The Gun

Work continued on the rifle. Some changes in 1948 were significant. The ejector was redesigned, to be similar to that of the SG-43, a medium machine gun. The return spring was thickened, to increase its reliability and longevity. Some changes were nettlesome and demanded time. One engineer eventually worked for four years to improve the structural integrity of the hammer.¹² A small change was ergonomic—the operating handle was recast to a crescent shape, like that of the American Garand, which made it easier to manipulate. There were others. No matter the changes, the AK-47’s accuracy could not be significantly improved; when it came to precise shooting, it was a stubbornly mediocre arm.[12] The army faced a choice: proceed with a less accurate assault rifle, or delay distribution of a weapon with tremendous firepower to every Soviet soldier. The army decided to proceed, opting for less precision to keep production moving forward.¹³ As a result, the primary socialist battle rifle would never be as accurate as many others, and this relative inaccuracy—a tradeoff for reliability—would be grounds for sustained criticism in future decades.¹⁴

After all of these efforts, the AK-47 had other flaws as well. After the final round was fired from a magazine, the bolt of a Kalashnikov rode forward and remained closed, as if another round had been chambered and the rifle were ready to fire again. This made it impossible to tell whether a weapon that had been fired repeatedly was loaded or empty; here was a shortcoming in design. It meant that a combatant, midfight, might not realize his weapon had no cartridges. (The bolts of many other automatic rifles lock in an open position when a magazine is empty. This signals immediately that it is time to reload, and leaves one step fewer in the loading cycle—because the bolt is already open, it need not be pulled back, which might save a second when seconds count.) Another flaw was potentially less serious, but still a sign of poor conception. The rifle’s selector lever, of which Mikhail Kalashnikov was proud, was stiff and noisy when it was manipulated between safe, automatic, and semiautomatic settings. For a soldier trying to be silent—as in the moment before an ambush—this pitfall posed a problem.

As more people contributed, the Soviet assault rifle, already a composite creation designed by multiple contributors, became still more of a people’s gun—a weapon whose shape, functions, and features were determined by the desires of a committee and the efforts of collective work. Dmitri Shirayev, a Soviet and later Russian armorer who said that many of the AK-47’s designers were denied public credit for their contributions, assigned the weapon a telling nickname: The ASS-47, an acronym for Avtomat Sovetskogo Soyuza—the automatic made by the Soviet Union.¹⁵ (Shirayev coined this title, the ASS-47, in a Russian magazine article after the Soviet Union collapsed. He worked at a government arms-research center at the time. The day after the article appeared, he was fired.)

The improvements to the AK-47’s mass-production models may have been clouded further still, given what is known about the whereabouts of the German designer Hugo Schmeisser, who had been captured by the Red Army and relocated to Izhevsk after the war. Schmeisser was intimately familiar with an assault rifle’s difficult path from drafting table to assembly line and had been through many redesigns with his sturmgewehr. He would have seemed the ideal engineer to assist with overcoming the problems faced in converting the AK-47 from contest winner to factory product. Schmeisser lived in Izhevsk during pivotal years of the rifle’s refinement. Neither the Soviet Union nor Russia has been forthcoming with details of his work. His contributions, if any, remain a historical question mark.¹⁶ A pair of rival views predominates. One says that there could be no explanation for Schmeisser’s presence in Izhevsk, of all places in the Soviet space, except to capitalize on his knowledge of assault rifles and the nuances of their mass production. It could not be a coincidence, in other words, that the preeminent German assault-rifle designer happened to be in the city where the Soviet Union sought to replicate his work. The other view holds that Schmeisser, as a foreigner, was not allowed near the early AK-47, the technical details of which in the late 1940s and early 1950s were still classified. His presence in Izhevsk, in this view, was to work on well-established weapons. Shirayev took this position. “The only thing Schmeisser did in Izhevsk was learn to drink vodka,” he said.¹⁷

Whoever was behind each design change, the improvements satisfied the army. In summer 1949, the army formally designated the AK-47 the standard rifle for Soviet forces. Then a problem demanded the engineers’ attention. The original weapons had been made with a stamped-metal receiver. The receiver is the part of the rifle that contains the trigger group, holds the magazine, and in which the bolt moves back and forth—the housing containing the rifle’s guts. The original AK-47 design did not lend itself to the available Soviet manufacturing processes, and workers were unable to manufacture the rifles in large quantities without many rejected receivers. This threatened production. A new engineering team, led by Valery Kharkov,¹⁸ was assigned to find a fix. Kharkov’s team arrived at a solution—a solid piece of forged steel was machined into shape, grind by grind, to fashion a replacement part. From the perspective of quality, the solution was admirable. The solid-steel receiver was singularly strong.¹⁹ From the perspective of the Soviet economy, and of an army eager for its new rifle, the fix had drawbacks. Machining a receiver from a block of steel meant wasting much of that steel. More than four pounds was milled away for every receiver, a considerable loss, considering that a receiver weighed less than a pound and a half. It also consumed time—requiring more than 120 operations by laborers for one part alone. The lost steel and hours increased costs. The available sources differ on when production of the rifles began. One account from Izhevsk said that by late 1949 both AK-47s—the original version and the variant with a solid steel receiver—were put into side-by-side production.²⁰ Another, more thorough account said the engineers did not work out an acceptable version of a milled receiver until late 1950, when the modified weapon was approved by a commission.²¹ What is uncontested is that Kalashnikov’s original design was phased out. The variant with a solid-steel receiver, its production made possible by a modification designed by others, was to be the predominant form of AK-47 for the next decade. The rifle was distributed in two forms—a wooden-stock model and an otherwise identical model with a collapsible metal stock, which, when folded, reduced the length to less than twenty-six inches overall. The folding-stock rifle was designed for paratroopers and soldiers who needed a shorter firearm, such as tank crews and armored troops. Automatic rifles had assumed a tiny form. At less than two feet two inches long, the collapsible Kalashnikov was now shorter than a regulation tennis racket. It had roughly the weight of an axe. Dr. Gatling’s vision had come to this.

With his namesake rifle undergoing refinement, Mikhail Kalashnikov experienced his first tastes of material comfort and fame. In 1949 the Soviet Union awarded him the State Stalin Prize, one of the highest honors the government gave to its citizens. The prize, in recognition of the AK-47’s selection for general service, included a bonus of 150,000 rubles— a breathtaking sum for a laborer in the years after the Great Patriotic War. The bonus equaled almost thirteen years’ worth of salary for the more fortunate workers in Izhevsk.²² Kalashnikov had lived across a spectrum of Soviet economic circumstances. Life on the Altai steppe had been grinding. In exile he had fared better than only the hungry and thinly clothed prisoners of the GULAG. The Red Army had provided him an economically stable lifestyle, though conditions for enlisted men were decidedly spartan. Once Kalashnikov became an arms designer he enjoyed comforts unavailable to many Soviet citizens, particularly during the war. His salary of fifteen hundred rubles in 1945 was several times that of a typical laborer. For seven years, during the war and in the lean period after, he had been adequately provided for. The Stalin Prize was life-changing. It vaulted Kalashnikov to a rarefied place in the Soviet social and economic hierarchy. Instantly, he could afford things most of his fellow citizens could not. His family, by one account, was the first in Izhevsk to own a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, and an automobile.²³ “At the time in Moscow shops there appeared Pobeda cars manufactured at the Volga car factory,” he said. “The price tag was 16,000 rubles. Myself, a senior sergeant at that time, I bought a car.”²⁴ Pobeda is Russian for victory. The automobile bearing this name was a popular postwar sedan, but very hard to obtain. Ownership of a Pobeda often marked a man with connections. Only 235,000 were made in nearly thirteen years, a tiny figure in a nation of roughly 200 million people. Kalashnikov was among the fortunate few to acquire one. Photographs from the time show Katya, his wife, in a glistening knee-length fur coat. He was twenty-nine years old in a parsimonious nation suffering shortages. He had managed a vertical social climb, to considerable reward.[13]

The news that a Stalin Prize had been awarded to a sergeant was published in Soviet newspapers, pushing Kalashnikov into mainstream Soviet conversation. He was a person of note now, a model citizen. The story of the unlettered enlisted man from a tank regiment, wounded in battle, who conceived of new tools to defend the Motherland, was the type of proletarian parable the Soviet Union wished to project. Stalin had killed off many of the party’s leading figures. The purges had thinned the ranks of promising citizens across society. New heroes were necessary, especially those who would be unquestionably subordinate to Stalin, and thus pose no threat.