The Gun

Kalashnikov was one of them. It was a role for which he would prove eager and well tempered, though it required lying. As his story circulated, it again was an edited biography. His time as an exile, his father’s death, his flight to the Kazakh rail yard—these things were not told. Kalashnikov had relocated to Izhevsk, where the assault rifle was soon to be manufactured by the millions. He was married to Katya, who had borne him a daughter. His life had assumed its shape: soldier-konstruktor, heroic genius, representative proletarian man. The years of wandering and wondering were over. Kalashnikov had obliterated his past and found the Soviet version of the good life. Neither he nor the party would endanger this by raising unwanted facts. “Could I have brought to light this part of my life in those straightforward times?” he said. “Of course it would have told upon my relations with the authorities. They would have found many things in my revelations which, from their highly ideological point of view, would not have let me become what I am now. Who would have allowed me to work in such a secret domain as weapons?”[14]²⁵

In 1950, the Communist Party extended Kalashnikov’s favored status further. That year, at age thirty, he was chosen to be a deputy in the Supreme Soviet—Stalin’s compliant legislature. Kalashnikov described his reaction, when told of his candidacy, as “flabbergasted.” Soviet elections were ostensibly free but entirely rigged. He knew his election was a matter of form. He also understood that he had at best a passing familiarity with Udmurtia, the region he was to represent. He had relocated there two years before. “Apart from my factory colleagues, I knew nobody and nobody knew me,” he said.²⁶ Ignorance of local affairs was not an obstacle to holding office. The job was ornamental, and seats were filled by archetypical socialist citizens. The legislators’ grand gatherings in the Kremlin brought together a selectively assembled body of cosmonauts, musicians, gold medalists from international athletic competitions, decorated laborers, and the like. They were not expected to deliberate or to provide checks and balances to Stalin’s power. They were expected to vote as they were told. Kalashnikov was assigned to the budget commission, though he had no training in economics or financial matters. The job had its material rewards, however, including regular travel to Moscow to stay in the Soviet Union’s finest hotels. As a deputy, Kalashnikov also exercised his connections to Dmitri Ustinov, who had been Stalin’s commissar of armaments during the war, to secure a four-wheel-drive car—a well-chosen entitlement for life in Udmurtia, with its heavy snowfalls and unpaved roads. In spite of the privileges, the first session Kalashnikov attended, in 1950, was grounds for dread. When he arrived at Spassky Gate, the Kremlin’s entrance, he worried he would be discovered as a former exile. He didn’t need to shudder. His past was not known. No guard would stop him. Once inside, he looked upon Stalin for the first time. The general secretary inspired fear like no other, the dictator atop his personality cult and the leader whose policies had cast Kalashnikov’s family into the wilderness. Kalashnikov had become his devotee. He was enthralled.

I was filled with awe. I remember with perfect clarity the way he came into the great hall in which we had gathered. Stalin was wearing his eternal semi-military suit. He sat in his place, the same one as ever, in the midst of a total silence. And then there was [a] thunderous outbreak of applause that lasted an eternity, since nobody wanted to be the first to stop! After several minutes, Stalin gestured with his hand, asking for quiet in the assembly. All at once, you could have heard a pin drop.²⁷

And then the dictator died. The reign of terror closed with a whimper. After a dinner with party officials and Lavrenty Beria, Stalin was found on the floor of one of his residences on March 1, 1953, incapacitated by what seemed a stroke.[15] He died on March 5. Kalashnikov was devastated. He had separated Stalin’s predation on the Soviet Union’s people from the despot himself. When party newspapers had written of enemies of the state, of saboteurs and lurking assassins, Kalashnikov accepted the propaganda. He wanted the traitors—many of whose plots were fabricated by the dictator himself—put to death. Stalin’s infiltration into Kalashnikov’s mind had eclipsed the most basic human relationships. “He was almost closer to us than our own parents,” he wrote. “When Stalin was buried, the whole population wept. We felt that life couldn’t go on without him. Fear of the future gripped our hearts.”²⁸ Kalashnikov was not naive. He knew the terror. But he accepted the sinister side of the system that had chosen him for rewards. He had joined the Communist Party. He had become a party man.

The shifts were tectonic. Beria became a deputy prime minister and set out upon what seemed a program of domestic reforms, officially banning torture, a jarring idea given the violent excesses of the chekists he had led. Beria was not to last. A plot to remove him was organized by Nikita Khrushchev and other party figures. He was arrested on June 26. His reversal of fortune was total. He had been untouchable, the man who sat beside Stalin and supervised the incarceration and killing of uncountable Soviet citizens, the architect of a great sorrow. Now he was exposed and alone. Shorn of his wire-rimmed spectacles, he groveled in a letter from his cell, offering to work as a laborer anywhere.

Dear comrades, you should understand that I am a faithful soldier of our Motherland, a loyal son of the party of Lenin and Stalin and your loyal friend and comrade. Send me wherever you wish, to any kind of work, [even] a most insignificant one. See me out, I will be able to work ten more years and I will work with all my soul and with complete energy. I am saying this from the bottom of my heart, it is not true that since I have held a big post I would not be able to perform in a small position. This can easily be proven in any region or area, in a Soviet farm, in a collective farm, on a construction site of our glorious Motherland. And you will see that in 2 to 3 years I will improve my behavior strongly and will be still of some use for you. I am to my last breath faithful to our beloved party and our Soviet government.

Beria’s last breath was not far off. He was tried in the fashion he would recognize: in secret, on largely fabricated charges, before a court that offered no appeal. After the verdict on December 23 he was blindfolded, gagged, and shot.²⁹

The events of 1953 allowed the Kremlin to reconsider its role at the international socialist vanguard. The changes—first in personnel, then policies—were integral to the assault rifle’s spread. Khrushchev became general secretary in the autumn, inheriting both the foreign-policy portfolio and the military-industrial complex. He grasped ways the two could be linked.

One early challenge was in institutionalizing security arrangements in the European buffer zone. In World War II, the Soviet military had moved onto foreign territory previously under German occupation and become the region’s premier military power. During the war the Red Army equipped and trained fighting units in Eastern Europe that became foundations for new national armies, all subordinate to Soviet command. For the Cold War’s opening years, such relationships were sufficient for the Kremlin. But in 1949, Western powers had formed NATO and sponsored the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Kremlin replied by founding the German Democratic Republic on the portion of Germany under Soviet occupation. Moves and countermoves continued. In 1955, West Germany joined NATO. The Kremlin’s parallel step would stoke assault-rifle proliferation in ways that persist: It bound its satellites together into a mutual-defense agreement of its own, the Warsaw Pact. The treaty was signed by eight nations—the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—in May 1955. Its initial significance was retaliatory and symbolic, a tit-for-tat escalation. In the event of armed attack on any one member, the others agreed to come to the attacked nation’s aid. The parties also declared, in a bit of doublespeak boilerplate, that they would strive for “effective measures for universal reduction of armaments.” The armaments buildup was actually just about to begin, spurred by the treaty’s fifth article, in which the members accepted a unified command.³⁰ In fall 1955, when the details of the command were circulated via a top-secret memorandum from Moscow, the commander’s deputies were instructed that they would be responsible for supplying “military items, in accordance with accepted systems of armaments.”³¹ The language referred to Soviet-pattern weapons, including the most common weapons of all—cartridges and firearms. The instructions formalized the idea of standardizing equipment in the Eastern bloc, a concept that became a Warsaw Pact cornerstone. The goal became:

…constant modernization of weapons and combat equipment and the development of new and more sophisticated prototypes of weaponry. The Soviet Union plays a leading role here. Possessing a powerful military- economic potential and scientific-technological base, it gives the necessary assistance to fraternal countries in strengthening their defensive might. Not only direct deliveries of new types of weapons and combat equipment are