The Gun

Ata.

Later, he was sent to the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy, which had relocated from western Russia to Samarkand, in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. There, early in the summer of 1942,[10] Kalashnikov met Major General Anatoly A. Blagonravov, a Soviet academician who worked during the war on automatic arms. The general examined Kalashnikov’s prototype. It had technical problems and was not better than submachine guns already in Soviet use, including the PPSh. Kalashnikov has offered different versions of this meeting. In 1968 he said General Blagonravov reassigned him to the academy. “What did you do then?” an interviewer asked him. He answered: “What I was advised to do. I had to remain at the Academy and study.”⁷³ In later accounts, and in the official tale, Kalashnikov said the general intervened quickly on his behalf, having understood that whatever was wrong with Kalashnikov’s submachine gun, the fact of its creation demonstrated the sergeant’s commitment and talent. He recommended that Kalashnikov be transferred to a setting where he could pursue his design ideas full-time. In one memoir, Kalashnikov quoted from the recommendation he said the general made.

Despite a negative judgment on the submachine gun as a whole, I note the large and laborious work done by Comrade Kalashnikov with great love and persistence under extremely unfavorable local conditions. In this work Comrade Kalashnikov displayed indisputable talent in designing the submachine gun, especially if one takes into consideration his insufficient technical education and a total lack of experience in gunsmithery. I consider it advisable to send Comrade Kalashnikov to study at a technical school, at least to short-term courses for military technicians in accordance with his wish, as the first step possible for him in wartime.⁷⁴

In Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, General Blagonravov’s letter was presented to Lieutenant General Pavel S. Kurbatkin, an officer who had helped defeat the basmachi Islamic uprising in the region twenty years before, and who commanded the Central Asian Military District. The general ordered Kalashnikov to Moscow, to the Main Artillery Department. His journey to Schurovo began. On the train, he rode with Sergei G. Simonov, an established designer. The two discussed the sergeant’s prospects. General Blagonravov had told Kalashnikov to read widely and to study all existing firearms. “Without knowing the old you will not make the new well,” he had said.⁷⁵ Simonov offered similar advice.

Suddenly Simonov squinted and smiled;

“Now tell me: Do you like to dismantle things?”

“You bet!” I exclaimed. “And I put something back together and then take it apart again to see every projection, every groove, every depression, every washer and every screw in order to understand exactly how everything works.”

“Well, then, when we get to the testing range, the first thing you should do is dismantle and assemble every gun. Feel the metal structures with your hands and eyes—and you will understand everything better, and it will be easier for you to perfect your gun.”

“I’ll do that, Sergei Gavrilovich,” I assured Simonov.

I thought I saw him glance at my tanker’s insignia.

“We all must do our jobs! Otherwise one could end up firing a pistol from a tank.”⁷⁶

Upon arriving at Schurovo, Kalashnikov frequented the polygon’s museum, which had an extensive collection of Russian and foreign weapons. “The specimens of arms displayed gave a graphic picture of the evolution of arms,” he said. “I took rifles, carbines, pistols, submachine guns and machine guns in my hands and thought about how unique various designing solutions were, how unpredictable the flight of creative thought could be, and how similar Russian and foreign arms sometimes were.” He added: “Sometimes I noticed that originality did not always go well with expediency.”⁷⁷ Kalashnikov was also drawn to another collection: prototypes of Russian and Soviet firearms that had not been selected for production. All of these weapons had flaws, but many had an unusual component or represented a novel approach. Kalashnikov tried to determine what about each weapon had made it a failure and inspected weapons from this scrap heap to see if any had a valuable feature, unrelated to its disqualification, that might be applied in a future design.

For much of the next two years, Kalashnikov shuttled between Schurovo and institutes in Tashkent and Alma-Ata. He tried to perfect his submachine gun, but the Red Army’s evaluators rejected it, saying that it still did not improve on existing models and was too complicated. (By the account of one of his supervisors at Schurovo, Kalashnikov’s work was of little promise: “Those samples were not even tested, since they were very primitive…. I can state with responsibility that during his work in Kazakhstan he did not create anything useable.”) ⁷⁸ In late 1943, he participated in a contest for a light machine gun and was selected as a finalist. Again his submission did not win approval. “The failure wounded my pride,” he said, and claimed that after these disappointments, he considered leaving the armorer profession and returning to the front. Instead, he said, he was encouraged to remain at his job by the chief of the polygon’s Inventions Department. In October 1944 he tried to work out a semiautomatic carbine matched to the new M1943 intermediate cartridge. His project was discontinued when Simonov’s entrant became the front runner. Every gun he had tried to design had failed. “I suffered probably a hundred times more failures,” he said, “than other designers.”⁷⁹

Early in 1946, three and a half years after leaving Central Asia for his new career, Sergeant Kalashnikov had his break: selection to continue in the trials to design an avtomat for the M1943 cartridge.

After being chosen for the second phase, he was transferred from Schurovo to Kovrov, an industrial center. Roughly two hundred miles east and north of Moscow, Kovrov was officially a city whose workers manufactured excavators. In accordance with the Soviet cover assigned to it, the plant where Kalashnikov was assigned was engaged in the manufacture of motorcycles. In fact it was dedicated to the production of automatic arms, including many of the machine guns and submachine guns that had driven the Nazis off, among them the PPSh. When Sergeant Kalashnikov arrived, the plant had recently been awarded the Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s highest award, for its successes arming the Red Army. During the war, the Communist Youth, working with factory workers who logged eleven-hour days on the assembly lines, constructed a new shop and production center for the Goryunov machine gun.⁸⁰ Nationalist fervor in Kovrov ran strong, at least among the officials. “A special exultant atmosphere reigned there,” Kalashnikov wrote.⁸¹

The assignment came at a difficult time for Kalashnikov. Repression and war had scattered the Kalashnikov family, and now that the war was over, news of his family’s grief was reaching him. Two of his older brothers—Ivan and Andrei—had been killed. The husband of his sister Gasha, who had been the dedicated party man in Kurya, had been lost in the war, too. The direct family tally meant that of the seven male members in Timofey Kalashnikov’s peasant household in 1930, only two survived the next fifteen years unharmed—Timofey died in exile, Viktor had been sentenced to a labor gang, Ivan and Andrei were killed in action, Mikhail had been wounded. This sort of suffering distilled the sorrow of the Stalin years. The war losses also gave meaning to the nation’s pride in its role and sacrifices in defeating Hitler’s Germany—the Soviet Union’s greatest accomplishment and a subject used to distract attention from the system’s cruelty and failures. Kalashnikov was too busy to return home and comfort his bereaved relatives. The avtomat project demanded his attention. His life was also changing. Though he had a young son and wife in Matai, on the Kazakh steppe, he had fallen in love with Katya, the draftswoman at the NIPSMVO design bureau. He was filled with longing as he left for Kovrov. Katya had to remain behind.

For a young arms designer on an important project, Kovrov held professional promise. Revered names in Russian armaments circles had worked at the plant, including Fedorov and Vasily A. Degtyarev, a Fedorov protege and Stalin favorite who had been promoted to general-grade rank and given a black ZIS, the imitation Packard limousine manufactured by hand for the party’s elite. When the arms plant received the Order of Lenin, General Degtyarev had been granted the Order of Suvorov, a decoration typically given to leaders who excelled in combat. Such was the general’s stature. He had achieved the rarefied place of rewards and fame that Stalin’s machine doled out to its favored sons. Kovrov was a place for arms-design greatness. And with the push for an avtomat, there was fresh urgency and opportunity. A cadre of draftsmen, engineers, machinists, and other specialists were pressed into service. Kalashnikov was soon paired with his new bureau.