The Gun

fact.¹⁰² These accounts present a credible challenge to Kalashnikov’s accounts, which blended the official Soviet biography with post-perestroika inserts and edits.

Further challenges to the rifle’s parentage have also suggested that Kalashnikov had not been forthcoming about the origins of the AK-47. Central to these claims were two allegations that flowed from forces both historical and personal. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, many legends were questioned by a population weary of propaganda and state lies; this larger re-examination led to a revisiting of the official story of the AK-47. Kalashnikov appeared to have drawn some of the attention on himself. Several colleagues thought the designer, who had basked in state glory and enjoyed benefits and favored treatment for decades, had assigned in his writing and public remarks too much credit to himself. They came forward with a fuller story.¹⁰³ Their counterclaims, largely ignored in the West, have proven long-lasting within arms circles in Russia.

One allegation asserted that Kalashnikov’s final prototype included a primary design feature—the integrated bolt carrier and gas piston—lifted from Bulkin’s earlier submission. Bulkin led a design bureau from Tula, a city south of Moscow that was another center of Soviet arms production. Unlike Kalashnikov, who was adept at endearing himself to his army and party superiors, Bulkin had a quarrelsome personality. He was not well liked by the judges.

The other allegation asserted that Kalashnikov had inside help from a testing officer at the range, Major Vasily Fyodorovich Lyuty, who provided Kalashnikov many ideas he applied to his prototype. Lyuty, who worked at Schurovo, claimed that he shepherded the early Kalashnikov design through a disappointing first showing and overruled a stern report from U. I. Pchelintsev, a testing engineer, which concluded: “The system is incomplete and cannot be further developed.” In all, Lyuty claimed, he recommended eighteen changes to the first prototype, which Kalashnikov accepted. Pchelintsev’s rejection letter was then rewritten.

I felt the test frustration deeply with Mikhail, because we were friends. This is why when he asked me, as the chief of the testing unit, to have a look at the gun and Pchelintsev’s account to outline the improvement program, I agreed of course. In fact, I took up all the subsequent business in my hands, thank God I had the knowledge and experience needed for it. Having studied the test report scrupulously I came to the conclusion that the design had to be redone almost anew, since according to my calculations 18 improvements of different complexity had to be made. I told Mikhail about it and explained what, and most important, how, this can be done to the avtomat. With the account of my remarks, I changed Pchelintsev’s conclusion and recommended the gun for further improvement.¹⁰⁴

Major Lyuty added that after the first round of tests, he and Kalashnikov worked side by side, along with Colonel Deikin, and the trio made the prototype that became a finalist. Major Lyuty later fell into official disfavor. He was arrested in April 1951 and taken to Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Soviet intelligence service, where he was beaten and accused of preparing a terrorist act against party leaders, of circulating anti-Soviet propaganda, and of participation in a counterrevolutionary group. He feared he would be executed. After torture and with coaching from another inmate, he agreed to confess to involvement in anti-Soviet propaganda. He was sentenced to ten years. Lyuty served four years in a labor camp, cutting wood near Kansk, and then was transferred to a sharaga near Moscow, where scientists and designers served their sentences. In 1954, after Stalin died, he was rehabilitated and returned to work, but not before Kalashnikov had become a proletarian legend and model of socialist virtue. Kalashnikov’s public standing precluded serious challenge to his record in Soviet times.

On one level, claims that the Kalashnikov design bureau, by appropriating elements of Bulkin’s design or accepting help from a test officer, tainted the contest do not account for the nature of the Soviet army’s pursuit of new arms. The Soviet Union did not operate by Western rules. Notions of intellectual property were incompletely formed. Officials encouraged designers to copy features of any weapon that could be usefully applied to their prototypes, even weapons in development by competitors.¹⁰⁵ Kalashnikov’s final design did not copy Bulkin’s test model in full; it incorporated a central idea but changed details, including the location of the cams. Kalashnikov never denied that he was an aggressive borrower. Collecting good ideas from existing firearms was, to him, fundamental to sound design. One of his reflections was resonant on this point. Sometimes originality does not go with expediency, he said. The first avtomat that his bureau produced for the M1943 cartridge, the AK-46, borrowed from John C. Garand, the designer of the standard infantry rifle for the United States, and his bureau tinkered with variations on Schmeisser’s trigger assembly, obtained by studying captured German arms. More broadly, as tests for an automatic weapon proceeded from Sudayev’s AS-44 to Kalashnikov’s final prototype, many submissions by different designers came to resemble one another in significant ways. Design convergence seemed to have been a welcome byproduct, even an aim, of holding competitions.

Kalashnikov always rebutted his accusers. He berated a Russian newspaper for publishing a story arguing that he had copied Bulkin’s work in an untoward way. “Certain people would like to cast doubt on the paternity of the AK-47,” he wrote. “I’m 83 years old, but fortunately I’m still here to reply to those mendacious accusations!” The questions persisted. The changes in his prototypes just before the final phase were so striking, and a central change bore enough physical and conceptual resemblance to Bulkin’s earlier design, that they pointed to the broader nature of the AK-47’s creation, which had been cocooned in a simplistic narrative for decades. They suggested that the weapon came into existence via expansive collaboration rather than springing from the mind of one man.

Whatever the exact origins of the final changes and whoever deserved the credit—Kalashnikov, Zaitsev, Bulkin, Lyuty, Deikin, and others—the AK-47 had taken its recognizable form. And many of its mechanical merits were evident. Kalashnikov described an encounter with Vasily Degtyarev, the general who had designed some of Russia’s most successful arms. The meeting, if the account is to believed, said much about the redesigned weapon’s potential. It occurred as the last prototype neared completion. The general and Kalashnikov met at Kovrov. Someone in the group proposed that they show each other their work. “Cards on the table,” he said.

The graying sixty-six-year-old general and the twenty-eight-year-old sergeant presented their weapons. Kalashnikov had disassembled his, so the general could examine each part. These two men were not the sort who would be expected to meet like this. The general had been predestined to be an armorer. Born into a family of czarist gunsmiths in Tula in 1880, he began working in the city’s arms factory at age eleven. Like Fedorov, he endeared himself to the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and began working on automatics. As Leon Trotsky was building a socialist army, he worked at the gun works at Kovrov, which became his home. Fedorov was aging. Degtyarev was heir apparent to be the Soviet Union’s konstruktor emeritus. His chest was adorned with state prizes and medals; his party contacts were extensive. With his short gray hair, parted to the side, he vaguely resembled Nikita Khrushchev, though he had a restrained and dignified air. He looked at the AK-47, the work of unknowns. As Kalashnikov tells it, he was impressed.

All of a sudden, General Degtyarev made this staggering declaration: “The way Sergeant Kalashnikov has put the components of his model together is much more ingenious than mine. His model has more of a future—of that I’m certain. I no longer wish to participate in the final phase of the competition.”

He’d said all of that loud enough for everyone to hear. I can remember the moment perfectly well. The general was in uniform, decorated with his medal, the star of a Hero of Socialist Labour. I think that it was very brave of him to think in this way. It was an act of great honesty, and indeed nobility—especially in view of the fact that he was one of the “favourites” of the regime.¹⁰⁶

This story also shifted in its multiple tellings. Kalashnikov told a curator of the Smithsonian Institution, whom he befriended, that General Degtyarev made his declaration during the final testing.¹⁰⁷ In another memoir, he recalled the moment differently. In this version, soon before the final tests, officials from the Main Artillery Department visited Kovrov.

Degtyarev gave a tired smile, as if under the pressure of an invisible weight. His movements seemed sluggish to me and he shuffled noticeably. However, he quickly became animated when he saw our prototype. “Well, let’s see what the young are up to now.” Degtyarev started to examine each part, each component of the prototype which I was taking apart right on his table. “Yes, it’s a clever piece of work,” said Degtyarev as he took the bolt carrier and the receiver cover in his hands. “Your solution to the fire selector problem is certainly original.”