The Soviet Union did not often make a product superior to the American alternative. Nobody in his right mind would have chosen to drive a pokey Lada over a speedy Corvette or even a stolid Packard. One of the few exceptions was in the military sphere, where the Soviets devoted a disproportionate share of their resources. In the long run, their greatest engineering triumph may not have been the construction of an atomic bomb in 1949 (based on stolen Western secrets) or the lofting of the first satellite into orbit (1957) or even the first man in space (1961). Far more enduring, if more low tech, was the development of the world’s most ubiquitous firearm: the AK‑47, or as it is often called, after its designer, the Kalashnikov.
Western experts initially dismissed this automatic rifle as crude and simplistic. As the New York Times correspondent (and former Marine) C. J. Chivers explains in “The Gun,” Westerners were used to making guns with “precision tools that allowed assembly lines to work within tight tolerances and mill parts to an exacting fit.” That’s not how the AK-47 was constructed in Russia’s primitive assembly plants by workers who no doubt consumed more vodka than was good for them. “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,” Chivers notes. Even on a test range the AK-47 was not particularly impressive, its accuracy inferior to that of Western competitors.
What made the Kalashnikov the winner in a global arms race that has been going on for more than 60 years was how it performed in the field. The very fact that its parts were “loose fitting, rather than snug” meant that it was “less likely to jam when dirty, inadequately lubricated or clogged with carbon from heavy firing.” “It was so reliable,” Chivers writes, that even when it was “soaked in bog water and coated with sand” its Soviet testers “had trouble making it jam.”
Not only was the AK-47 utterly reliable in the kind of adverse conditions that soldiers encounter in battle, but it was also easy to operate. Its simplicity meant, Chivers writes, that it could be employed by “the small-statured, the mechanically disinclined, the dimwitted and the untrained.” Practically anyone, even child soldiers, could use this compact marvel, less than three feet long and weighing about 10 pounds, which “could push out blistering fire for the lengths of two or three football fields.”
Thus the AK-47 emerged as the Model T of assault rifles. With as many as 100 million copies in circulation (no one knows the exact figure), it is the best-selling gun of all time. The distant runner-up is the M-16 and its descendants, which have been reproduced fewer than 10 million times. Chivers explains how this unusual success for Soviet industry came about. The 47 in the gun’s name refers to the year it was invented — 1947. The AK stands for
Avtomat Kalashnikova — “the automatic by Kalashnikov.” That would be Senior Sgt. Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, who in 1947 was just 28 years old and had no formal training in metallurgy, engineering or any other technical discipline. As might be expected, the Soviet state built a formidable myth around this proletarian hero.
Among the inconvenient facts that were airbrushed out was that during the Stalinist Terror the Kalashnikov family had been stigmatized as “kulaks” (rich peasants), forcibly removed from their home (which was razed) and relocated to western Siberia. One of Mikhail’s brothers served years of forced labor; his father quickly succumbed to the harsh Siberian winter. Mikhail was one of eight children (out of 18) who survived childhood. He was drafted into the Red Army and, during World War II, was wounded while commanding a T-34 tank.
While in the hospital he began reading an encyclopedia of firearms and doodling his own gun designs, which resulted in the creation of a submachine prototype. This prototype was rejected by the Red Army, as were his other early brainstorms, but Kalashnikov succeeded in getting assigned to a weapons design bureau. In 1947 his team entered a contest to develop an automatic rifle for the Red Army — a weapon more portable than a machine gun but with a longer range than a submachine gun.
This would represent a major advance over the single-shot, bolt-action rifles, like the British Lee-Enfield or the German Mauser, that were common in World War II. The United States Army had already fielded a semiautomatic rifle known as the M-1 (Patton called it “the greatest battle implement ever devised”), but it still required a trigger pull for every shot, and its magazine held only eight rounds. By contrast, the AK-47 could expend a 30-round clip in seconds.
Exactly how the winning design was created remains murky, but contrary to Soviet propaganda, it is clear that Kalashnikov got plenty of help — not only from other Russian konstruktors but (more embarrassing) from a captured German arms designer, Hugo Schmeisser, who during World War II had created an early assault rifle (the
Sturmgewehr) that bore an uncanny resemblance to what became the AK-47. But even though the AK-47 was the product of considerable collaboration, it was Kalashnikov who got the glory. He was twice named a Hero of Socialist Labor and acquired sufficient riches to buy a refrigerator, vacuum cleaner and automobile — all scarce commodities in postwar Russia. Eventually he would become a lieutenant general and a world-famous symbol of the Soviet arms industry.
The AK-47 and various knockoffs would be constructed not only in the Soviet Union but also in China, North Korea, East Germany, Egypt and numerous other countries that set up their own production lines with Soviet help. This proliferation would in time make the AK‑47 the emblem of terrorists and guerrillas or, if you prefer, “freedom fighters”; it would even appear on the flags of Mozambique and a number of terrorist groups.
Hezbollah’s flag incorporates an image of an assault rifle that may or may not be the AK-47.
The romance of the AK-47 was well justified by its battlefield performance. In Vietnam, for example, it initially gave the Viet Cong a considerable advantage over American troops armed with M-16s, which had been rushed into production and were notorious for jamming in the heat of battle. Eventually the M-16’s design flaws were corrected, but it would never catch up in the global popularity contest with its Eastern bloc rival.
Although Chivers’s book is ostensibly devoted to the AK-47, he actually gives considerable space to tracing the development of other weapons — not only the M-16 but also predecessors like the Gatling, Maxim and Tommy guns. This helps put the AK-47 into context but also causes the book to lose some narrative momentum.
Chivers is a first-rate war correspondent and a prodigious researcher who has tracked down every relevant document (or so it appears). He even interviewed the aging Kalashnikov. He is less adept as a writer, and “The Gun” is full of infelicitous phrases.
I am still struggling to figure out the meaning of this sentence: “Whenever an idea organizes for battle it gathers around its guns.” There are also too many repetitions and distracting detours, like the lengthy story of a Kurdish bodyguard who was badly wounded by an AK-47. But these are only quibbles. “The Gun” is likely to become the standard account of the world’s standard assault rifle.
Max Boot, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.
