assignment: as a rule, the future of the enterprise as a whole and the small arms business specifically depended on such visits. I wanted to bring up not only general problems but also my own, designer’s problem—the construction of an engineering building for small arms producers. Ideally it had to be exactly like the testing range near Moscow that had been destroyed so thoughtlessly years ago.
As always we began the tour in the experimental section, then went on from there. We were passing a conveyor with suspension brackets which held brand-new AKMs. Whenever Brezhnev picked up an assault rifle, the first thing he looked at was the bayonet… I did not really worry, but thought with curiosity: “Haven’t the advisers of the esteemed guest notified him beforehand that the cardinal merit of my creation was not the bayonet but other more essential components and units?”
But everything soon became clear. Brezhnev bent down to me and asked me in a subdued voice: “Can it be stolen?”
I had to make one of those vague gestures which could be interpreted in many different ways. One or two minutes later Brezhnev said again in a conspiratorial tone: “What if I steal it?”
For that not to happen, I had to give Brezhnev the bayonet which he liked so much. He was delighted as a boy. I reassured him sympathetically: “You can always tell a hunter.”9
Having played to the chairman’s feelings, Kalashnikov asked for what he wanted: an engineering building. The polygon at Schurovo, where the design contest that led to the AK-47 had been held, had been closed by Khrushchev. Kalashnikov seethed about this. He hoped Brezhnev would replace what the small-arms designers had lost. The chairman did not commit. (Some years later, Kalashnikov and officials from Izhevsk landed an hour-long meeting with Brezhnev, who by then was the general secretary—the Soviet Union’s most powerful man. Brezhnev promised them that they would have the building. It was never built.) The exchanges pointed to the perils of the Kremlin’s governing style. A small-arms research-and-development center was a cog in the national security apparatus. Arguably it was an important cog. It was not of sufficient importance for its status to require a decision of the head of state. But the concentration of power in few hands meant an endless scrum for access and favor, and involved the most senior officials in matters better handled by ministries and staff. It also colored the way midlevel bureaucrats acted and thought. Kalashnikov blamed Khrushchev for Schurovo’s closure. He could conceive of relief only through Brezhnev.
The Soviet Union’s behavior, and that of its Warsaw Pact underlings, manifested itself in uglier ways.
As Brezhnev’s power and stature were rising, the assault rifles being assembled in secret in East Germany had found their way to border guard detachments at the boundary with West Germany. The new knockoff was starting to replace the PPSh submachine guns that had been carried by the government’s border guards since the units had formed. The guards stood grim duty. In 1961, the East German government had begun construction of what it called the Anti-Fascist Protection Wall, another milestone in doublespeak, considering that the purpose of the wall was not to keep Germans from the west from entering the east, but to stop the flow of emigres fleeing the oppression and stagnation of the socialist side. The Kalashnikov’s participation in state-directed violence against civilians here would be of a smaller scale than what had been seen in Hungary, but its introduction would be dark, and would resonate for decades.
Early on the afternoon of August 17, 1962, two young construction workers in East Berlin, Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik, agreed not to return from their lunch break on a road-reconstruction project, opting instead to examine a building near the wall that separated them from West Berlin. They wanted to escape, and planned a reconnaissance. Any attempt would mean dashing across the open space, known as the “death strip,” scaling the short wall on the far side, and passing under the barbed wire. The building, near Checkpoint Charlie, was beside the new wall. Perhaps it would offer a suitable leaping-off point, out of view of the armed East German guards. Inside the building, the pair found a storage room with a rear window that was not bricked over. The wall was in front of them. It was not much taller than a grown man. They had not intended to make their escape on this day. But the temptation was powerful. After observing the narrow space they would have to run across, Fechter and Kulbeik slipped through the window and landed on the death strip. Their sprint began.
The young men were quick, and they likely surprised the border guards watching the stillness below their posts. Both men reached the far wall. As they neared the concrete, the border guards opened fire with Kalashnikovs. Dozens of bullets flew toward the men. The range was short—perhaps sixty meters. The bullets missed Kulbeik. He scaled the wall and squeezed through the strands of barbed wire. Fechter was lean and fresh- faced; he looked fit. As he leaped to gain a hold with which to pull himself up, one of the rounds found its mark. He was hit. He fell, back to the eastern side.
Kulbeik sensed his companion’s peril. But Fechter was so close. If only he could get up and try again. “Now go, go now, now move ahead!” Kulbeik shouted.
Fechter could not raise himself. He had been struck in the pelvis.
The hips, upper thighs, and pelvic girdle are among the worst places for a rifle bullet to smack into a human being. Wounds to these areas are often instantly immobilizing. Load-bearing bones rupture. Victims buckle and collapse. Complicating matters and raising the risk of swift death, large blood vessels follow the contours of bones. If cut, these blood vessels tend to bleed heavily and in ways that can be hard to stop. In the mad race to stop the flow, pressure and tourniquets are hard to apply.
Just a few feet from Kulbeik, at the edge of the communist world, Peter Fechter could not stand, much less scale a vertical concrete wall. Unarmed, eighteen years old, and at the mercy of two governments whose boundary he straddled, he slumped to his side, his blood draining from a wound almost impossible to treat. He was in need of immediate aid. His hasty attempt to escape had come to a full stop. He was not inches from freedom. He was a spectacle, watched by residents and officials from both sides, a helpless young man, minutes from death.
He shouted for aid. Surely he was not a threat, or capable of escape. Weapons were no longer required. But the wall was new, and the procedures for this kind of moment uncertain. From their posts on the east and from the west alike, the guards watched, joined by a growing crowd. No one dared to step into the strip and help. Fechter was thrown a bandage from the Western side. His wound was too severe, and too tricky, for him to hope to treat himself. Fechter bled. After several minutes he passed into unconsciousness, and fell silent. He slumped on his side, in the fetal position, wearing a dark sport coat. Later, the East German border guards, helmets on, their assault rifles slung across their dark coats, ventured to the wall and picked up Fechter and carried him away. An East German doctor soon pronounced him dead.
No one outside his own circle had heard of Peter Fechter before. He verged on anonymity in life. His death was of the most public sort, and East Germany was unapologetic about how in his ending he realized instant and gruesome fame. Karl-Edvard von Schnitzler, the caustic East German television host, swept aside complaints, and defended the guards’ decisions both to shoot and to leave the young man to die. “The life of each of our brave boys in uniform is worth more to us than the life of a law-breaker,” he said. “One should stay away from our border— then you can save the blood, tears, and cries.” The killing of Fechter also fit the use of the assault rifle for which Mikhail Kalashnikov had been rewarded: “reinforcing the power of the state.” Here was the real Kalashnikov, 1962, propaganda peeled away.10
The Kremlin’s posture toward its satellites and their yearnings for self-determination remained true to this form.
In early 1968, the Soviet Union faced another challenge from its western vassals, this time in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, where a reform-minded politician, Alexander Dubcek, assumed control of the nation’s Communist Party. Dubcek sought change, including loosening restrictions on speech and on the press, liberalizing the economy, and offering citizens more consumer goods. The challenge to Kremlin hegemony was less confrontational than the uprising in Hungary twelve years before. But it was a threat. Its nickname, Prague Spring, suggested it was only a start. By July, with the Kremlin worried that tolerating one upstart might encourage others, the Soviet army was planning exercises—the word used to mask an invasion—on Czech and Slovak soil.11 Soviet divisions struck in August, advancing alongside troops from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland. The airport outside Prague was seized, allowing transport planes to offload troops. Resistance was sporadic and mostly light. But more than seventy people were killed, and Moscow had sent a fresh signal to its satellites and to the West: The communists’ hold on power would be preserved by force. When it felt threatened, the Soviet Union and its local partners would move past talk of fraternal relations and partnership and turn its guns on its own, just as they would fire on their unarmed citizens when they tried to flee.
The Eastern bloc had changed from Stalin’s time. The Great Terror had given way to a less bloody form of
