The Gun

the AVH set out to destroy its participants and symbols. The immediate problem was Nagy, who had been granted sanctuary at the Yugoslav embassy. The Kremlin resorted once more to lies. The new Moscow-backed prime minister, Janos Kadar, signed a document for the Yugoslavs guaranteeing the former premier’s safety. Assured of their security, Nagy, his circle, and their families left the embassy on November 22, expecting to be escorted home. Like the Soviet declaration in Pravda, and the faked negotiations to withdraw from Hungarian soil, the promise was a trap. Soviet intelligence officers stopped the bus and placed Nagy and his entourage under arrest. (After a secret trial, Nagy would be hanged.)

Next came reprisals against the revolution’s rank and file. Between the end of the revolution and mid-1961, 341 people were executed and 22,000 sentenced to other punishments, mostly prison terms. Tens of thousands of others lost homes or jobs. More than 100,000 people were punished. Familiar Soviet slurs were recycled; the accused found themselves labeled kulaks or fascists. The reprisals took time to gain momentum. The caseload was large. At first Fejes faded back into his laborer’s life. He hid in plain sight. His luck could not hold. He had been visible on the streets with his AK-47 throughout the cease-fire, and his employer appeared to know of his insurgent past. Beyond participating in the fighting, he and his AK-47 had been present at the killing of Lieutenant Balassa. This was the last sort of crime the government was not likely to overlook, the more so because Balassa was a legacy—his mother worked in the AVH. She could push for his case from within. All this, and Michael Rougier’s photograph of Fejes had been published in Life. He was the revolutionary poster boy, the young fighter with a captured assault rifle, wearing an eye-catching hat. Such high- profile evidence could bring a man maintaining a low profile no good. A clipping with the photograph went into the government’s file. The authorities zeroed in. Fejes was arrested on April 30, 1957.⁷³ In a closed trial in early 1959, prosecutors described his supposed actions after Lieutenant Balassa, broken by bullets, fell to the street. Balassa had been struck in the neck, chest, lung, and elsewhere. Witnesses said Fejes stood over the body, removed Balassa’s documents, and waved them for all to see. “He was an officer of the secret police,” his accusers said Fejes shouted. “I killed this officer!” After the killing, prosecutors said, Fejes accused another man of being a member of the AVH, too. He released him after examining the man’s palms and deciding that their rough condition indicated hard physical work; this, the prosecutor said, showed that Fejes was the leader of an operative revolutionary unit tasked with killing members of the police.

Fejes said this was all a lie. He said he had been posted to guard a corner with another young man, nicknamed the Mute. But Fejes said he had argued with the other guards and was told to go away. As he walked off, leaving the Mute behind, he said, he heard gunshots, and turned around, frightened, to see Lieutenant Balassa falling. He joined the crowd only after Balassa was dead.

I saw that person who shot the alleged AVH member. That person was short, bulky and was wearing a brown short coat, army trousers, boots and a winter hat. He had a Soviet type submachine gun, with which he shot his victim dead. The murderer afterwards left the site for the direction of Baross Street, but he returned shortly afterwards to get the victims AVH I.D., then he left again. I was afterward assigned by the armed persons the task to guard the tank at the corner of Rakoczi Square, which I guarded for over one hour and a half. During that time came civilians and diplomats to take photos. They took pictures of me, too, because I was standing next to the tank. That is how I got into the pictures.⁷⁴

The crowd around Balassa was dispersed, he said, when a Hungarian soldier shot his weapon in the air. In all, Fejes said, he was at the scene of the murder, looking at Lieutenant Balassa’s corpse, for ten or eleven minutes. Then he took his position guarding the tank. The trial was before a stern and famously progovernment judge. As the judge questioned him, Fejes tried to stay alive.

“I never tried my automatic gun,” he said. “I did not even shoot any shots with it, but it must have been very good, I guess.” He added later, “I had nothing on my mind, no particular reason when I joined the freedom fighters, I was not even familiar with the situation here.”

The prosecutors’ case was not ironclad. Elements of the evidence were suspect. The case relied in part on a written statement from an anonymous witness—a police-state tactic that could allow evidentiary invention to convict innocent men. The prosecutors presented a coroner’s report of Balassa’s exhumed remains that claimed he had been shot in the skull. In the photograph of Balassa dead on the curb, his head was intact. Fejes’s defense attorney pointed to inconsistencies in the testimony, and to a witness who said that Fejes did not fire his AK-47 during the shooting. But Fejes’s AK-47 did not help him. Rougier’s photograph imbued the young man in the courtroom with the air of a tough and accomplished fighter; certainly a man could not have acquired such a weapon by easy means. A prosecutor called him “Defendant Fejes, the bowler hat hero, an iconic figure of the counter- revolution,” who “carried out homicide, robbery and looting.” Fejes had the right to speak last. He adopted the language and essential points of view of his accusers and begged for his life.

I plea for a merciful verdict. I did not participate in the counterrevolution intentionally, it was curiosity that drove me into it. I am not at fault in the Balassa incident. I was sent away from Rakoczi Square for I was conducting the checks in an improper way and only when I began to walk away did I turn around because I thought they were shooting at me, but that was when they in fact shot at Balassa. I plea to receive a light verdict because I am a common child of a worker, when Balassa got shot I even felt disgust towards the freedom fighters and I left them.

It was no use. Fejes was convicted of participating in events aimed to overthrow the people’s republic, of unlawfully seizing state property, of theft, and of the murder of an officer of the law. The sentence was death. His appeal was rejected. At 7:18 A.M. on April 9, 1959, Jozsef Tibor Fejes was hanged. He was suspended on the gallows for thirty minutes, and then pronounced dead, the end of the journey of the first known revolutionary to carry what would become known as the revolutionary’s gun.

Within the Soviet Union’s design bureaus the family of arms built around the AK-47 was being finished. A new suite of Soviet firearms was emerging, pushing the Soviet army and its allies ahead of the West in efforts to field a basic set of infantry arms for the Cold War. The AK-47 was established and accepted, though problems in its original design had not been resolved. Throughout the mid and late 1950s, a team led by Mikhail Miller, an engineer in Izhevsk, worked to improve the early production models, experimenting on the gas system, the weapon’s rate of automatic fire, the wooden stock, and more. The team also sought an acceptable stamped-metal replacement for the solid-steel receiver. Miller’s group made multiple test rifles, and in 1959 Izhevsk launched production of an updated Kalashnikov, the AKM, the Avtomat Kalashnikova Modernizirovanny, or Modernized. The new Kalashnikov featured a stock made of laminated wood, which was determined to be stronger than solid wooden stocks. It had a new trigger group that included a device to slow the rate of automatic fire. Engineers hoped this would make the weapon easier to control. And the AKM had a sheet-metal receiver, which reduced the rifle’s weight from the nearly nine and a half pounds of the previous version to less than seven pounds. With the AKM’s arrival, the AK-47 was phased out.⁷⁵ The AKM became the basis for the most commonly encountered versions of the Kalashnikov line.

Mikhail Kalashnikov’s status as exemplar for the working masses solidified. In 1958, as weapons bearing his name circulated throughout Soviet military, intelligence, and police units, and were passed to the Warsaw Pact, the Politburo designated Kalashnikov a Hero of Socialist Labor. The certificate accompanying his elevation praised his role in “reinforcing the power of the state.”⁷⁶ This was curious language for an award issued for contributions to economy and culture, and especially so after the manner in which the state’s power had been brought to bear in Hungary. It said more about the Soviet view of its assault rifle than most of its other declarations ever would. The award generated more coverage, and in 1959, Kalashnikov received more publicity still, including a profile of his life and work in Voyenniye Znaniya, a military magazine. The secret man was hardly a secret at all. He was a well-packaged public entity. Later, he said, “the avalanche of letters began after I had received the first state prize and has continued ever since. As if a floodgate had been opened.”⁷⁷

Simultaneously with the completion of the AKM, the Main Artillery Department oversaw the development of complements. The first system, the RPK, or Ruchnoi Pulemyot Kalashnikova, the handheld machine gun by Kalashnikov, was the smallest step forward. It was in the simplest sense a heavyweight AK-47,