The Gun

over the uses to which it might be put.

Except as an arm for trench warfare or semimilitary police forces having to deal with armed risings, it is difficult to see what honest need they can meet; yet we are faced with the fact that they exist and are on the open market for anyone who wants to buy them. Here, one would say, is an arm that is useless for sport, cumbrous for self-defense and could not serve any honest purpose, but which in the hands of political fanatics might provoke disaster.⁶⁶

The Thompson was not particularly cumbersome for self-defense, and arguments still rage about the best definitions for legal sport and honest purposes in nations fortunate enough to have the stability and the forums to quarrel over such things. But the Post summarized well enough some of the risks that followed when small automatic arms designed for the most intimately violent of military tasks were made available to anyone. A few years later, the prediction proved at least partly right. In the mid-1920s, the weapon began to turn up in the hands of Chicago gangsters as they descended into a bootlegging turf war. Thompson’s solution for overcoming the tactical horrors of the Western Front reached firearms notoriety by 1929, when hit men in police uniforms ordered seven men against a garage wall in Chicago’s North Side and killed them all with Tommy Guns. Thompson was distressed. His public-relations troubles did not improve in the Depression. Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, and John Dillinger led a list of headline-generating outlaws who came to be associated with the Thompson and the menace of illicit firepower—good for bandits convincing bank tellers to open vaults and for shooting out of encirclement when trapped by the police. Not so good for everyone else.

The Thompson had a spectacular run, but its long-term effects as a public danger were less than what might appear. The Auto-Ordnance Corporation was one small company. Its production was not especially large. The gun entered outlaw lore aided by a rambunctious press. It managed to point to the future perils of assault-rifle proliferation. Yet it was an isolated case. This was because its breakout period occurred in a stable Western nation with functioning police, courts, and legislatures and a durable public compact. There was also the important matter of scale. Perhaps a few hundred Thompsons reached criminal hands in the United States. They caused minor havoc and national uproar, but the United States took steps for the public’s safety before popular ownership of submachine guns became widespread. It began to make law. In 1934, Congress passed the National Firearms Act, part of a series of state and federal laws that restrict the sale, ownership, or use of automatic arms in the United States. Ultimately, after a brief and noisy heyday, Thompson’s trench broom served to illustrate how stable nations with responsive governments can adjust to shifts in weapons technology. These were not the sort of nations where the AK-47 would leave its longest-lasting marks.

The AK-47 existed on a different order of magnitude, and was controlled by a different political culture. It was being assembled in enormous quantities by governments that, while they lasted, would show small concern for where the weapons went, or to whom. And after these governments fell, many of their automatic arms cascaded out of their possession. The arms flow began with a trickle. It began with Jozsef Tibor Fejes.

Fejes had carried his captured AK-47 with straight-backed rebel confidence. His cause seemed to have prevailed.

Soon after the cease-fire, the Kremlin adopted a conciliatory tone. It published in Pravda a declaration of respect, equality, and noninterference in the domestic affairs of its European satellites. By all appearances, the insurgents had won. They had forced Khrushchev to accept a new point of view about Soviet relations in the buffer zone. The revolution shifted from violent to political, at least on the surface. On November 1, 1955, Prime Minister Nagy delivered a radio address declaring Hungary’s departure from the Warsaw Pact, and proclaiming its new unaligned status. Hungary was leaving the Soviet orbit. For Hungarians the proclamation was a moment of national self-determination. For the Kremlin, the radio address challenged Soviet authority over the nations in its grip and threatened to unravel a carefully choreographed alliance. For Nagy, the address was a reactive step; he had received reports of new Soviet military activities. The conciliatory declaration in Pravda had been a trick. On October 31, Khrushchev had decided to invade Hungary again, and with a much larger force. For a few days, as it massed troops, the Kremlin maintained the ruse. The Soviet leadership negotiated with Nagy’s government over details for withdrawing Soviet forces. Almost everyone took the bait. On November 1 in Washington, Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, addressed the National Security Council after digesting the news. He marveled at the insurgents’ success:

In a sense, what had occurred there was a miracle. Events had belied all our past views that a popular revolt in the face of modern weapons was an utter impossibility. Nevertheless, the impossible had happened, and because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not effectively be used.⁶⁷

Public opinion was not so powerful after all. That night, Soviet troops started a reconnaissance of the capital. On November 3, the Soviet and Hungarian delegations met for negotiations. The meeting ended when General Ivan Serov, director of the KGB and Dulles’s Soviet counterpart, placed the Hungarian delegation under arrest. The remaining plans were already in motion. The commander in chief of Soviet armed forces had given his orders, reminding the soldiers that Hungary had sided with the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet invasion, he said, was justified under the Warsaw Pact, which bound the troops to the task of “carrying out their allied obligations.”⁶⁸ Shortly after 4:00 A.M. on November 4, the nature of Soviet allied obligations was made known. The full attack began.⁶⁹

The Soviet army called the crackdown Operation Whirlwind and launched it with the codeword grom, Russian for thunder. Armored divisions rolled into Budapest from multiple directions, this time with an ample complement of infantry. Nagy managed a radio broadcast to say the Hungarian government was at its post and Hungarian troops were fighting. Then he fled to the Yugoslav embassy. Janos Kadar, a rival politician who had secretly betrayed Nagy and received Kremlin backing, announced that a new government had been formed. The attack was overpowering. Soviet units quickly encircled the Hungarian Ministry of Defense and army buildings and barracks, neutralizing any chance of an organized conventional defense. In Moscow, Georgy Zhukov, the Soviet minister of defense, told the Central Committee that Soviet troops had seized communication centers, military depots, Parliament, the central committee of the Hungarian Workers’ Party, and three bridges. The rebel government was in hiding, Zhukov said, and searches had begun. Then came the problem of Fejes and his colleagues at the rebels’ stronghold. “One large hotbed of resistance of the insurgents remains in Budapest around the Corvin Theater,” Zhukov said. “The insurgents defending this stubborn point were presented with an ultimatum to capitulate. In connection with the refusal of the resisters to surrender, the troops began an assault.”⁷⁰

The attack surprised the Corvinists. As many as two thousand fighters were near the theater, part of the new National Guard. But they were not as alert as before, and this time the Soviet military did not probe piecemeal or hesitate. It drove in heavy and hard. A tank regiment and a mechanized guard regiment rolled forward after artillery had prepared their path. Many rebels fought, but there was small hope of stopping such a force, and gradually most slipped away, yielding ground. The Soviet soldiers used flamethrowers and explosives against the holdouts. “By sunset,” said Yevgeny I. Malashenko, acting chief of staff for the Soviet corps that resided in Hungary, “we had broken the resistance in the whole area.”⁷¹ The revolution was crushed, although at tremendous cost. The Soviet military suffered as many as 722 dead and 1,500 wounded. The bulk of their casualties came in the first week of fighting, before the cease-fire. Another 67 soldiers disappeared outright, likely to a mix of battle and defection to the West. The Hungarians suffered up to 20,000 people wounded. Depending on the source, 2,000 to 3,000 Hungarians were said to have been killed.⁷²

Jozsef Tibor Fejes survived. What he did during the final Soviet invasion was not evident from the fading court records left behind; sources vary on whether he participated in the battle for the theater. But he had returned to his father’s flat by November 5. By then the rebels’ situation was desperate. Many tried to escape, some fleeing on foot toward Austria. Fejes opted to try to resume his former life. He reported back to work, where, in a sign of the depth of popular support for the revolution but also that Fejes’s employer knew something of his armed activities, his salary was doubled. He settled back into the routines of labor and collecting wages, his AK-47 slung from his shoulder no more. The choice was fraught with risk. With the uprising extinguished, the Soviet Union and