seminomadic people, many Karamojong saw themselves as unincorporated. They had paid for this perceived backwardness and disloyalty at the hands of Amin and his government. After the evaporation of the army at Moroto, local men looted the base and relieved it of weapons. This marked a consequential rearrangement. The Karamojong were already accomplished cattle rustlers, and with their newly acquired Kalashnikovs they could raid their neighbors’ herds with heretofore unimaginable ease. The qualities that made a Soviet conscript with an AK-47 much more formidable than a Soviet conscript with a Mosin rifle or PPSh translated seamlessly to the business of rustling. But there was a difference. The introduction of Kalashnikovs to the Karomojong multiplied their firepower by a much larger factor than had the introduction of AK-47s to Soviet infantry squads, because the rustlers were not graduating from rifles and submachine guns. They were moving up from spears. In the ensuing years, traditional Karamojong power arrangements eroded, and the elderly leaders were supplanted by younger men leading bands of rustlers equipped with assault rifles. Warlords became a force. Karamojong raiding parties set upon their neighbors and claimed herds owned by the Iteso and Acholi people. Before the raids, the Acholi had three hundred thousand cattle. By 1997 many Acholi switched to raising donkeys. Their cattle holdings shrank to five thousand. Government efforts to control the Karamajong proved insufficient. Upheavals in Rwanda and Congo, and the eruption of an unrelated Acholi insurgency, brought more Kalashnikovs into the country. A local arms race matured. Attempts to restrict the flow of assault rifles were futile. The Ugandan government chose a new strategy. Hoping to co-opt some of the warlords and to create an informal buffer against the expanding Acholi insurgency, it urged Karamojong men to register their rifles in return for monthly stipends of about ten dollars.23 What had been illegal in Uganda had become so entrenched that policy now sanctioned it with cash.
As the Karamojong were changed by their acquisition of Kalashnikovs, the Egyptian experience with the rifles also took an ugly turn. Egypt’s wars with Israel had yielded it little, whether under King Farouk or under Nasser, and its support for the fedayeen had fanned activities and sentiments it could not control. In 1979, President Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel and agreed to recognize the Jewish state. The treaty enraged the fedayeen and their closest supporters, who turned on Sadat with a loathing reserved for traitors. On October 6, 1981, at a military parade in Cairo, assassins within the Egyptian army struck. While a ceremonial convoy passed the reviewing stand, a lieutenant ran toward the dignitaries standing for the pass and review. The officer with the Kalashnikov seemed part of the performance; perhaps he was to salute. He started firing. At the same time, more soldiers on a troop transport opened fire on the bleachers. Sadat and eleven other people were killed. Egypt passed under martial law.
These three examples—the savvy of Cummings, the vulnerability of Amin’s armories, and the fate of Sadat, cut down by his own guns—were markers. And they were valuable for the smallness of their canvases. Cummings’s business centered on himself, but he could explain the forces that drove a larger system. In Uganda, processes difficult to see in international arms transfers could be traced. In Egypt, the risks of sponsoring terror on a neighbor’s soil had played out in full view, as had the ferocity of automatic-rifle power when miniaturized. The events in Uganda and Egypt also reflected an unstated but disturbing fact. The calamities that visited these governments had roots in steps intended to increase the governments’ strength: acquiring assault rifles to be ready for any foe.
The Soviet Union, seemingly impregnable under Stalin after the Great Patriotic War, was not to last. While it did, its idiosyncratic rules held. By the 1980s, Mikhail Kalashnikov wanted to travel within the Warsaw Pact to observe the production of his rifles elsewhere. He mentioned this desire on a visit to Moscow to the office of Dmitri F. Ustinov, the Soviet minister of defense. Kalashnikov regarded Ustinov as a mentor and friend. The reaction was cold. He sensed his mistake.
Hardly had I started to say that I wanted to see a weapons factory in Bulgaria, when Ustinov became gloomy and frowned. He said in a low voice: “Comrade Major.”
I was in civvies as usual, but the minister’s tone made me want to rise from the armchair and stand at attention.
It should be mentioned that this happened at precisely the time when the Americans had published an insulting story about “the Russian sergeant having armed the whole of the Warsaw Pact,” and they started rapidly raising my military rank. In the morning, I found out that I had been given the rank of senior lieutenant, and in the evening I was already a captain.
Obviously, Ustinov personally monitored my “military career,” and that was the case when I found out that I had been made a Major.
But that didn’t change anything.
I felt a chill go down my spine when the minister said distinctly: “You have not said that. I have not heard you say that. Anything else?”24
Kalashnikov, for all his official achievements, lived within Soviet constraints, no matter that the series of arms carrying his name had entered the official national culture.[32] The Soviet Union maintained its military ranks through obligatory mass conscription, and before teenagers were drafted, they were required to master the assembly and disassembly of the AKM. The training was a part of the Program of Pre-Conscription Preparation of Youths, a Ministry of Defense curriculum managed by each school’s military and physical-education instructors. In Soviet schools, rifles were the fourth R. The curriculum also included competitions in donning gas masks, thousand-meter cross-country runs, hundred-meter swims, pull-ups, and throwing simulated hand grenades. All male Soviet students were expected to perform these tasks, along with learning the rudiments of marching, civil defense, and first aid.25 Even students from the most privileged families participated.
The program could be seen in Pripyat, founded in 1970 to support the Nuclear Power Station in the Name of Vladimir I. Lenin, which had been constructed at Chernobyl. Its citizens were selected from accomplished families. Theirs was to be a model city, brick-and-mortar testimony to Soviet progress and the atom’s peaceful use. In Pripyat as elsewhere, the AKM was as surely a part of the curriculum as Lenin, Pushkin, and the periodic table. In one set of evaluations, held at School No. 1 on April 10 and 11, 1986, the tenth-grade boys, most of them sixteen years old, were timed assembling and disassembling their school’s assault rifles. The AKM’s few parts and simple design made it ideal for the exam. Most students needed only thirty-four to fifty seconds to complete the test, held under the watchful gaze and stopwatch of I. D. Peshko, chief referee. Some students were remarkably fast. Andrei Avramenko, born in 1969, took apart his Kalashnikov and put it together again in twenty-eight seconds. Sergei Svirnov performed the chore in twenty-four seconds. Sergey Salih was the best of all, completing the task in twenty-two seconds. His hands must have been a blur. Even the laggard, Oleg Bryukhanon, was capable. He needed seventy-five seconds—and that was the slowest of all.26
Two weeks later, the dream of Pripyat came to ruin. Reactor No. 4 exploded, bombarding Pripyat with radiation. Families were evacuated in an apocalyptic panic while the Kremlin pretended all was well. The evacuees left behind a world in freeze-frame—contaminated, sealed from intrusion, stopped in time. The abandoned city and its records, including I. D. Peshko’s military preparation files, became an exhibit of the Soviet experience everywhere. The preconscription records showed the extent of assault-rifle infiltration into Soviet life. On purely ergonomic grounds they were consistent with records from tests organized by the United States Army in 1966, which underscored the simplicity of the Kalashnikov compared to American-designed arms. In those tests, conducted with American soldiers, the average assembly-disassembly times for the M-14, the M-16, and the AK-47 were seventy-one seconds, eighty seconds, and thirty-four seconds, respectively.27 At sixteen years of age, the schoolboys of Pripyat were quicker than American soldiers with their own service rifles.28 Assembly-disassembly times are not the most important measure of a rifle’s design. But if a rifle is otherwise sound, they can be a measure of some significance. And the preconscription training, the tests held for teenaged boys handling assault rifles as part of their school day, established this: Children, it turned out, could figure out the basics of the Kalashnikov at least as quickly as soldiers could.
From school gymnasiums to jungle patrols to terrorist attacks, the AK-47 and its descendant arms seemed to be almost everywhere in the 1980s—in the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations, in Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, in the Middle East. They were represented in the hands of state armies, police and intelligence services, and guerrilla formations and shadowy terrorist groups. The Iraqi and Iranian armies each carried
