The Gun Read online

  The Gun

  C. J. Chivers

  At a secret arms-design contest in Stalin’s Soviet Union, army technicians submitted a stubby rifle with a curved magazine. Dubbed the AK-47, it was selected as the Eastern Bloc’s standard arm. Scoffed at in the Pentagon as crude and unimpressive, it was in fact a breakthrough—a compact automatic that could be mastered by almost anyone, last decades in the field, and would rarely jam. Manufactured by tens of millions in planned economies, it became first an instrument of repression and then the most lethal weapon of the Cold War. Soon it was in the hands of terrorists.

  In a searing examination of modern conflict and official folly, C. J. Chivers mixes meticulous historical research, investigative reporting, and battlefield reportage to illuminate the origins of the world’s most abundant firearm and the consequences of its spread. The result, a tour de force of history and storytelling, sweeps through the miniaturization and distribution of automatic firepower, and puts an iconic object in fuller context than ever before.

  The Gun dismantles myths as it moves from the naÏve optimism of the Industrial Revolution through the treacherous milieu of the Soviet Union to the inside records of the Taliban. Chivers tells of the 19th-century inventor in Indianapolis who designs a Civil War killing machine, insisting that more-efficient slaughter will save lives. A German attaché who observes British machine guns killing Islamic warriors along the Nile advises his government to amass the weapons that would later flatten British ranks in World War I. In communist Hungary, a locksmith acquires an AK-47 to help wrest his country from the Kremlin’s yoke, beginning a journey to the gallows. The Pentagon suppresses the results of firing tests on severed human heads that might have prevented faulty rifles from being rushed to G.I.s in Vietnam. In Africa, a millennial madman arms abducted children and turns them on their neighbors, setting his country ablaze. Neither pro-gun nor anti-gun, The Gun builds to a terrifying sequence, in which a young man who confronts a trio of assassins is shattered by 23 bullets at close range. The man survives to ask questions that Chivers examines with rigor and flair.

  Throughout, The Gun animates unforgettable characters—inventors, salesmen, heroes, megalomaniacs, racists, dictators, gunrunners, terrorists, child soldiers, government careerists, and fools. Drawing from years of research, interviews, and from declassified records revealed for the first time, he presents a richly human account of an evolution in the very experience of war.

  C. J. Chivers

  THE GUN

  For Natalya K. Estemirova

  Bezstrashnaya Natasha

  Fearless Natasha

  The Investigator

  Murdered for her work in Chechnya

  An Example for All

  February 28, 1958—July 15, 2009

  “Inventors seldom benefit themselves. They benefit the people.”

  —Richard J. Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun

  PROLOGUE

  Stalin’s Tools of War

  Outside an Institute Known by a Codeword, Nadezhda, on the Steppe in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic

  The atomic bomb rested on a tower one hundred feet above the ground. Known as RDS-1, it was shaped like a huge metal teardrop with rivets and bolts along its sides. Everything had been prepared. Inside its shell was a uranium and plutonium charge equal to about twenty kilotons of TNT, making it a rough equivalent to the weapon the United States had used to destroy Nagasaki four years before. In the hours after midnight the scientists had departed, and now, shortly before dawn on August 29, 1949, they gathered at their instruments in a control bunker more than six miles away, where they were watched by Lavrenty Beria, chief of Stalin’s secret police. Detonation was set for 6:00 A.M. The Soviet Union was moments from entering the atomic age—ending the American monopoly in atomic arms, securing the Kremlin’s status atop a global superpower, and giving the Cold War its sense of doomsday menace. This was a decade after the purges, two decades after the brutalities of collectivization, and in a postwar period in which German prisoners of war were used as forced labor and captured Soviet soldiers returned from German camps had been interrogated, incarcerated, and, sometimes, put to death. Beria’s methods of pursuing Stalin’s will were well-known. The lead physicist, Igor V. Kurchatov, and his team were anxious. If the bomb did not work, some of these scientists expected to be shot.

  The test range, on an arid basin northwest of Semipalatinsk, a frontier city where Russians had been sent to exile since czarist times, was a methodically assembled period piece. Soviet soldiers and laborers had built it at a pace a dictator could muster. The anticipated detonation site had been divided into sectors. Within each, work cadres had erected structures and placed objects in common military and civilian use: a railway bridge, buildings of various dimensions and design, automobiles, concrete bunkers, aircraft, artillery pieces, armored vehicles, tanks. Live animals had been tethered throughout, some unprotected and others within buildings or vehicles, to determine how an atomic explosion’s shock wave, heat, and radiation might affect live tissue at various distances and in various states of exposure and protection. Pigs had been selected because their hides were thought to resemble human skin; rabbits because their eyes were thought to be like those of a man. Horses were used because they could be fitted with gas masks. Looming over the scene were reinforced concrete towers, each nearly forty feet high and anchored on foundations sunk deep into the ground. The towers, containing instruments and cameras, had been lined with lead plates and connected with subterranean cables. Never before had Soviet physicists had such an opportunity. They did not intend to waste it. It was not enough that RDS-1 explode. The Soviet scientists planned to measure its effects on the buildings, equipment, and animals ringed round.1 All of this work had been cloaked in the strictest secrecy that Beria could organize. Kurchatov’s research center, roughly an hour’s bouncing drive away over a dirt road, was on no maps. It had its own postal code, which often changed. One code name was Nadezhda, the Russian word for hope.

  And now it was time.

  There was an enormous white flash, then an extended bright glow. A sky-splitting roar and blast rushed outward, blowing asunder buildings, twisting the bridge, buckling bunkers as it blew through. In the first instant the soil near the tower had been liquefied, becoming a molten syrup that shot through the air, coating flat surfaces and the ground in a searing, radioactive caramel. As the wave whooshed through the nearest sectors, tank barrels and artillery pieces bent like reeds. Farther out, animals were roasted; then farther, they were singed. Farther still, they were bombarded with radiation that would erupt into burns that would kill them later, as the scientists documented their declines. The blast wave took a half minute to sweep over the steppe to the command bunker, which shuddered. When the rumbling subsided, Beria, Kurchatov, and his team stepped outside and looked at a steep-sided mushroom cloud, sucking up smoke, soil, and debris as it rose.2 Timber and dust spun high overhead. Success.

  Inside Factory No. 74 of the Izhevsk Machine, Engineering, and Motor Plant Complex, in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic

  As diplomatic cables about the atomic explosion moved from embassies in Moscow to Western capitals, about eleven hundred miles to the west of the test site, in a Russian industrial city in the Ural range, another of Stalin’s secret military projects was gaining momentum. Within the dark brick walls of a set of immense factories, a product was being prepared for mass production. Teams of engineers, armorers, and factory supervisors were fine-tuning its design. Communist Party leaders insisted that these factories were engaged in the manufacture of automobiles. But this product was neither a vehicle nor any of its parts. It was a weapon: a strange-looking rifle, deviating from the classic forms.

  At a glance, the new rifle was in many ways peculi
ar, an oddity, a reason to furrow brows and shake heads. Its components were simple, inelegant, and by Western standards, of seemingly workmanlike craftsmanship. The impression it created was the puzzling embodiment of a firearm compromise, a blend of design choices no existing Western army was willing yet to make. It was midsized in important measures—shorter than the infantry rifles it would displace but longer than the submachine guns that had been in service for thirty years. It fired a medium-powered cartridge, not powerful enough for long-range sniping duty, but with adequate energy to strike lethally and cause terrible wounds within the ranges at which almost all combat occurs. The weapon was not merely a middleweight. It was a breakthrough arm. It could be fired automatically, and at a rate like those of the machine guns that already had changed the way wars were fought. It could be fired on single fire, like a rifle of yore. None of the Soviet Union’s Cold War opponents had managed to conceive of, much less produce, a firearm of such firepower at such compact size. And this new weapon had other useful traits. It had little recoil compared to most rifles of its time. It was so reliable, even when soaked in bog water and coated with sand, that its Soviet testers had trouble making it jam. And its design was a testament to simplicity, so much so that its basic operation might be grasped within minutes, and Soviet teachers would soon learn that it could be disassembled and reassembled by Slavic schoolboys in less than thirty seconds flat. Together these traits meant that once this weapon was distributed, the small-statured, the mechanically disinclined, the dimwitted, and the untrained might be able to wield, with little difficulty or instruction, a lightweight automatic rifle that could push out blistering fire for the lengths of two or three football fields. For the purpose for which it was designed—as a device that allowed ordinary men to kill other men without extensive training or undue complications—this was an eminently well-conceived tool.

  The Army of the Soviet Union had given its new firearm a name: the AK-47. While Soviet physicists had been teasing out the secrets of the atom, the army’s Main Artillery Department had selected the AK-47 in a secret competition soon after the end of the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet Union called their war against Hitler’s Germany. The acronym abbreviated two Russian words, Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic by Kalashnikov, a nod to Senior Sergeant Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, a twenty-nine-year-old former tank commander to whom the army and the Communist Party formally attributed the weapon’s design. The number was shorthand for 1947, the year a technical bureau in Kovrov, a city east of Moscow with its own hidden arms plants, had finished the prototypes. In the time since, factories in Izhevsk had been tooled up to produce it. Within twenty-five years it would be the most abundant firearm the world had known.

  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 soldier
s 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.”3 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.