for two days in a bunker he was ordered by a doctor to travel to a hospital on a truck. In another account, he said his battalion commander ordered him to the hospital. The various versions Kalashnikov has circulated all converged briefly at the same point, a moment in which Kalashnikov was transported by truck with a group of wounded fellow soldiers.
Setting aside the diverging particulars of Kalashnikov’s final battle and his medical case, the larger situation was certain: The Red Army was being routed as the wounded sergeant was driven off in search of a hospital. From the strategic confusion sowing fear in the Kremlin down to the tactical disarray of the units scattered around Bryansk, disaster was near. The German units were about to capture the city, which they would occupy until 1943. Panzer columns and light motorized patrols roamed the countryside. The truck with the wounded Red Army soldiers stopped at a village that seemed deserted, and Kalashnikov, the driver, and a lieutenant with burned hands reconnoitered the town. They were spotted by a German patrol, came under fire, and escaped. But as they returned to their friends, they discovered that the Germans had found the truck. Next came an incident that appears in all his memoirs: The Germans, Kalashnikov said, executed the wounded Soviet soldiers with close-range automatic fire. After the Germans drove away, the three surviving Soviet soldiers emerged from hiding and gathered at the truck to look in horror upon the dead and dying men, whom they had left only a few minutes before. “Our lieutenant was already vomiting and suddenly I doubled over, too, and threw up,” Kalashnikov wrote.62
The official Soviet account is again much more dramatic. In it, as the truck moved through the countryside, Kalashnikov and the other wounded soldiers talked at length and in detail about the need for a new automatic weapon in the Red Army. When they reached the deserted village, Kalashnikov volunteered in spite of his injury to reconnoiter the town and set off with another soldier. They were fired upon by a German patrol but escaped and returned to a place near the truck and saw that the Germans had surrounded it. As they watched, the doctor protested about a Nazi soldier touching a wounded Russian, and a German hit him with a rifle butt. One of the Red Army soldiers on the truck—Kuchum, who in this version had tended to Kalashnikov after he was wounded— wrestled a gun from the Germans and killed a German officer, but was shot dead in the struggle. The Germans then leveled their submachine guns and opened fire. “Barbarians!” the Red Army doctor shouted as he died. Kalashnikov opened fire with a pistol, but it was no use. He was chased away by the Germans’ superior firepower. Like much in the Soviet version, it is an engaging, powerful, and fully unverifiable tale.
By Kalashnikov’s later telling, the three survivors wandered the countryside and were taken in and hidden and fed by a peasant, who happened to be a doctor. The man cleaned the soldiers’ wounds and dressed them with new bandages. The soldiers hid in a pile of hay for two or three days, and at last, after more days of walking, reached Red Army lines near the village of Trubchevsk. “We gave ourselves up as prisoners of our own army, since we’d crossed German lines and weren’t carrying any papers,” Kalashnikov wrote. “Every Russian soldier’s worst nightmare was to fall into German hands: We’d avoided the worst, and were safe. After a short interrogation, the lieutenant and I were sent to hospital, while Kolya reassumed his job as an army driver.”
Sergeant Kalashnikov’s first sustained treatment for his injuries was at Evacuation Hospital 1133 in Yelets, a city about four hundred miles south of Moscow.63 There he stayed into early 1942, among wounded soldiers in a crowded ward. In Yelets, he said, his interest in arms design took serious shape. “My roommates included tankers, infantrymen, artillerymen and sappers. We often argued about the advantages and shortcomings of various kinds of weapons. I did not take active part in those debates, yet they made an impression on me. I listened with particular interest to those who had themselves attacked the enemy with a submachine gun or checked enemy attacks on their trenches. Their description of how the automatic weapon worked in close combat was most convincing.”64 In Yelets, Kalashnikov said, he was racked with nightmares of the execution of the wounded soldiers in the truck, and of being underequipped against German troops. “I woke up, my heart beating fast, only to hear the moans of my neighbors. They were having nightmares, too, and woke up one by one: a wonderful silence fell on the room, but not because everybody was asleep—on the contrary. I, too, lay in the dark with my eyes open and thought: How come? We had been told before the war that we would not incur heavy casualties and that we would fight with up-to-date weapons. But now, whoever I asked said that he had to share a rifle with another soldier when fighting…. Where were our automatic arms?”65
Kalashnikov said he began reading
In early 1942 he was granted a convalescent leave and boarded a train intending to return to Kurya. His two sisters still lived there. En route, however, Kalashnikov said he changed his mind, choosing to head to Matai, where the railway depot might provide a workshop. He wanted to try to convert his sketches to a submachine gun. According to Kalashnikov’s memoirs, the chief of the locomotive department granted his request and assigned several people to assist him, including a welder, a fitter, and a machinist. A group of women at the depot’s technical bureau helped with the drawings. After three months, he said, his ad hoc design team had its prototype —a “black lacquered submachine gun number one,” he called it, which fired 7.62?25 Tokarev pistol cartridges.67 (How long Kalashnikov worked on the first prototype is a subject of confusion. His memoirs say three months. In an interview, he said he worked “about half a year.”)68 Once the crude prototype was ready, the team held firing tests, first to ensure that it functioned and then to examine its accuracy. The official Soviet version is again more colorful. According to Kalashnikov’s party chronicler, the depot chief was not interested in helping the sergeant, but a Communist Party organizer saw the error in this, intervened, and convinced him to allow Kalashnikov to work on the depot’s grounds. Often in the official version, party officials appear to provide well-timed pushes.69
Sergeant Kalashnikov settled into Matai, taking up residence in a single-story wooden home and fathering a son, Viktor Mikhailovich, who was born late in 1942.70 By then Kalashnikov had moved again, away from the child and the child’s mother.71 Once the weapon was finished, a local official decided to send the weapon and the sergeant to the military registration and enlistment headquarters in Alma-Ata, the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Kalashnikov made the train trip, drinking vodka along the way with fellow travelers. He arrived in the capital, presented himself to a lieutenant serving as the commissar’s adjutant, and announced that he, a tank sergeant on convalescent leave, had made a new weapon. He said he would like to show it to the commissar. He was arrested. “This was war time and everybody was very much on guard,” Kalashnikov said. “The question was, where did this staff sergeant get the means to develop a machine pistol?”72
Relieved of his weapon and of his belt, Sergeant Kalashnikov spent four days locked in a guardhouse, asking each of his cell mates, as they were released, to contact people on his behalf. On the fourth day the adjutant appeared and arranged his release. (Unsurprisingly, the official version makes no mention of an arrest.) A car waited outside, to bring the sergeant to the republic’s Central Committee. Kalashnikov, it seemed, had enlisted the help of local party contacts he had made in Matai during the late 1930s as a member of the Komsomol. The official who met him affected the mannerisms and dress of Stalin, as many officials did at the time. He had no expertise in small arms, but, by Kalashnikov’s telling, he was impressed that the weapon had been created in a railroad workshop by a sergeant with no special training. He arranged for Kalashnikov to continue his work at an institute in the city under the mentorship of a specialist in aircraft weapons. Hundreds of Soviet design institutes and manufacturing enterprises had relocated to the east, out of reach of German columns and aircraft. Working from a small adobe building, Kalashnikov refined his weapon at the Moscow Aviation Institute, which had moved to Alma-
