The Gun

allowed to assemble honest accounts of arms plants and arming decisions in Russia, North Korea, China, and many other nations. The weapon was principally a product of secretive governments, and unpleasant facts surrounding its distribution have left governments and exporters with little incentive to share their roles openly. Further, Russia, where the Avtomat Kalashnikova originated in Soviet times, has expressed itself on the subject mostly through propaganda, which over time and through repetition has hardened into national fable. The fuller versions remain officially suppressed, lost to the combined and corrosive effects of the censors and the near chanting of half-truths and lies. Myths have risen around the weapon, as have honest understandings. Separating the two is a challenge for any researcher, particularly in a period when important state archives remain sealed and when many institutions and groups, ranging from Kalashnikov’s family to the manufacturers of the weapons that bear his name, are invested in self-serving versions that cannot be fully verified and do not appear sturdy enough to withstand scrutiny. The story of the Kalashnikov is further complicated by accounts of soldiers, activists, and journalists, Eastern and Western, pro-gun and anti-gun, whose statements often flow from legend, fancy, or, in the case of the ideologues, ulterior motives. Such distillations have been repeated so often that they can appear to the casual observer to be fact. Last, elements of the weapon’s story are difficult to assemble because of the weapon’s frequent involvement in crimes. The criminals who have used them left no archives. Many have had a marked unwillingness to discuss their work. And yet for all of these obstacles, the weapons exist in such huge quantities and in so many visible fashions that a rich history can be assembled with rigor. And the questions whose answers are unknown or unresolved, the blank spots—like those of a redacted Soviet text—can be pointed out and encircled with analysis and the available facts.

Third, this book does not attempt to address the core arguments over the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. There are several reasons for this. The book is principally concerned with events and activities outside the United States, and with roles that automatic weapons play in conflict zones and regions of instability. Their effects upon stable, developed, Western democracies are of an entirely different order, and so of limited interest in this treatment. Where this book does examine events within the United States, these events are mostly matters of nineteenth-century conflict, arms development and sales, military policy, and the evolution of tactical choices in officers’ circles. The Second Amendment, and the many questions of individual rights and public policy that surround it, is another subject. This is especially so because throughout the period of their existence, the Kalashnikovs discussed here, which in the United States are classified under federal law as weapons covered by the 1934 National Firearms Act—essentially, as machine guns—have not been available to most American citizens. As such, they are largely removed from the main disputes over how to define and legislate the right to bear arms in the present day. Moreover, the Kalashnikov rifles that are in circulation in the United States are almost all semiautomatic arms, and fire a single shot for each trigger pull. For this reason—the fact that they are not fully automatic weapons—they are not Kalashnikovs as the rest of the world understands them.

Fourth, on the subject of sources: To explore the more challenging periods or characters, especially within the Soviet Union and the nations of the Warsaw Pact, the middle portion of this book brings together conflicting sources and positions them against each other. Many sources are sound. Some are not verifiable, but have enough merit to be included with attribution and explanation. Some are suspicious or outright false and are declared to be so in the text. The value of the dubious sources is that they demonstrate both a portion of the lies that have been circulated and the reasons why. The Soviet Union deployed falsehoods for practical purposes, and its propaganda— pernicious and sustained for decades—has indelibly informed the public understanding of the Kalashnikov line. It is worthwhile, then, for a reader, when examining Soviet military history from official and contemporaneous Soviet sources, to remember the words of General Aleksei Yepishev, chief political commissar of the Soviet armed forces. In a helpfully apt summary of much of what was published in Soviet times, Yepishev dismissed the complaints of Georgy K. Zhukov, marshal of the Soviet Union, whose memoirs were being “edited” by a Communist Party rewrite team in ways that removed criticism of Stalin, made them more celebratory and platitudinous, and included cameo appearances by senior communist officials who demanded that they appear in the text, no matter their relevance to the story. (Leonid Brezhnev, who never saw Zhukov in the war years, was among those who insisted on being named.) To Zhukov’s objections, Yepishev said: “Who needs your truth if it stands in our way?”⁷ This is part of the nature of official Soviet history, and it frames one of the challenges to objective researchers of the period. And for exactly this reason, Soviet sources are useful, even necessary, when clearly shown for what they are. They go to the very character and motivations of actors involved, and provide readers with a basis for a healthy skepticism of official stories in the national stock.

The nature of available sources drove choices in structure. The book is arranged to present three periods of a history: the origins of rapid-fire arms, the development and mass distribution of Eastern bloc assault rifles, and the effects these weapons have had on security and war. The middle section in places offers differing accounts and allows for triangulation. This approach has utility in presenting contradictory statements by Soviet propagandists and by Mikhail Kalashnikov about the invention and development of this weapon, and about the designer’s personal history. Again, it provides a foundation for skepticism. The clarity with which Soviet and Russian falsehoods are visible should not be taken as an indication that Western sources on Western arms told the truth. Sometimes they did; other times they did not. Arms designers and military officers in the West, and one now-defunct firm with a prominent place in this book—Colt’s Firearms Division of Colt Industries—engaged in untrustworthy behaviors. But there is a difference between Western sources and sources with a Soviet influence. In the West, the availability of materials in archives, and laws that allow at least a modicum of public access to once-classified reports, allow the Western portion of this history to emerge in a crispness of detail that is not yet possible in much of the old Soviet space, where legends, though challenged and under strain from post-Soviet disclosures, manage to live on.

Fifth, a note to the collector, enthusiast, industrial historian, or forensic investigator: This book does not attempt to provide a full field guide to Kalashnikov-style weapons, the ammunition they fire, and the factories that produced them. Such a reference would be, without question, a valuable resource, including as a tool for helping soldiers and law enforcement officers to trace collected weapons to their sources. It would also be a different book. But the field-guide notion is worth addressing here. A small number of firearms references have attempted this, at least in part, and the United States military has quietly built an arms database, known as CHUCKWAGON, that provides this service to its users. The Pentagon’s database includes data not just on weapon types by style and serial numbers and their sources of production but also on intermediate handlers, including governments and units that have possessed distinctly identifiable weapons at certain times. But for private citizens, none of the publicly available tools are complete, and all of them have errors. Most of them also repeat legends and common mistakes.⁸ An effort to provide that service here would no doubt include errors as well, partly owing to the secrecy and deception of many Kalashnikov producers, and partly because the official database, which might be used to refine such a record for the public, is closed to unofficial users.

Sixth, for those interested or invested in the continuing disputes about what cartridge and rifle combination would be best for conventional military duty in 2010 and beyond, this book does not recommend one cartridge or weapon over others. It deals bluntly with problems that surrounded the American military’s introduction in the 1960s of the M-16 rifle and the 5.56-millimeter cartridges it fired—a reaction to Kalashnikov proliferation that, in its early years, resulted in a weapon not ready for war. But the most pressing problems of that era were addressed well more than a generation ago, and much of the historical discussion is not relevant to comparisons between rifles offered for government service today. Moreover, the highly charged rifle-selection disputes that persist— between advocates of the SCAR, the M-4, the XM8, and many others, including new variants of the Kalashnikov line—are not treated here. That could be another book. The experiences of soldiers and Marines described in this book do have bearing on that conversation. They suggest that those who choose new rifles for military organizations should be wary of hype, and of salesmen pushing new products. The best tests of an automatic rifle occur in the body of experience accumulated during its service in combat over time. Many of the choices offered today have not been widely used by many hands, or have been used by secretive forces whose operations are not transparent and whose experiences are not sufficiently known and available for considered reflection and review. It is not the ambition of this book to champion one rifle over others. Based on what is publicly known, the limits of any endorsement are too great.

Similarly, this book avoids a celebration of the Kalashnikov’s technical merits. The AK-47 was, in hindsight, a predictable assimilation of converging ideas of military small-arms design. It came into existence via smart borrowing of others’ work and emerged as a compromise between established classes of firearms. Like all compromises, it was imperfect. Its descendants do have remarkable traits. Mostly they have been well made. But they are not engineering miracles or monuments to perfection, as often portrayed. Limitations and weaknesses