The Gun (72 page)

91.
Ibid., p. 210.

92.
The available sources differ on this point, and Kalashnikov has published inconsistent accounts. Bolotin listed three finalists: Kalashnikov, Bulkin, and Dementyev. The museum in Izhevsk listes four: Kalashnikov, Dementyev, Bulkin, and Sudayev. (The addition of Sudayev appears to be an error; he died in summer 1946, long before the rifles’ field trials. His weapon was used as a control.) To these lists, Kalashnikov has at times added Sphagin and Degtyarev, two of the best-known figures in Soviet arms design.

93.
Kalashnikov,
From a Stranger’s Doorstep,
p. 213.

94.
Bolotin,
Soviet Small Arms and Ammunition,
p. 69, citing
Red Star
newspaper, September 20, 1957.

95.
Kalashnikov with Joly,
The Gun that Changed the World,
p. 63.

96.
Malimon,
Otechestvenniye Avtomaty,
chapter 9.

97.
Kalashnikov with Joly,
The Gun that Changed the World,
p. 62.

98.
Ibid., p. 63.

99.
Ezell,
Small Arms World Report,
December 1992, p. 7.

100.
Bolotin,
Soviet Small Arms and Ammunition,
p. 70.

101.
Bolotin’s book was both accurate and authoritative enough, in Kalashnikov’s view, that he cited it in his own memoirs, although not on the subject of Zaitsev’s design contributions to the final AK-47 prototype.

102.
Malimon,
Otechestvenniye Avtomaty.
Chapter 9 includes excerpts from a letter by Zaitsev. The book was published by the Russian Ministry of Defense and serves as both an official chronicle of the tests and a fuller account than Kalashnikov provided. Only five hundred copies were printed, and its circulation was tightly limited.

103.
Pravda.Ru, a Russian news site, published its version on August 2, 2003, thirteen years after Lyuty died.

104.
Vlasyuk,
Zerkalo Nedeli.

105.
Personal communication to author from Maksim R. Popenker.

106.
Kalashnikov with Joly,
The Gun that Changed the World,
p. 65.

107.
Small Arms World Report,
December 1992, pp. 7–8.

108.
Kalashnikov,
From a Stranger’s Doorstep,
pp. 225–26.

109.
In 1989, according to the transcript of their interview, Kalashnikov told Ezell he met Degtyarev during his early work at NIPSMVO, when Kalashnikov was still “a single country bumpkin.”
Small Arms World Report,
December 1992, p. 6.

110.
Zhukov,
Second Birth,
pp. 146–47.

111.
Ronald F. Bellamy and Russ Zajtchuk, “Chapter 3: The Evolution of Wound Ballistics: A Brief History,”
Textbook of Military Medicine, Part 1: Warfare, Weaponry and the Casualty Conventional Warfare: Ballistic, Blast and Burn Injuries
(Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 1989), pp. 83–106.

112.
Sergeyev,
Tekhnika i Vooruzheniye,
p. 27.

113.
Robert H. Clagett, Jr, “How the Infantry Tests a Rifle,”
American Rifleman,
October 1953, pp. 27–30. Clagett, a major, was a test officer for Army Field Forces No. 3 at Fort Benning, Georgia.

114.
G. E. Hendricks, “Test Results Report on AK-47,” November 7, 1962, Report No. DPS-800, to U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, and “Trial Report Soviet Machine Carbine 7.62mm Kalashnikov (AK),” August 1958, from the G-2 to the Netherlands General Staff. The Dutch report is on file at the Leger museum in Delft.

115.
Small Arms World Report,
December 1992, p. 7.

116.
Kalashnikov,
From a Stranger’s Doorstep,
p. 231.

117.
Kalashnikov with Joly,
The Gun that Changed the World,
p. 66.

118.
Malimon,
Otechestvenniye Avtomaty,
chapter 9. Kalashnikov has written that tests ended on January 10.

119.
Novikov, from
Volksarmee
.

1.
A. A. Grechko,
The Armed Forces of the Soviet State: A Soviet View
(Moscow: Ministry of Defense of the U.S.S.R., 1975). Translated and published by the U.S. Air Force, pp. 6–7.

2.
Such reasoning has anchored popular assessments of the Kalashnikov line. The conventional wisdom runs like this: The AK-47 is an excellent and almost failsafe assault rifle, therefore it is ubiquitous. This is insufficient.

3.
This sentiment informs Russian pride in Russian firearms to this day. Russia cannot point to a wide range of industrial successes. Against this background, the AK-47 and its related arms are Russian products that actually work.

4.
Kalashnikov,
From a Stranger’s Doorstep,
p. 234.

5.
Kalashnikov with Joly,
The Gun that Changed the World,
p. 70.

6.
Val Shilin and Charlie Cutshaw,
Legends and Reality of the AK: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the History, Design, and Impact of the Kalashnikov Family of Weapons
(Boulder, Co.: Paladin Press, 2000), p. 28. There is no question that Kalashnikov, by mid-1948, began work here. But sources other than Kalashnikov point to a roundabout route, and say he first worked in Tula and Kovrov, but was unsatisfied with his professional life at both places, perhaps because of competition with other designers. (Bulkin, Simonov, and Tokarev worked at Tula, Degtyarev in Kovrov.)

7.
Malimon,
Otechestvenniye Avtomaty,
Chapter 10.

8.
Ibid.

9.
Shilin and Cutshaw,
Legends and Reality of the AK,
p. 28.

10.
Kalashnikov,
From a Stranger’s Doorstep,
pp. 247–51. The dates here shift in Kalashnikov’s multiple tellings; he said the meeting was in 1944, when Kalashnikov was working at Kovrov. But in 1944 Kalashnikov was not yet working on the AK-47, and was not yet assigned to Kovrov.

11.
Kalashnikov with Joly,
The Gun that Changed the World,
p. 74.

12.
This work fell to Valery Kharkov. Malimon,
Otechestvenniye Avtomaty,
Chapter 12.

13.
Malimon,
Otechestvenniye Avtomaty,
Chapter 11, translation by Michael Schwirtz. Other changes were driven by economic concerns, including substituting expensive materials used on the prototypes with less expensive materials better suited for cost-conscious mass production. A few changes were minor: The screw fixtures in the stock and near the barrel were replaced with stronger fittings. The accessory panel at the butt plate, which provided access inside the stock for storing small items, such as rifle-cleaning materials, was changed to be similar to that of a carbine designed by Evgeny
Dragunov, another Soviet armorer. One change was to an accessory: Because it could fire automatically, the AK-47 built up more heat than most of the rifles and carbines that preceded it. A steel clip was added to the shoulder strap to prevent it from burning where it came into contact with the barrel.

14.
For data on its imprecision, see the ballistic studies performed at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, including G. E. Hendricks, “Test Results on AK-47 Rifle,” published on November 7, 1962, and filed as Report #DPS-800.

15.
Dmitri Shirayev, “Who Invented the Automatic Kalashnikov?”
Soldat Udachi
(
Soldier of Fortune
), Moscow, September 2000, pp. 30–34.

16.
Personal communication to author in July 2009 from Norbert Moczarski, a German biographer of Schmeisser. Almost twenty years after the end of the Soviet Union, Schmeisser’s activities at the time of the AK-47’s development remain shrouded. There is no question of his presence in Izhevsk during the 1950s. But the Soviet archives have not been opened to allow an examination of how Schmeisser passed his time there and the reasons he had been sent to such a place. His biographers in Germany remain unsure what role, if any, he played in the development of the Kalashnikov prototypes, the fine-tuning and mass production of the AK-47 design, and the tooling of the Izhmash assembly line.

17.
The first view was put forth by Russian
Life
magazine. Shirayev’s quotation is from a personal communication to the author.

18.
Shilin and Cutshaw,
Legends and Reality of the AK,
p. 29.

19.
The heavier AK-47 that resulted from it probably reduced recoil, too.

20.
Shilin and Cutshaw,
Legends and Reality of the AK.
Shilin does not provide his source.

21.
Malimon,
Otechestvenniye Avtomaty,
Chapter 12.

22.
After the monetary reform in 1947, the typical urban worker in the Soviet Union received a salary of five hundred to one thousand rubles a month (data of the Soviet State Statistics Committee; research conducted by Nikolay Khalip).

23.
Irina Kedrova, in the Russian-language newspaper
Tribuna,
quoted Nelly Kalashnikov, Mikhail Kalashnikov’s stepdaughter, in November 2004.

24.
Mikhail Kalashnikov, in public remarks at sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the AK-47, in offices of Rosoboronexport, Moscow, in 2007, in presence of the author.

25.
Kalashnikov,
From a Stranger’s Doorstep,
pp. 429–30.

26.
Kalashnikov with Joly,
The Gun that Changed the World,
p. 98.

27.
Ibid., p. 104.

28.
Ibid., p. 105.

29.
William Taubman,
Khrushchev
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). Taubman provides a vivid description of Beria’s last minutes on p. 256. The excerpt from Beria’s letter, written on July 1, 1953, is from the translation of the document posted on the Virtual Archive of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, at
www.wilsoncenter.org
.

30.
Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne,
A Cardboard Castle: An Inside History of the Warsaw Pact 1955–1991
(Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005). The documents quoted were retrieved from archives and translated by the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The document cited here, “General Provisions of the Warsaw Treaty Armed Forces Unified Command,” is from pp. 80–81.

31.
Mastny and Byrne,
A Cardboard Castle.
The language is from the Statute of the Warsaw Treaty Unified Command, Part II, Section B, p. 81.

32.
Grechko,
The Armed Forces of the Soviet State: A Soviet View,
p. 342.

33.
The Czechs resisted developing an AK variant and produced their own assault rifle, the vz-58, which fired the M1943 cartridge and superficially resembled the AK-47 but was otherwise a different rifle.

34.
Guy Laron, “Cutting the Gordian Knot: The Post WW-II Egyptian Quest for Arms
and the 1955 Czechoslovak Arms Deal,” Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 55. See also Jon D. Glassman,
Arms for the Arabs. The Soviet Union and War in the Middle East
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955).

35.
Much of the information about the Chinese delegation and the details and dates of technical transfers are from the memoir of Liu Zhengdong, titled
Zhu Jian.
The book, a limited-edition memoir (press run, two thousand copies), was published in China in 2007. Its contents have never been distributed in English, and begin to fill in blank spots in the history of communist Chinese small-arms production. The translated title is
Casting of the Sword: Memoir of an Old Armorer.
Liu Zhengdong held positions within the Chinese defense industries for several decades. The account of Liu Shaoqi’s visit to Stalin is from
Together with Historical Giants
—
Shi Zhe’s Memoirs.
Shi Zhe was Mao’s Russian-language interpreter. His memoirs were published in Beijing in 1992. The description of Mao’s telegram to Stalin in the Korean War is from
Witness to Sino-Soviet Military Relations of the 1950s—Memoir of Military Staff of Marshal Peng Dehuai.
The marshal was the Chinese minister of defense in the 1950s. Translations by Lin Xu, an independent arms researcher.