The Gun

the notion that he was in any way responsible for problems the rifles caused.

These positions made him much different from another renowned figure in Soviet arms design: Andrei D. Sakharov. Sakharov, one of the physicists who led the Soviet nuclear-arms program, had contributed to the successful detonation of RDS-1 outside Semipalatinsk in 1949 while Kalashnikov was involved in outfitting the gun works in Izhevsk. His later work was a cornerstone of the development of the hydrogen bomb. He was a giant in Soviet weapons programs, a three-time Hero of Socialist Labor—one of the rare Soviet men more decorated than Kalashnikov. By the mid-1960s, burdened by the moral responsibilities of his work, he urged an end to the arms race that had been the center of his professional and intellectual life. Sakharov dared to question the entire socialist world. In doing so he rejected its rewards and brought upon himself its wrath. He called for rapprochement with the West and the development of a pluralistic society rooted in human rights and free expression. The Soviet Union ordered him into internal exile and restricted his travels and his writing. In 1973, Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB, who had been the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the crackdowns in 1956, labeled him “a person involved in anti-social activity.”¹⁰⁰ The world saw Sakharov differently. In 1975, he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mikhail Kalashnikov was no Sakharov. But expectations of a Sakharov-style reorientation, implicit in the many questions he fielded over the years about what the AK-47 had become, were diversionary. For just as Kalashnikov was not the sole creator of the original AK-47, he was not responsible for the manufacture, distribution, or illicit use of the long line of derivative rifles that followed it. He was a midlevel player in a large system, and never its engine. The larger processes, globally and within Stalin’s military complex, were in motion long before he participated in them, and the Soviet Union was determined to produce, and would have produced, a simple and reliable assault rifle for mass production whether or not Kalashnikov had lent his energies to the pursuit. This was a far simpler task than creating an atomic bomb. And once this new rifle was made, it would have been standardized throughout the communist bloc, as were many other martial products of Soviet provenance.

For all of Kalashnikov’s unyielding insistence that he was accountable for nothing beyond being a gifted inventor, and for all of his moments of nationalism, he occasionally expressed remorse—at least at the rifle’s association with atrocity, crime, ethnic war, and terror. His regret at times sounded tactical. A prepared statement about the perils of illicit small-arms proliferation read in part like a capitalist’s complaint that other manufacturers had cut into Russia’s business. At other times his misgivings sounded genuine. “Do you think it’s pleasant seeing all of these hoodlums using your gun?” he once said, and then pointed to the post-Soviet war for Nagorno-Karabakh, the disputed territory along the border between the two former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. “Armenians and Azeris killing each other. We all lived so peacefully before.” His memoirs touched difficult themes. “Arms makers have strange destinies!” he wrote. “They are saluted with shots they never expected, and it is not orations or music that remind one of jubilees but moans and screams.”¹⁰¹ These were hints at private pain. But almost always, after allowing such a tantalizing glimpse, he turned back to his fuller answers, the jumbled medley of a man whose name was attached to the world’s most common rifle, and a killing machine.

The constructor is not the owner of the weapon—it is the state. It does of course feel good when I know that many states used the arm. That something very worthy had been created… they spread the weapon not because I wanted them to. Not at my choice. I made it to protect the Motherland. Then it was like a genie out of the bottle and began to walk on its own in directions that I did not want. The positives have outweighed [the negatives] because many use it to defend their countries. The negative side is that sometimes it is beyond your control—terrorists also want to use simple and reliable arms.¹⁰²

To this, on a summer day late in life, he added an answer to the victims, to men like Karzan Mahmoud, crippled by a terrorist carrying everyman’s gun. “I sleep soundly,” Kalashnikov said.

EPILOGUE The Twenty-first Century’s Rifle

Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, early 2006

The fourteen Marines, ready to dash, waited for the signal. It was a cold February morning on a firing range just inland from North Carolina’s coast. The Marines, members of Second Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, were preparing for a deployment in the Anbar province of Iraq, and on this day they had set aside their M-4s and M-16s. In front of them, a short jog away, were fourteen Kalashnikov assault rifles, disassembled, unloaded, resting on the ground. At the signal, the Marines were to sprint to the rifles, reassemble them, perform a function check, load a magazine, and fire into a man-shaped target, aiming for the face and chest. Their rifles were a mix of Kalashnikov variants. They came from Romania, Russia, China, and North Korea. One was an original AK-47 from Izhevsk, assembled from solid machined steel, date-stamped 1954.¹ It was fifty-two years old—almost three times the age of some of the men about to fire it.

The Corps had a nickname for this test: Just In Case. In the tour ahead for these Marines, their officers wanted to be sure that they could pick up a Kalashnikov, in any condition, whether from an allied Iraqi soldier or from an insurgent in a close-range fight, and use the weapon immediately and well. The signal was given. The Marines were sprinting. Thirty seconds or so later, the first of them were firing. Holes began to appear in their targets’ heads.

After almost six decades, the long travels of the Kalashnikov assault rifle had achieved the inevitable state: full saturation. Decades earlier the first AK-47s had left Soviet hands, and in the years since they had become the hand weapon of choice for strongmen, criminals, terrorists, and messianic guerrilla leaders. In time the Kalashnikov had also become a preferred arm for those who fought against the Soviet Union or Russia, and those who organized genocide. And now it was institutionalized in the training of American infantrymen. It could not, with all prudence, be any other way. In the battles ahead, every one of these Marines would encounter Kalashnikovs in the hands of allies and enemies alike. To see Marines prepare themselves around these simple facts, training with the signature socialist arm on one of the most prominent American military bases, was to grasp the extent of Kalashnikov saturation in modern war.

What does saturation mean? It would be naive to think that war would stop without these weapons. It wouldn’t. It would be just as naive to think that many of the consequences of war as it has been waged in recent decades might not be lessened if these rifles were in fewer hands, and not so available for future conflicts. For how long will battlefields be so? The answer is straightforward—as long as the rifles exist in the outsized numbers the Cold War left behind.

Much attention is paid to accountability, security, and destruction of potential materials for weapons of mass destruction. With lesser urgency and smaller budgets, efforts to secure and destroy antipersonnel land mines have become widely accepted. In the past decade or so, similar attention has been given to efforts to eliminate stocks of shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons, whose existence threatens the security of air transportation. The notion of regulating military firearms and destroying excess stockpiles enjoys much less support and faces considerable opposition, no matter that illicit uses of assault rifles have killed and wounded far more people than have all of these other weapons combined.

There are many reasons for this. Part of it is that surplus small arms are regarded as foreign-policy tools to be kept in reserve. Part of it is that to many government officials, honest and corrupt alike, surplus small arms are commodities, items to be converted to cash. Part of it is the manner in which priorities are set. Infantry arms that are loose in the field are exceedingly difficult to account for or collect. Surplus arms, locked up in armories, do not seem to cry for attention. Domestic and international politics play a role, too. The governments most responsible for the widespread distribution of military assault rifles—Russia, China, and the United States—have, for different reasons, shown little to no interest in destroying their excess weapons or those of other governments, even when they are not needed by standing military forces, and even when they endanger their own troops.

The United States has underwritten destruction programs. These have been small in ambition and scale, low in priority and funding, and undermined by official incoherence. Moreover, domestic politics in the United States have hindered any American government from trying to undo assault-rifle proliferation, at least as more than a