He goes, frankly, as a bauble, a banquet boy in the rolling Russian hospitality suite, to lend the peddling of planes and tanks some historical gravitas. He helps get the checks written… it is a special torture custom-made for him in a special capitalist hell.86
And yet he appeared, again and again. For his participation, he was commended. The state piled prizes upon him with inventiveness and marked his birthday as an official holiday. Wearing his medals and carrying bouquets, which he often waved triumphantly above his head, the loyal veteran was a one-man advertisement for Russian arms and Soviet greatness. On his holidays he fulfilled roles that in latter-day Russia passed for news: state hero, grateful servant, living example of the talented Russian mind. In 2007, at the sixtieth anniversary of the creation of the AK-47, President Vladimir V. Putin issued a decree noting that Kalashnikov’s “name is associated with the legendary pages of the history of Russian gun-making.”87 In November 2009, Putin’s protege, Dmitri A. Medvedev, followed the pattern. For Kalashnikov’s ninetieth birthday, Medvedev awarded him the Hero of Russia medal—the highest honorary designation in the Russian Federation. Like Kalashnikov’s accumulation of military ranks, each new award served to boost both the designer’s stature and the stature of the state. This was a mutually supporting public-relations loop.
Publicly, Kalashnikov’s standing remained large. Privately, his luck was fair. The end of the Soviet Union allowed challenges to the official Soviet story of his arms-design genius. Abroad, and in Rosoboronexport’s sales kiosks and on state-controlled Russian television, Kalashnikov was lionized. But with prohibitions on free speech loosened, he faced criticism as strong and personal as when he had been accused in Khrushchev’s time of being the center of a personality cult. Skeptics raised the possibility that Kalashnikov, like Aleksei Stakhanov, the celebrity miner who had supposedly mined fourteen times his quota of coal in a single shift, was a Soviet put-on, a heroic creation of a cynical state. Much of this line of inquiry was muted by the government’s muzzling of journalists, but it was robust enough that credible counterclaims to the AK-47’s parentage, and fuller explanations of the design process, emerged in Russian-language sources.
Kalashnikov, the man, pushed on. He slowed in his eighties and yet remained active, even spry—a case of will and Cossack hardiness besting advanced age. In the weeks and months between trips, he split time between his apartment in Izhevsk’s center and a rustic but modern two-story dacha outside the city on a lake. He passed time with guests, often writing or listening to classical music; Tchaikovsky, he said, was a favorite.
His luck never quite turned. Many people tried to make money off him, and he became involved in private ventures, none of which proved lucrative. Local businessmen, backed by the government, borrowed his last name for a brand of vodka. But the Russian vodka market was as crowded as the international assault-rifle trade. The brand never captured market share. It filled store shelves in Izhevsk, but was almost unseen outside Udmurtia or the occasional duty-free shop, where it was packaged as overpriced kitsch. (One vodka offering at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow, in a bottle shaped like an AK-47, carried a price tag of 150 euros. The vodka inside was worth a few dollars, at most.)88 Kalashnikov’s family groused about business arrangements that provided small returns for Kalashnikov and profits for the vodka producers; ill feelings lurked beneath the surface. The designer himself all but sighed when discussing his experiences in business—a concept foreign to an elderly worker from a state enterprise. “I do it very poorly,” he said. “Private commercial interests were never realistic options for us.”[44]89 In interviews, he often downplayed the importance of money. “I am told sometimes, ‘If you had lived in the West, you would have been a millionaire long ago.’ Well, they value everything in that green stuff. But there are other values. Why don’t they see these values?”90 At other times, disappointment emerged. “Stoner has his own aircraft,” he said of the inventor of the M-16. “I can’t even afford my own plane ticket.”91
If his own security was precarious, that of the rifles was not. The Kalashnikov line retained its place in Russian military life and in larger society. Preconscription training in public schools did not fade away with the Soviet Union, though the Kremlin, first under Putin and again under Medvedev, insisted the nation was shifting to a volunteer military force. The old pattern became the new. Russian students continued to study the Kalashnikov at school, including gaining hands-on experience with the assault rifles as tenth and eleventh graders.92 By 2010, virtually every adult male in the nation less than seventy years old had handled Kalashnikov’s rifle and knew the designer’s storied name and official history.
What of his legacy? One element was beyond dispute. Whatever notoriety the AK-47 and its knock-offs realized, Kalashnikov the man would be sure to defend to the end his nostalgic ideas of Soviet days. He was fastidious, proud of labor, and attuned to the rituals of Slavic collegiality. In formal settings, he would drink small glasses of cognac and vodka, shot by shot, gamely making toasts and wishing his many well-wishers well. Russia might have suffered its many deteriorations. He would not let that be said of him. He insisted on neatness. In public he often produced a comb and fussed his white hair into place. In his home, he offered pickles and fresh
And he could confound. In one interview, he suggested that it was a compliment for his family to have been selected by party commissars in Kurya for exile during collectivization. As Kalashnikov framed it, Stalin knew which families were hardy and resourceful enough to tame Siberia. He chose the Kalashnikovs to help build a greater Soviet Union.93 It was a sign of the dictator’s wisdom, in this view, that he had chosen so well.
In his Russian-language writing, Kalashnikov stood in many different places at once. He wrote of his desire for peace and communal friendship, and of the perspectives of common soldiers. He wrote of international bonds between people and of his respect for, and relationships with, foreign arms designers. He also expressed disdain for American craftsmanship and American consumer attitudes, and gave voice to his satisfaction that his weapons had stymied American military operations—a roundabout way of expressing satisfaction that his weapons had killed American troops.
Americans like to think that everything that is best is “Made in USA” and they would like very much that the period after World War Two would pass under the sign of their achievements and that “according to the law of the markets their American products would fly like a swarm.” Unfortunately, everything was the opposite. The second half of the twentieth century is marked by the fact that the Americans could not feel themselves absolutely unpunished either in Cuba or in Korea or in Vietnam or in tens of other places, which they believed were their zone of vital interests. And everywhere it was the AK that had a sobering effect on them.94
His zigzagging statements were unsurprising. He had lived a complicated life. With a complicated life came a complicated file—that of a survivor in a dystopia that first tormented his family, then championed him as a national hero. He presented a mass of ideas that cannot be squared.
Ultimately, Kalashnikov was left, by both his circumstances and his decisions, atop his contradictions. He clung to his mixed accounts of the rifle’s origins and insisted upon respect while speaking of his own humility. To one interviewer he said: “As for the star sickness, I do not have it.”95 Yet when a museum was built in his honor in Izhevsk,[45] it compared him, with seriousness, to Galileo, and in his dacha, on the stair landing leading to the second floor, he hung a large Central Asian carpet bearing an image of himself. These were not marks of modesty. Kalashnikov also claimed to have bitterly told President Boris N. Yeltsin in writing that a pistol Yeltsin had presented him was a “mediocre decoration” that “humiliated the President of Russia even more than it did me.”96 This in spite of the fact that Yeltsin had made an exception to army personnel policies that forbade the appointment of a general in peacetime and elevated Kalashnikov from the rank of colonel to general grade.97
The references to Galileo and the outbursts were significant. They underscored the most consistent qualities of Kalashnikov’s innumerable comments after the Communist Party’s fall: his pride of association with the AK-47 and his sense of extraordinary accomplishment. This was his real position. It sometimes flashed itself in starkly unconventional terms. “With arms you have to understand it is like the idea of a woman who bears children,” he said. “For months she carries a baby and thinks about it. The design work is similar. I felt like a mother—always happy when her baby achieves something.”98 He added: “I have always tried to knock down that annoying stereotype: if you are a weapons designer, you are a murderer…. For people in my profession, all that comes down to one notion: Motherland.”99 Ultimately, in the service of this position, he assembled carefully disconnected lines of thought. He sought credit for the rifle when it was put to uses he liked. He rejected
