The Gun (30 page)

Sergeant Kalashnikov settled into Matai, taking up residence in a single-story wooden home and fathering a son, Viktor Mikhailovich, who was born late in 1942.
⁷⁰
By then Kalashnikov had moved again, away from the child and the child’s mother.
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Once the weapon was finished, a local official decided to send the weapon and the sergeant to the military registration and enlistment headquarters in Alma-Ata, the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Kalashnikov made the train trip, drinking vodka along the way with fellow travelers. He arrived in the capital, presented himself to a lieutenant serving as the commissar’s adjutant, and announced that he, a tank sergeant on convalescent leave, had made a new weapon. He said he would like to show it to the commissar. He was arrested. “This was war time and everybody was very much on guard,” Kalashnikov said. “The question was, where did this staff sergeant get the means to develop a machine pistol?”
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Relieved of his weapon and of his belt, Sergeant Kalashnikov spent four days locked in a guardhouse, asking each of his cell mates, as they were released, to contact people on his behalf. On the fourth day the adjutant appeared and arranged his release. (Unsurprisingly, the official version makes no mention of an arrest.) A car waited outside, to bring the sergeant to the republic’s Central Committee. Kalashnikov, it seemed, had enlisted the help of local party contacts he had made in Matai during the late 1930s as a member of the Komsomol. The official who met him affected the mannerisms and dress of Stalin, as many officials did at the time. He had no expertise in small arms, but, by Kalashnikov’s telling, he was impressed that the weapon had been created in a railroad workshop by a sergeant with no special training. He arranged for Kalashnikov to continue his work at an institute in the city under the mentorship of a specialist in aircraft weapons. Hundreds of Soviet design institutes and
manufacturing enterprises had relocated to the east, out of reach of German columns and aircraft. Working from a small adobe building, Kalashnikov refined his weapon at the Moscow Aviation Institute, which had moved to Alma-Ata.

Later, he was sent to the Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy, which had relocated from western Russia to Samarkand, in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic. There, early in the summer of 1942,
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Kalashnikov met Major General Anatoly A. Blagonravov, a Soviet academician who worked during the war on automatic arms. The general examined Kalashnikov’s prototype. It had technical problems and was not better than submachine guns already in Soviet use, including the PPSh. Kalashnikov has offered different versions of this meeting. In 1968 he said General Blagonravov reassigned him to the academy. “What did you do then?” an interviewer asked him. He answered: “What I was advised to do. I had to remain at the Academy and study.”
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In later accounts, and in the official tale, Kalashnikov said the general intervened quickly on his behalf, having understood that whatever was wrong with Kalashnikov’s submachine gun, the fact of its creation demonstrated the sergeant’s commitment and talent. He recommended that Kalashnikov be transferred to a setting where he could pursue his design ideas full-time. In one memoir, Kalashnikov quoted from the recommendation he said the general made.

Despite a negative judgment on the submachine gun as a whole, I note the large and laborious work done by Comrade Kalashnikov with great love and persistence under extremely unfavorable local conditions. In this work Comrade Kalashnikov displayed indisputable talent in designing the submachine gun, especially if one takes into consideration his insufficient technical education and a total lack of experience in gunsmithery. I consider it advisable to send Comrade Kalashnikov to study at a technical school, at least to short-term courses for military technicians in accordance with his wish, as the first step possible for him in wartime.
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In Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, General Blagonravov’s letter was presented to Lieutenant General Pavel S. Kurbatkin, an officer who had helped defeat the
basmachi
Islamic uprising in the region twenty years before, and who commanded the Central Asian Military District. The general ordered Kalashnikov to Moscow, to the Main Artillery Department. His journey to Schurovo began. On the train, he rode with Sergei G. Simonov, an established designer. The two discussed the sergeant’s prospects. General Blagonravov had told Kalashnikov to read widely and to study all existing firearms. “Without knowing the old you will not make the new well,” he had said.
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Simonov offered similar advice.

Suddenly Simonov squinted and smiled;

“Now tell me: Do you like to dismantle things?”

“You bet!” I exclaimed. “And I put something back together and then take it apart again to see every projection, every groove, every depression, every washer and every screw in order to understand exactly how everything works.”

“Well, then, when we get to the testing range, the first thing you should do is dismantle and assemble every gun. Feel the metal structures with your hands and eyes—and you will understand everything better, and it will be easier for you to perfect your gun.”

“I’ll do that, Sergei Gavrilovich,” I assured Simonov.

I thought I saw him glance at my tanker’s insignia.

“We all must do our jobs! Otherwise one could end up firing a pistol from a tank.”
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Upon arriving at Schurovo, Kalashnikov frequented the polygon’s museum, which had an extensive collection of Russian and foreign weapons. “The specimens of arms displayed gave a graphic picture of the evolution of arms,” he said. “I took rifles, carbines, pistols, submachine guns and machine guns in my hands and thought about how unique various designing solutions were, how unpredictable the flight of creative thought could be, and how similar Russian and foreign arms sometimes were.” He added: “Sometimes I noticed that originality did not always go well with expediency.”
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Kalashnikov was also drawn to another collection: prototypes of Russian and Soviet firearms that had not been selected
for production. All of these weapons had flaws, but many had an unusual component or represented a novel approach. Kalashnikov tried to determine what about each weapon had made it a failure and inspected weapons from this scrap heap to see if any had a valuable feature, unrelated to its disqualification, that might be applied in a future design.

For much of the next two years, Kalashnikov shuttled between Schurovo and institutes in Tashkent and Alma-Ata. He tried to perfect his submachine gun, but the Red Army’s evaluators rejected it, saying that it still did not improve on existing models and was too complicated. (By the account of one of his supervisors at Schurovo, Kalashnikov’s work was of little promise: “Those samples were not even tested, since they were very primitive. . . . I can state with responsibility that during his work in Kazakhstan he did not create anything useable.”)
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In late 1943, he participated in a contest for a light machine gun and was selected as a finalist. Again his submission did not win approval. “The failure wounded my pride,” he said, and claimed that after these disappointments, he considered leaving the armorer profession and returning to the front. Instead, he said, he was encouraged to remain at his job by the chief of the polygon’s Inventions Department. In October 1944 he tried to work out a semiautomatic carbine matched to the new M1943 intermediate cartridge. His project was discontinued when Simonov’s entrant became the front runner. Every gun he had tried to design had failed. “I suffered probably a hundred times more failures,” he said, “than other designers.”
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Early in 1946, three and a half years after leaving Central Asia for his new career, Sergeant Kalashnikov had his break: selection to continue in the trials to design an
avtomat
for the M1943 cartridge.

After being chosen for the second phase, he was transferred from Schurovo to Kovrov, an industrial center. Roughly two hundred miles east and north of Moscow, Kovrov was officially a city whose workers manufactured excavators. In accordance with the Soviet cover assigned to it, the plant where Kalashnikov was assigned was engaged in the manufacture of motorcycles. In fact it was dedicated to the production of automatic arms, including many of the machine guns and submachine guns that
had driven the Nazis off, among them the PPSh. When Sergeant Kalashnikov arrived, the plant had recently been awarded the Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s highest award, for its successes arming the Red Army. During the war, the Communist Youth, working with factory workers who logged eleven-hour days on the assembly lines, constructed a new shop and production center for the Goryunov machine gun.
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Nationalist fervor in Kovrov ran strong, at least among the officials. “A special exultant atmosphere reigned there,” Kalashnikov wrote.
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The assignment came at a difficult time for Kalashnikov. Repression and war had scattered the Kalashnikov family, and now that the war was over, news of his family’s grief was reaching him. Two of his older brothers—Ivan and Andrei—had been killed. The husband of his sister Gasha, who had been the dedicated party man in Kurya, had been lost in the war, too. The direct family tally meant that of the seven male members in Timofey Kalashnikov’s peasant household in 1930, only two survived the next fifteen years unharmed—Timofey died in exile, Viktor had been sentenced to a labor gang, Ivan and Andrei were killed in action, Mikhail had been wounded. This sort of suffering distilled the sorrow of the Stalin years. The war losses also gave meaning to the nation’s pride in its role and sacrifices in defeating Hitler’s Germany—the Soviet Union’s greatest accomplishment and a subject used to distract attention from the system’s cruelty and failures. Kalashnikov was too busy to return home and comfort his bereaved relatives. The
avtomat
project demanded his attention. His life was also changing. Though he had a young son and wife in Matai, on the Kazakh steppe, he had fallen in love with Katya, the draftswoman at the NIPSMVO design bureau. He was filled with longing as he left for Kovrov. Katya had to remain behind.

For a young arms designer on an important project, Kovrov held professional promise. Revered names in Russian armaments circles had worked at the plant, including Fedorov and Vasily A. Degtyarev, a Fedorov protégé and Stalin favorite who had been promoted to general-grade rank and given a black ZIS, the imitation Packard limousine manufactured by hand for the party’s elite. When the arms plant received the Order of Lenin, General Degtyarev had been granted the Order of Suvorov, a decoration typically given to leaders who excelled in combat. Such was the general’s stature. He had achieved the rarefied place of rewards and fame that Stalin’s machine doled out to its favored sons. Kovrov was
a place for arms-design greatness. And with the push for an
avtomat,
there was fresh urgency and opportunity. A cadre of draftsmen, engineers, machinists, and other specialists were pressed into service. Kalashnikov was soon paired with his new bureau.

Over the course of a year,
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the collective made a batch of prototype rifles. The outline of what would become the AK-47 was only faintly evident:
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the weapon’s overall length, the steeply raised front sight post, the distinctly curved magazine, and the characteristic gas tube above the barrel. But many Soviet efforts at automatics looked like this; these were not unusual traits. The resemblance to the eventual design was superficial. Internal components were still to be reworked. Kalashnikov and his collective nonetheless were proud. They had a gun. “At last the time came,” he said, “when we could actually touch the whole thing, glistening with lacquer and lubricant.”
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Sergeant Kalashnikov worked alongside Aleksandr Zaitsev, an engineer who had recently left the army. One design feature was essential. They chose to make their prototypes’ parts loose-fitting, rather than snug, thinking that this might make the weapons less likely to jam when dirty, inadequately lubricated, or clogged with carbon from heavy firing. This was a counterintuitive choice to many Western designers, who had experience with the precision tools that allowed assembly lines to work within tight tolerances and mill parts to an exacting fit. Some Russian designers favored that approach, too. “Tokarev had adopted one principle which determined the overall shape of his weapons: all the elements were stuck to one another so that not even dust could get in,” Kalashnikov wrote. “My approach is different: all the elements are spaced out, as if they were hanging in air.”
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The approach was not original. It had been used by Simonov for the SKS and by Sudayev in the AS-44—the weapon that had been the front runner until Sudayev fell sick.
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It appeared to reach to the stamped-metal Soviet submachine guns, which were made with a looser fit to accommodate the anticipated shrinking and stretching associated with stamping and pressing metal sheets. It was becoming a trait in general-issue Soviet small arms and would distinguish them from their Western counterparts. To those who did not recognize the reasons behind the choice, the AK-47 could seem crude. Anyone who removed the return spring from a Kalashnikov, for example, would find that many parts, when not held by its tension, would slide and rattle. This was not
crudity. This was exactly as the AK-47 was designed, and contributed to the weapon’s ability to withstand field use.

In 1947 the teams gathered with their prototypes back at Schurovo for the field trials, to be held from June 30 to August 12.
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The new weapons would compete against one another, while three others—the AS-44 prototype made by Sudayev, a captured German
sturmgewehr,
and a PPSh—would be used as controls. Kalashnikov was of two minds. In Schurovo he was reunited with Katya, and the pair was married at the garrison. “The testing range became our registry office,” he said.
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His personal life had taken a shape that would last for decades. His professional confidence was strained. He was anxious about the tests and wished that if he was to be eliminated, the elimination would be quick. His weapon, listed as the AK-46, was heavy, weighing more than nine and a half pounds.
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He doubted its design. “My situation was not enviable as I was becoming increasingly critical of my imperfect creation,” he said.
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He worried and fretted, listening to the rifles being fired, and was able to distinguish the sound of his from the others. Once, as the AK-46 was being put through a course that included ten shots, the shooting ceased after a few rounds. The silence tormented him. Had his weapon jammed? The tester who answered the phone laughed. “A moose crossed the firing line so we had to stop shooting,”
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he told him.