The Gun (40 page)

Next was the PK, or
Pulemyot Kalashnikova,
the machine gun by Kalashnikov. This filled the medium-machine-gun role for infantry companies, with greater range, accuracy, and stopping power than the RPK. It was meant to become the general-purpose machine gun for Soviet forces. In the initial effort to develop such an arm, a machine gun by Grigory I. Nikitin and Yury M. Sokolov was the front-runner. Ultimately, a design team in Izhevsk, with Kalashnikov as its titular head,
presented its submission. The army had been satisfied enough with the AK-47, AKM, and RPK that it thought that the machine gun under the same name might enjoy similar popularity and success. It selected the submission from Izhevsk for service in 1961.
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The PK weighed nearly twenty pounds unloaded and fired the larger 7.62x54R cartridge; it was to be a successful weapon and found in service alongside Kalashnikov rifles almost anywhere they are used. The basics of the Kalashnikov line were now complete. Future arms in the series would all be modifications of these underlying designs.
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(The remaining element of the Eastern bloc’s primary suite of small arms—a semiautomatic sniper rifle known as the SVD, or
Snaiperskaya Vintovka Dragunova
—was also in its research and development phase. It would be fielded in the early 1960s.)
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For Kalashnikov, this period should have been a time of professional and personal satisfaction. Instead it brought troubles. Kalashnikov’s fame had fueled resentment, and as his stature grew he faced a species of social persecution that inhabited the post-Stalin Soviet Union. In 1956, Khrushchev issued a speech to a party congress, “On the Personality Cult and Its Consequences,” in which he denounced Stalin’s brutal excesses and the fealty and adoration that surrounded him. The speech, given in secret, was quickly leaked for public consumption. Its transcript was a powerful document. Once the population understood that the party leadership was questioning party symbols and behavior, it had a line of attack to settle scores against those who had benefited during the Stalin years. Kalashnikov’s turn came while he was testing the PK in Samarkand. At a meeting of his collective in Izhevsk, a worker denounced Kalashnikov as arrogant and accused him of ignoring the suggestions and ideas of laborers in the plant. The diatribe fit the times. The Soviet Union’s decorated designer was being cast as a man whose ego was outsized.
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Kalashnikov was not present to defend himself. The troubles grew. An article about the meeting appeared in the factory newspaper under the headline “On Overcoming the Personality Cult and Its Consequences,” a play on the title of Khrushchev’s speech. The text detailed the worker’s grievances and provided examples of Kalashnikov’s supposed transgressions. Upon returning, Kalashnikov noticed his friends’ discomfort around him. He was dejected. “I had always believed that I had been working for the Motherland to strengthen its defenses,” he said. “But it appeared that people had misunderstood me.”

Kalashnikov described the complaints as petty. Workplace jealousies, it seemed, had found an outlet in the bizarre atmosphere of that time. But workers’ newspapers could scarcely be published, particularly in a factory under as close party supervision as an arms plant, without approval of factory bosses and their party liaisons. And published denunciations carried risks. The repression had subsided. Khrushchev’s Soviet Union was incomparably less violent than Stalin’s, notwithstanding the treatment of Beria. But apparatchiks could have their standing downgraded over accusations related to a personality cult. Kalashnikov’s fidelity to Stalin was unbending. His fears were likely considerable. He hinted at this. “I could not defend myself before each employee of our giant plant,” he said. The stresses of the period affected him physically, he said, and he developed cardiac arrhythmia. But Mikhail Kalashnikov was ever the survivor of the Soviet Union’s ugly undercurrents. He sought help from what he vaguely called “our major client” and continued to work. His instincts and connections served him well. At a collective meeting some months later the secretary of the factory’s party committee raised the accusations. This time he defended Kalashnikov. His standing was preserved, even as his role in arms design became less important.
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By the early 1960s Mikhail Kalashnikov was no longer especially significant to socialist arms production, beyond his status as a public figure. The weapons carrying his name had been created. They were bound for proliferation independent of what he said or did. Their rates and locales of production, their distribution, their many uses—these were out of his hands. He was a front man now: the story and its face. And across the Eastern European satellites the production of the Kalashnikov line had gathered momentum.

Poland was the first European nation to produce the rifles, beginning work on their arms in 1956. Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, and Hungary followed. As new assembly lines opened, they would receive state subsidies and be given priority in the delivery of the resources required for production—metals, labor, tools, fuel, and when required, security. The German experience offers a view of the process, albeit with a special set of deceptions required by the Kremlin’s public stance that Germany would not be allowed to militarize again. This posed problems. Officially, the German Democratic Republic was a peaceful nation that had forsworn armament production. It was not to be engaged in the gun trade. To hide
the work, assault-rifle production was classified and compartmentalized. Rifle parts were made in sites scattered around the countryside, sometimes in small family shops, and brought to a secluded plant. There, the many secret components came together, like pieces in a puzzle, in the form of a gun. Then the rifles were shipped to their destinations, either for East German security forces or foreign customers.

The final assembly point was in Wiesa, a village in the Erz mountains away from main cities and roads. To produce rifles this way, the communists imitated the Wehrmacht, which had experience circumventing restrictions. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles had mandated a sharp reduction in German armed forces. It also imposed limits on the types and numbers of weapons Germany could garrison. Article 180 allowed for 84,000 rifles and 18,000 carbines (it even mandated the type, down to the style of bayonet), 1,926 machine guns, 252 mortars, and 288 heavy guns. Only one factory, the Simson works in Suhl, was approved to manufacture rifles. Other arms plants were ordered to disassemble their production lines, and, in an early swords-to-plowshares clause, expected to manufacture civilian products, including precision tools. The treaty was impressive on paper. On the ground it did not work. German officers and gun manufacturers used many forms of subterfuge to dodge compliance. In 1922, the former Royal Rifle and Ammunition Factory in Erfurt, which had been shuttered under the treaty, opened a new gun works, ERMA, and surreptitiously resumed production. By 1932, the plant had one thousand employees. Another firm, Rheinmetall-Borsig, spirited away more than two thousand tons of arms-making machinery and hid them in warehouses in Holland under false declarations. Using a front company, it bought stock in a Swiss firm near Bern and began manufacturing machine guns that would have been forbidden at home. In 1926, a group of officers founded the Statistical Corporation, or Stage, which entered the arms-manufacturing business, too. And so on.
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The gun works at Wiesa followed this pattern, but added Soviet touches. One step required finding a site for a final assembly line. The army selected a formerly private textile plant that had been nationalized and declared a people’s company in 1949. The plant had been owned by the family of Kurt Schreiber, a local businessman. During World War I, its main building served as a POW camp; captured French and Russian officers were held there. After the war, it became a factory again. It was a
bucolic setting, a stately building on a hillside with neatly kept fields abutting its fences. After World War II, the party seized the plant. By 1950, several Schreiber family members who had faced charges upon protesting their loss (their descendants call the basis for the seizure “a legal farce”) had fled to West Germany. This cleared title for the site’s next use. In 1956, East Germany’s military received sample AK-47s and technical specifications from the Soviet Union. In February 1957, the commandeered plant reopened as a secret arms factory. That year the government seized adjacent property, taking some of the best farmland on the slope.
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It extended fences, hired police officers, installed security lighting along the perimeter, and built a guard shack at the gate. Watchdogs appeared. They slept by day in a pen in the compound’s interior and roamed the fences at night. Their presence was a sure indication of something important within. Construction changed the place, updating it along bland Soviet lines. Dull concrete buildings and a warehouse sprouted. Rail service was extended to reach within the fences. Beneath one of the main buildings, secured behind heavy iron grates, a firing range was opened for testing the weapons before packaging and shipment.

Across the region, skilled workers were hired and trained, and a bus line was created to carry them back and forth to work. There was no bus service for anyone else. The arms-plant jobs, which paid more than what was generally available elsewhere and came with access to a workers’ cafeteria that served hearty meals, were coveted and hard to land. Each applicant had to pass a background check. Those from families with a history of private business ownership or who had relatives in the West were turned away. Those offered positions were required by the Staasi, the secret police, to sign an oath pledging never to reveal what took place in the plant. “You were not allowed to tell your own wife what you did,” said one former employee. Such measures were nonsensical, he added. Like most everyone else, “she already knew.”
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The plant was given a cover: It manufactured tools and home appliances. Over time the villagers coined a knowing joke. That strange plant on the hill, they said, makes a wonderful coffee filter.
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By 1958, rifle production had begun. A bustling gun works grew. Under police escort on the country roads, truck drivers brought in components that had been forged and machined elsewhere.
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The barrels came from Suhl, from a plant said to manufacture bicycles.
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Smaller gun works contributed other parts. A few were machined within the Wiesa compound.
The first result was the Maschinen Pistole Kalashnikov, or MPiK, a copy of the original design. Soon more than one thousand people were employed by the works, and the plant became the engine of the local economy in a time when German citizens were still suffering postwar shortages of everything from fresh fruit to building supplies to schnapps. Some townspeople were pleased, and welcomed the good fortune of having a large employer near their homes. Others were afraid. They thought that by choosing Wiesa for a rifle plant, the party had made their village a target. “We always knew, and we were told,” one local man said, “that in case of war Wiesa would be one of the first places to disappear from the planet.”
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Production was slow in the first years. But output rose under harsh quality-control measures, and enough rifles were made to equip the Nationale Volksarmee, the Staasi, and a list of foreign customers, including Iraq, Algiers, Yemen, India, and the Republic of Congo. Rail cars would arrive. They departed filled with green wooden crates containing ten assault rifles each. If the estimates of production levels are accurate, as many as three hundred thousand crates left the grounds. Many were trucked to Dresden. Others went to Rostock, a port on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, on their way to export. The secrecy of the gun works in Wiesa was short-lived. Virtually everyone in Wiesa knew. Much of East Germany did, too. The covers—the bicycle plant in Suhl, the appliance plant in Wiesa, the idea that East Germany did not manufacture rifles—grew to be absurd. Assault rifles peddled by East German front companies in Berlin turned up in wars in Africa and the Middle East. And yet over the years, day by day, the unstated rules of totalitarianism demanded that the people of Wiesa feign indifference, even ignorance, as the muffled crack of gunfire rose from the basement firing range each night. “I decided that up to the edge of the fence was mine,” said one of the plant’s neighbors. “After that it was a foreign country, and I couldn’t care about it.”
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Others did care. Little attracts more attention among armies than word that another military force has a new weapon and is investing heavily in its production. Whispers about new weapons can be an emotionally and intellectually powerful variety of intelligence; they inspire curiosity and often worry. Such was the case in many foreign capitals when the AK-47
began to be seen. As the Kremlin hardened its foreign policy, outside interest in the weapon grew. Foreign intelligence services and arms technicians collected specimen rifles. One of the earliest collections was made in 1956 by Erkki Maristo, of the Finnish military’s ordnance department, who was at the center of a minor Cold War intelligence caper. In the mid-1950s, the Finnish Defense Forces were exploring available options for a new service rifle and wanted to test existing designs. Intelligence sources had brought news of the M1943 cartridge and the AK-47. In May 1956, Lieutenant General Sakari Simelius, chairman of the Finnish Small Arms Committee, saw the AK-47 on a visit to the Soviet Union. Like the Soviet army, the Finns had experience with submachine guns and had no bias against lighter-powered automatic arms. They had studied the
sturmgewehr
closely and battle experience had taught them that weapons built around traditional European rifle cartridges were not necessarily the best choice for defending their thickly forested nation, where many engagements were fought at close range. The Soviet weapon might fit Finnish needs. How to obtain a sample? Direct sale from Moscow seemed impossible. No defector had carried an AK-47 across the Soviet-Finnish border. The defense forces found another means—a businessman with connections in Poland who agreed to arrange a clandestine purchase. As part of Warsaw Pact standardization efforts, Poland was beginning to manufacture its version of the AK-47. After the businessman’s inquiries, an early rifle was offered for sale. In fall 1956, Maristo sailed by ferry across the Baltic Sea as a private citizen and landed in Poland. In Warsaw, he was shown one of Poland’s prototype Kalashnikovs. He purchased it for an undisclosed price. The rifle was disassembled and the parts smuggled home on a Polish commercial vessel sailing from Gdansk to the Finnish port of Kotka, where it was picked up by the Ministry of Defense and reassembled for analysis.
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