The collapse of the Soviet Union both harmed and benefited him, and his world changed repeatedly. Financially, the end of the Soviet Union upended Izhevsk and the firearms industry. Defense budgets dried up. Assembly lines fell quiet, and many workers, their salaries unpaid, left in search of work. Much of the labor force that remained was furloughed, called to work when orders needed to be filled but often told to stay home. Conditions on production days were gritty; sections of the factories were lit only by skylights, many workers had no protective clothing, and the ventilation was so poor that the air on days when weapons were assembled had a yellowish, particle-laden cast.75
Russia sought customers for its weapons. But its introduction to free markets was jarring. With so many assault rifles stockpiled, and other manufacturers competing—Arsenal in Bulgaria, Radom in Poland, Romtechnica in Romania, Norinco in China, F.E.G. in Hungary (now closed), Zastava in Serbia, and others—Izhmash and Izhmech, the paired companies in Izhevsk responsible for Kalashnikov production, struggled to make sales. Part of the problem was in management. The former communists who ran the companies knew much about their factories and almost nothing about marketing or service. They conducted business opaquely, and with patterns of patronage and nepotism not far beneath the varnish. But even sound managers might not have stopped the gun lines from stalling. Further Kalashnikov production fed a glut. The Russian arms-manufacturing sector was suffering from another of the varied ailments of the post-Soviet hangover. Several decades of mass production of the Kalashnikov line, which had once fit foreign-policy objectives and notions of national security, had destroyed business opportunities. Customers could always find other sellers. Those sellers undercut Russian prices.76
To keep workers employed and prevent the full erosion of the skill base, Izhmash produced a line of sporting rifles and shotguns, many of them using the underlying Kalashnikov design and some of them nodding to older gunsmithing traditions, with handsome wooden stocks and engraving. These were bourgeois guns. “We had to live on something,” Kalashnikov said. “So we began to think about how to try, using our knowledge base and military- fighting designs, to create weapons for hunting.”77 The line was a limited success. Markets for sporting arms were similarly crowded, and Izhmash competed against established brands. In 2009 the company, its finances and behavior largely impenetrable to outsiders, entered Russian bankruptcy proceedings. Its operations were limited and its prospects for large orders grim. It seemed unlikely to shut down entirely, though its security rested not in its performance as a private enterprise but in a political fact: For the Russian military, the plants that produced the rifles remained a strategic enterprise. Similar problems manifested themselves throughout the firearms sector. Another Russian Kalashnikov manufacturer, the Molot joint stock company in Kirov, which complemented the production at Izhevsk, was so cash-strapped that in late 2008 it stopped paying wages to many employees. By 2009 it compensated workers not with rubles, but with food. This was, literally, subsistence labor.78
As the workers struggled, Mikhail Kalashnikov’s stature spared him from both material suffering and idleness. He fared, if not well, at least better than many of his generation. Though there was little work, he retained the title of chief designer of the Izhmash gun works and consultant to the general director of Rosoboronexport, the state arms-export agency.79 He also served as the informal ambassador of the sprawling Russian arms industry. Both the government and the factory had reason to ensure that he did not slide into the penury that enveloped Izhevsk’s workforce. His ceremonial ascension from former noncommissioned officer to lieutenant general served him especially well. Because of it he received two payments a month from the government: a salary of about $575 from Izhmash and a general’s pension from the military, too.[43] 80 His payments as consultant to the export agency were never disclosed. There was no doubt he was provided for—not lavishly, but far better than most.
The opening of borders and the loosening of restrictions also allowed Kalashnikov to travel, and beginning in the 1990s he was flying from place to place and seeing a world that for decades had been forbidden. Many trips followed invitations to military museums or gun clubs, whose members crowded around him at the chance to meet the face of the AK-47. He visited, among other nations, China, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, where he was a minor celebrity for many firearm owners: the aging Soviet general, hard of hearing, who had given the world its best-known gun. He seemed to enjoy these trips most of all. Kalashnikov, after a career as a state hero, was a man who liked being toasted as a genius. Other trips were part of his duties as Russia’s ceremonial arms ambassador. The state arms-export agency shuttled him to arms shows to greet potential customers at the Russian booth. He claimed to have made more than fifty trips abroad, a pace of several expositions a year. In this way, he lived like Chekhov’s wedding general—an elderly and avuncular officer whose presence lent weight to gatherings otherwise routine. Sometimes he arrived in a sport coat or suit, which he adorned with a diamond-studded tie clip in the shape of an AK-47—a touch as paradoxical as post-Soviet Russia itself.
In performing his public duties, Kalashnikov was often earnest. He could seem sincere. Yet his official appearances were sometimes accompanied by an undercurrent of shabbiness, of a geriatric man being used. His assignment was to be the embodiment and caretaker of an idea—the notion, welcomed after the Soviet Union’s collapse, of Russian excellence. Post-Soviet Russia developed around him into an extraction state, an exporter of hydrocarbons, lumber, minerals, and people. It manufactured few commercial products widely recognized or sought beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union. In its lists of companies and exports, Russia had no Sony, Panasonic, or Samsung; no Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, or Nissan; no Vanguard, Lloyd’s of London, or Sotheby’s; no Gucci, Tag Heuer, or Cartier; no Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nestle, or Kraft; no Nokia, Black-Berry, Apple, or Microsoft. Russian fashions were not coveted, Russian popular music was scarcely listened to outside the former Soviet Union. But Russia had invented one commercial product that had overtaken much of the world: the AK-47 line. The paired Kalashnikovs, man and weapon, became secular icons and subjects of enforced celebration. Sometimes the celebratory nods took on an air that conflicted with Kalashnikov’s talk of peace. For several years, the Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow displayed a Kalashnikov that the museum claimed was used to kill seventy-eight American servicemen in Vietnam on a single spring day in the Tet Offensive of 1968.81 The tale felt apocryphal. And the museum’s presentation (the director of the museum pointed the rifle out proudly to an American newspaper reporter in 1997) seemed both gleeful and odd.
Part of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s performances for the republic required more shading of the truth, including recirculating exaggerations about the degree of secrecy that had surrounded him during Soviet times. Kalashnikov and his handlers made it seem as if he had been locked off from the world and isolated even from his fellow citizens, a closely guarded national security asset who was prohibited from mentioning his work.
In the mid-1980s I went to my birth place in the Kuryinsky district of the Altai region for the unveiling of my own bust at the central square near the district library. My countrymen wanted to know how I became twice a Hero of the Soviet Union, they wanted details. But speaking about my work was not allowed.82
This was not exactly true. While some secrecy attended all Soviet arms enterprises, Kalashnikov’s existence and work were openly acknowledged, and he was interviewed for a foreign publication as early as 1967.83 Such remarks were a type, a feeding of a legend. Some of his statements were more boldly out of line with the record.
It was a complete secret. I wasn’t allowed to speak to my family or have any contact with foreigners. Even after seven years of production, the gun was still secret: it had to be carried in a special case; there could be no specifications published; even the cartridge cases had to be picked up after shooting.84
These statements were laden with falsehoods. His assertion that no specifications had been published after seven years of production was demonstrably untrue. By 1955, the United States Ordnance Technical Intelligence Service had obtained and translated the 121-page Soviet Ministry of War’s AK-47 manual, which, according to the date stamp on the original Soviet document, had been published in 1952—three years after mass production of the early AK-47s began in Izhevsk. The United States military began circulating the manual in its commands.85
The act had its purposes. To some, the general’s appearances in his official capacities—as design virtuoso, lubricator of arms sales, a state secret emerging into the postcommunist light to dispense wisdom by the pearl— spoke to his commitment to the state. Others detected his discomfort, his fatigue, and a sense that he was performing services scripted by others.
