The Gun

rifles gained international acceptance, and the sprawling infrastructure for their mass production in multiple countries was created and set in motion. The developments were often subtle and seemingly unrelated—a technical decision here by one entity, a political decision there by another. The result, as decisions accumulated, was an improved AK-47 and assembly lines opening in one nation, then another, while these weapons began to show up in battle, first as rarities, then curiosities, and then almost everywhere.

What fueled proliferation? Two larger phenomena drove the AK-47’s spread from the secrecy of Schurovo to near ubiquity in conflict zones. They can be distilled into categories: the Kremlin under Stalin, and the Kremlin under Khrushchev. Viewed through the prism of the Soviet Union’s industrial psychology, Stalin was the AK-47’s creator, the impatient dictator whose engineers conjured to existence weapons of all kinds, and whose arms plants perfected and assembled them at a hurried pace. This phenomenon predated the development of the gun. The same forces that led to the avtomat’s creation predicted a certain degree of its abundance, even—perhaps especially—during a time when Kalashnikov-producing nations lagged in producing consumer goods. The assault rifle was a priority product in the planned economy of Stalin’s police state, which saw itself under threat and was preparing for inevitable war. The emphasis on fielding assault rifles fit neatly into the larger pattern. As the Soviet Union expanded its nuclear arms programs, it overhauled its conventional equipment and engaged in arms races with the West across an array of items: attack aircraft, submarines, radar systems, tanks. Cold War urgency pressed Soviet engineers to improve the AK-47 and its follow-on arms and rush them to mass production. Production was linked to the strength, even the survival, of the state. All the while, as the force of Stalin’s personality and the particulars of his fears gave rise to the Soviet assault-rifle industry, the world was being divided into camps. The AK-47 emerged in time to become the principal firearm of one of them. These historical pressures forged the AK-47 into something more than a mere defense product; it was a national, then an international, requirement. But even Stalin could not last forever. Someone else would send the rifles around the world. Nikita S. Khrushchev, who would replace him, became the Kremlin’s arms dealer, the man whose government passed the weapons out and whose decisions would serve to expand assault-rifle production to outsized levels.

In the mid-1950s, while the Soviet Union staggered out of Stalin’s reign, the Kremlin was in a unique position. It was both the world’s standard bearer for socialism and a nation with the military power to help fraternal nations with their armament desires. Soviet arms became a form of Soviet political currency. Nations queued up, seeking their share, as did revolutionary groups, and, later, terrorist organizations. As the AK-47 gained acceptance and approval in the Soviet army, the Kremlin used it as a readily deliverable tool in the game of East-West influence jockeying, both as a diplomatic chip to secure new friendships and as an item to be distributed to those willing to harass or otherwise occupy the attention of the West. The trends gave energy to each other. As AK-47 production gathered momentum, the Kremlin also began pursuing a more activist foreign policy, and this policy shift encouraged the distribution of more military technology, for reasons practical and political. On the practical side, convincing allies and potential allies to select Soviet equipment expanded standardization. By circulating Soviet patterns across the contested world, Kremlin arms deals made interoperability with Soviet troops easier in the event of future wars and as notions of socialist revolution spread. This was an especially useful pursuit for cartridges and firearms, those most basic tools of war. Standardization also made client states accept that in the event of their own local wars, they would need to be resupplied via the Kremlin. The result was a logistical and psychological arrangement that created dependencies serving Kremlin interests. On the political side, sharing military technology cemented allies and made new friends for the Kremlin, all the while helping to frustrate the West. Clients and customers brought an intangible benefit, too. Foreign acceptance of Russian firearms created the impression that Soviet equipment was preferable to Western military products. For a nation that struggled to manufacture decent elevators and shoes, in a system in which wool shirts were not necessarily wool, approval of a Soviet weapon served as a refreshing endorsement of an industrial base often making shoddy goods.³

For all of these reasons, the period centered on the 1950s marked the most important years for the Kalashnikov line. The weapon had been developed. Now it would be debugged, and the man credited for its invention would be given public stature and material rewards and would be regarded as a proletarian hero—the role he would live for decades. The infrastructure would be built to manufacture the assault rifle across the socialist world, and the Russian assault rifle would see its first combat use—both by conventional forces and by insurgents. The United States military, all the while, would misjudge the meaning and significance of the AK-47’s arrival. Beyond dismissing the value of the socialists’ main firearm with parochial superiority, it would develop weapons for its own forces that would fail when it mattered most, losing one of the most important but least-chronicled arms races of the Cold War.

For the initial step in these processes, the Soviet army had to organize a base of domestic production, first to improve the AK-47’s design and then to equip its combat divisions. The avtomat was a standout compromise firearm, but like all compromises it was not perfect—not at all. The prototypes had flaws, and initial production proved problematic without extensive fine-tuning and a few major changes. In 1948 the army ordered rifles for field trials to be assembled in Izhevsk, one of the country’s rifle-manufacturing centers.⁴ The accounts of when this occurred vary. By one, Mikhail Kalashnikov said that in January 1948, the day after the announcement of the AK-47’s victory at Schurovo, he and a small team were transferred to the Izhevsk Motor Plant No. 524, which was officially manufacturing motorcycles.⁵ Izhevsk was an isolated industrial city almost six hundred miles east of Moscow, a community closed to most outsiders, hemmed off by dense forests and Russian suspicions. It had been a center of rifle production since czarist times. During the revolution, the gun works had gone over to Lenin and his party and helped arm Trotsky’s new forces. If socialism promised a grand new order of workers’ rule and higher living standards, it did not happen here. Izhevsk was a dingy factory town, with block upon block of bland apartment buildings surrounding factories belching dark smoke. The Orthodox church at the city’s center had been converted into a movie house. The brick-walled gun works, near the shore of a cold polluted lake, was sealed off by foreboding iron fences. A nearby steel plant kept it fed. Far from Moscow and Leningrad, this drab milieu was to be Kalashnikov’s new home.⁶

The initial manufacturing efforts posed problems. The AK-47 remained an unfinished idea, a set of integrated firearm design concepts that together made an automatic rifle. It needed substantial refinement. Lingering concerns about the weapon’s accuracy prompted the army to hold more tests, and, at one point, to try reducing the power of the M1943 cartridge.⁷ Durability was a concern, too, as some parts, including the return spring, were insufficiently sturdy.⁸ A batch of rifles was assembled and in May 1948 a second plant—Factory No. 74, the Izhevsk Machine Engineering Plant, or Izhmash—was ordered to produce the AK-47 as well.⁹ Once the first batch was finished, the rifles were sealed in special containers and sent to the army. Two months later, Kalashnikov was summoned to the Main Artillery Department in Moscow, and then rode by train with Nikolai N. Voronov, chief marshal of Soviet artillery, to the location where the field tests were held. Kalashnikov claimed to have already been a favorite of Voronov. The marshal, he said, had helped free up funding for the AK-47 prototypes after a lower-ranking general had refused it.¹⁰

Field trials are a normal stage in preparing a rifle for military service. What was revealing about this trial had little to do with the tests themselves, but with Kalashnikov’s behavior around senior officers. On the train back to Moscow, Marshal Voronov called Kalashnikov to a meeting, where Voronov questioned him in front of a group. As Kalashnikov described it, the session was less an interrogation than an ice-breaker, an effort to learn more of a young noncommissioned officer the Soviet Union was to catapult to fame. Voronov’s questions covered Kalashnikov’s family and background—those years before Kalashnikov became a konstruktor. This was a potentially treacherous patch for a kulak’s son. The sergeant, mindful of the dangers, resorted to deception. “I obviously couldn’t relate my real life story to them,” he said. “If I had done so, I would surely not have been allowed to carry on with my career as a designer. God knows what might have happened to me.” Life in Stalin’s Soviet Union had conditioned him. He was familiar with the methods of editing autobiography. “I’d prepared a long time in advance for it,” he added. “I ‘omitted’ certain details.”¹¹ During this meeting, Voronov asked Kalashnikov if he wanted to remain a soldier or would prefer to be demobilized to reserve status and become a civilian designer. Kalashnikov chose civilian life. The process began for his discharge. (The promotions Kalashnikov would receive in future years—lifting him to lieutenant general—were ceremonial, given for political reasons, not because of military service.)