The Gun (2 page)

During this time, the American intelligence community would fixate, understandably and properly, on the Soviet Union’s nuclear programs. The activities in Izhevsk would be missed. As the mushroom cloud towered over the Kazakh steppe, no one noticed the arrival of Stalin’s new firearm. No one would pay much mind as these rifle plants, and others across the Eastern bloc and in nations aligned with the Soviet Union or the socialist ideal, would ship off their automatic rifles by the untold millions during the years ahead. And no one would have predicted, as the world worried over nuclear war, that these rifles, with their cartridges of reduced size, would become the most lethal instrument of the Cold War. Unlike the nuclear arsenals and the infrastructure that would rise around them—the warheads, the mobile launchers, the strategic bombers
and submarines—an automatic rifle was a weapon that could actually be used. And none of the Cold War’s seemingly infinite and fantastic array of killing tools could more readily slip from state control. In this way, 1949 became the year of a mismatched but fated pair, RDS-1 and the AK-47, whose descendants were to work in consonance and shape the conflicts ahead. The nuclear umbrella froze borders in place and discouraged all-out war between the conventional armies stacked in Europe, helping to create conditions in which the Kalashnikov percolated from continent to continent, nation to nation, group to group, man to man, maturing as its numbers grew and its reputation spread into the age’s dominant tool for violence in conflict zones. At first the distribution was piecemeal and incremental; gradually, it became almost unchecked. By the early 1960s, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had startled its participants and as the war in Vietnam was expanding and quickening, the Kremlin and the White House comprehended that their mutual nuclear arsenals had made total war unwinnable. Small wars and proxies would be the means through which the Cold War would be fought.

The Kalashnikov Era had arrived.

We are living in it still.

This book focuses on the most important series of infantry small arms of our time, and as most commonly encountered in the field: the original AK-47 and its derivates, knockoffs, and companion firearms that have flooded armories and arms bazaars around the world and become a primary weapon of guerrillas, terrorists, and many armed criminal gangs. It examines their origins, design, production, distribution, stockpiling, export, and use as one of the predominant tools of war of the past half-century—a status they are likely to retain for at least a half-century more. But this is not an account solely of a weapon’s ubiquity on the battlefield. Nor is it a treatment of the AK-47 only for the sake of examining the AK-47. That is not to say that the Kalashnikov line by itself is not an expansive and interesting subject; it is. But a richer context is essential. These weapons occupy a place in history beyond the questions of when, where, and how they have been manufactured and used. The significance of the automatic Kalashnikov lies deeper than its origins in Stalin’s Soviet Union, its technical utility as a killing tool, its famed reliability and ease of
use, the awesome size of its number or the multiplicity of its meanings—though these themes are all essential.

The richer context is this: The automatic Kalashnikov offers a lens for examining the miniaturization and simplification of rapid-fire firearms, a set of processes that when uncoupled from free markets and linked to mass production in the planned economies of opaque or brittle nations, enabled automatic firepower to reach uncountable hands. It also provides a lens for examining national arming decisions, in the East and the West, and the many practices of arms transfers to other states and groups, often to disastrous effect. The results have shaped war and influenced security and development in large sections of the world. This is the story, then, of how fully automatic rifles, lightweight and often concealable tools that perform their intended tasks with reliability and efficiency, came into existence and widespread use.

In the narrowest sense, these weapons were born of a set of ugly and overpowering political forces of the early to mid-twentieth century. Nazism, Stalinism, and the exigencies of the Cold War combined to give assault rifles their early shape. But their roots reach much further back in time; they are the result of evolutionary processes in firearms and ammunition development and changes in military and economic thinking that accompanied an industrializing and polarizing world. The factors and actors that finally conjured compact automatic rifles into existence were able to do so because of this much longer and richer history. The journey through this history is populated by geniuses and fools, ruthless villains and naïve idealists, self-promoting salesmen and incorrigible profiteers, a pantheon of killers of all stripes and, now and then, people who wanted the killing to stop. Along the way the journey offers a tour of the ignorance and folly of many governments and their colonels and generals, as well as a passage across the grim political landscape of the Soviet Union and many of the most dreadful battlefields of modern times, upon which soldiers found themselves using the wrong tactics or carrying the wrong gear. It is also the story of how the United States, whose industrial revolution in the nineteeth century became the incubator for rapid-fire arms, and which as it became a superpower would stand against the Soviet Union and dictate small-arms choices to fellow NATO member states, repeatedly misread the path of automatic arms development. Ultimately, in the 1960s, American soldiers and Marines found themselves outgunned.
Automatic arms had evolved in the Eastern bloc to the Kalashnikov line. The United States was far behind. Such mistakes began in the mid-nineteenth century and continued, at key moments, for more than one hundred years. Last, in the latter half of the Cold War, the chronicle shifts again, to an account of how Kalashnikov-pattern rifles migrated from military possession to guerrillas, thugs, bandits, child soldiers, and a host of other users at odds with the stated, or perhaps supposed, reasons of their design. These weapons began as a means to equip standing armies. But the nations that made them lost custody of them, and then control, and now in much of the world they are everyman’s gun.

In examining the AK-47 in this way, this book attempts to lift the Kalashnikov out of the simplistic and manipulated distillations of its history that have come to define it, inadequately. The carefully packaged history of Soviet times, a cheerful parable for the proletariat, was that the weapon sprang from the mind of a gifted if unlettered sergeant who wanted to present his nation an instrument for its defense. This was a message made in the Communist Party’s propaganda mills. It required redaction and lies. In publishing this account, the Soviet Union resorted to enough invention, some of it cartoonish, that even Mikhail Kalashnikov eventually publicly criticized it, albeit lightly. As a historical account, the official narrative was not only embellished and redacted, but poorly framed. It emphasized the heroic spontaneity of a single mind and intentions for the weapon at odds with the weapon’s most characteristic uses. The AK-47 did not result from an epiphany at the workbench of an intent Russian sergeant. Heroism, in the classic sense, was nonexistent here. Spontaneity, according to a close reading of the available records, played almost no role. The automatic Kalashnikov was the result of state process and collective work, the output not of a man but of committees. And its wide distribution and martial popularity did not occur because the rifle is, as General Kalashnikov often says, “simple, reliable, and easy to use.”
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Ultimately, it was its production by the tens of millions by governments that gave them away or lost control of them that made the Kalashnikov the world’s primary firearm. One way to understand the nature of its familiarity is this: Had the AK-47 been created in Luxembourg, few people would likely have ever heard of it. But Luxembourg could not have created this weapon, because it lacked the Soviet bureaucracy and the particular historical pressures that ordered the Kalashnikov to its
form within the USSR. This assessment is meant as no insult to Mikhail Kalashnikov; rather, it is meant to show the fuller and more interesting processes that pulled assault rifles into existence and global use, and to draw out the inner workings of the Soviet Union during a time it saw itself as in great peril. The Soviet state is the inventor here—both of the weapon and its fables. Far too many people regard the study of weapons as an illiberal art. The chronicle of automatic firepower, viewed through the AK-47 and its infiltration across the world, suggests otherwise. But first fable must be cast away.

Such an inquiry could begin at many points over a roughly one-hundred-year span. Here, it will start with Dr. Richard J. Gatling, whose invention in 1862 of the Gatling gun provided armies with their first reasonably effective rapid-fire arm—a massive, misunderstood, and often unwanted weapon that became the precursor to the rest. The early Gatling system weighed, more or less, a ton. It had no more mobility than an artillery piece, and required a crew of men to fire and a train of mules or horses to move about the battlefield. In its early forms it was temperamental, prone to jamming, and often despised by traditionalists who did not understand what it pointed to. And yet it was, in the history of conflict, of singular importance: Distinct shapes of modern war and instability can be traced through the miniaturization and proliferation that followed Gatling’s designs. In 1949, the Soviet selection of the AK-47 as its standard military arm marked a decisive moment in this evolution. A superpower had managed the effective miniaturization of a rapid-fire arm that could be wielded by a single man in almost all the typical situations in which a firearm might be useful. Gatling’s ton became, in a fully loaded Kalashnikov, about ten pounds—a weapon compact enough to be worn beneath a coat. To compete with this new weapon, combatants faced a choice. Either use the Kalashnikov, or come up with a rifle that could match it in a fight. War reorganized around Stalin’s gun.

Why does this remain a subject, more than half a century on? One weapon alone has been a consistently lethal presence in modern war: the infantry rifle. Tanks can rout conventional armies. GPS-guided ordnance can scatter combatants. Land mines, suicide bombers, and improvised explosives have attracted more attention in recent years. Yet the rifle remains
preeminent. Whenever an idea organizes for battle it gathers around its guns. Few weapons are as accessible or can be as readily learned. No other weapon appears in as many conflict areas year after year. None is as sure to appear in each future war, if only because no other weapon is as well suited for as many missions and tasks. And of all the rifles available for war today, the Kalashnikov line stands apart as the most abundant and widely used rifle ever made. Virtually everyone has seen a Kalashnikov. With its stubby black barrel with a parallel gas tube above, its steep front sight post, and the distinctive banana clip, its unmistakable profile has become a constant presence in the news. It is the world’s most widely recognized weapon, one of the world’s most recognizable objects.

More than six decades after its design and initial distribution, more than fifty national armies carry the automatic Kalashnikov, as do an array of police, intelligence, and security agencies. But its fuller terrain lies outside the sphere of conventional force. The Kalashnikov marks the guerrilla, the terrorist, the child soldier, the dictator, and the thug—all of whom have found it to be a ready equalizer against morally or materially superior foes. A roster of its handlers holds a history of modern strife. Celebrated by Soviet propagandists as a tool for self-defense and liberation, its first lethal uses were for repression—crushing uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956, and for shooting fleeing civilians trying to cross the Iron Curtain’s borders. Once it grew beyond border and crackdown duty in Eastern Europe, and became an automatic weapon for global combat service, it was instantly a groundbreaking firearm, a weapon that rearranged the rules. In the 1960s, when American Marines encountered AK-47s in urban warfare, at Hue City in Vietnam, they discovered that a single guerrilla with a Kalashnikov could slow a company’s advance; they used cannon to rubble buildings in which AK-toting Viet Cong marksmen hid.
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Its power, today a battlefield norm, was at first of an almost unseen sort, at least among the weapons that could be wielded by one man. Interest in it was immediate. Engineers in Finland and Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia secured early versions of the weapon and developed unlicensed knockoffs straightaway. After leading the revolution that put him atop Cuba, Fidel Castro amassed stores of Soviet assault rifles and distributed engraved Kalashnikovs as gifts. Idi Amin armed his Ugandan forces with Kalashnikovs and appointed himself president for life. Yasir Arafat procured them for the PLO and the many terrorist groups that
spread from Fatah. Since it first entered the martial consciousness, no matter the year or theater, the Kalashnikov has appeared. Its followers cross all lines. The Egyptian army outfitted itself with Kalashnikovs. Islamic Jihad used a Kalashnikov to assassinate the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. Its durability and availability have made it more popular with the passing of time; the great numbers of its manufacture and the multiple sellers offering it ultimately ensured that it would be turned against the army that created it, as was the case in the Soviet-Afghan War and then again in Chechnya.

By the 1980s, with several sources simultaneously arming both sides of the Afghan conflict, the country filled with AK-47s and their derivatives. A durable assault rifle can have many lives over the decades of its existence, and in Afghanistan the weapons were recycled repeatedly, passed from fighter to fighter by many means. In the Panjshir Valley, a chasm in the mountains north of Kabul, the rifle sometimes became a family heirloom. The valley had been the scene of some of the most intense fighting in the early years of the war; its canyons became backdrops for mujahideen legend. Several times the Soviet army thrust armored columns up the valley, sometimes enveloping the guerrillas by using helicopters to land troops on mountain passes to cut off withdrawing mujahideen. Each time the Soviet forces controlled territory briefly before being subjected to persistent attacks. The valley was never conquered, and its villages were never co-opted or tamed. First among the Soviet army’s foes was Ahmad Shah Massoud, the ethnic Tajik commander whose charisma and tactical adroitness became part of Afghan lore. Massoud’s fighters were fit and skilled. But they too suffered. After one Soviet incursion, Massoud attended the funeral of a dead guerrilla. He lifted the man’s Kalashnikov and carried it to the deceased man’s younger brother, Ashrat Khan. The commander’s mastery of quiet ceremony, like his sense for tactics, had reached a high state of polish.