The Gunmaker

Born November 10, 1919

The whole world knows the word “Kalashnikov.” Some hear it as a proper noun – the name of Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, the renowned weapons designer from Izhevsk, the capital of the Urals’ Udmurt Republic. For others, it is a common noun, as in “He grabbed the Kalashnikov and started to shoot.” But even as a common noun (and one found in dictionaries across the world), the gunsmith’s surname has become freighted with history. What kind of a man was Mikhail Kalashnikov? And can we ever separate the man from the legends that surround him and his AK-47?

Another native of Izhevsk, where Kalashnikov spent most of his life, once told of how, when he was a child in the 1970s, he lived next door to Kalashnikov and often saw him going about his business in their neighborhood. When he mentioned this to his classmates, nobody believed him, since everyone thought that the inventor of the AK-47 had long since died. Even in the “closed” city of Izhevsk, people did not realize that Kalashnikov was still alive. The man was already a legend, known to all, but not really known by anybody.

Interestingly, Mikhail Kalashnikov, this Soviet legend, was the son of kulaks, who, as a child, was exiled to Siberia and had to forge documents to escape exile and rid himself of some of the stain on his family history. After a stint as a mechanic at a tractor station back in his native Altai, and then, in 1937-38, as technical secretary in a political office of the Turkestan-Siberia Railroad (such offices propagandized and enforced the party line – and this at the height of Stalin’s terror), Kalashnikov was drafted and made a tank mechanic. During the war, he was wounded and spent months hospitalized. Beginning in 1942, having shown some talent in weapons design, he was assigned to work at an institute, where he came up with what would ultimately become the renowned AK-47 (Avtomat Kalashnikov; the number represents the year it was created). It was only in 1949 that Kalashnikov began working at Izhevsk’s weapons factory. He was married, divorced, married again, had children. Having served in the war as a sergeant, only much later was he promoted to major, then colonel, and ultimately lieutenant general. Over his lifetime he came up with numerous inventions and modernized his own renowned assault rifle.

Kalashnikov’s biography raises a number of questions, first and foremost: how did the son of peasants with a fascination with technology but very little formal education manage to design a weapon that has been used throughout the world for more than half a century? Is that really the full story?

There is a picture hanging in Izhevsk’s Kalashnikov Museum showing the members of the design team in which 28-year-old Mikhail was working when he created his rifle. Every last one of Kalashnikov’s teammates had studious looking Jewish faces. Might it turn out that, at some point, Kalashnikov was “appointed” creator of the rifle simply because he had the proper pedigree? Yes, he was gifted, yes, he was talented, but to design a weapon you need certain basic knowledge, and where would he have acquired this knowledge? While he was technical secretary at the Turkestan-Siberia Railway’s political office? When he was working as a tank driver and mechanic, and later tank commander? While he was recovering from his wounds in a hospital? And why was it that most of his many later inventions – the Kalashnikov machine gun, the hunting rifle, the pistol – never caught on, either because they were too expensive or too hard to use. These are open questions. Perhaps someday we’ll learn the answers.

And if Kalashnikov is, indeed, the inventor of the AK-47, this raises other questions. How did the motherland reward the creator of this greatly superior weapon, which the Soviet Union sold all over the world? By the standards of the day, he was indeed generously compensated. Kalashnikov was given a three-room apartment and a bonus on which he could afford to fill it with furniture manufactured in Czechoslovakia – the pinnacle of what a Soviet citizen could dream of in those days.

Many years later, when he was able to replace the furniture (while staying in that same three-room apartment), Kalashnikov sent his old furniture to his museum. This gives you an idea about how simply our high achievers – people who would have been multi-millionaires in any other country – lived in the Soviet Union. Did this bother him? Kalashnikov always denied that it did, but did he have any idea of the sums being denied him? Toward the end of his life, when he was first allowed to travel abroad, he probably began to understand how his standard of living compared with much of the rest of the world’s, but throughout the decades he spent in his top-secret, closed-to-foreigners Izhevsk, he no doubt considered himself rich.

And another question: was Kalashnikov kept awake at night by pangs of conscience? What should someone feel who has invented something that has taken so many lives? Kalashnikov had his own answer to that question: his conscience was clear. He once made a statement that answered both questions: “You can’t measure everything in terms of money. The most precious thing to me is when people tell me, ‘Your weapon saved my life!’ What do I need millions for? I live well as it is.” And why not? You can certainly look at Kalashnikov’s assault rifle from that perspective as well. And apparently, he really did avoid thinking about his lost (or stolen) millions.

And so, he lived out his later life in Izhevsk. He was given patents for new inventions and was awarded the degree Doctor of Technical Sciences for his body of work as a whole. (I’m not sure how he got around the usual requirement to produce a high-school and university diploma.) He was nominated (and of course elected) as a member of the Supreme Soviet, although he is not known for any particular legislative initiatives (not that there was such a thing as individual legislative initiatives in Soviet days). He wrote books, or rather related his life story, and enterprising journalists wrote down and reworked what he told them, although “his” books gained him entry into the Writers Union.

Meanwhile, his rifles were arming the huge Soviet Army and military units throughout the world – leftist, rightist, revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries – they all grew accustomed to resting Kalashnikovs on their shoulders as they aimed it. All Soviet schools had a weapons room with at least one Kalashnikov, albeit non-firing. During the military training classes that were a part of the curriculum for Soviet schoolchildren, they had to take the rifle apart and put it together again, all within 20 seconds. This exercise was a great annoyance to girls trying to protect their manicures.

Now that Izhevsk is open to tourists, the Kalashnikov name has become a treasured brand for the town. Upon entering the city, visitors are greeted with a sign reading “Welcome to Izhevsk, City of Gunsmiths!” Tourists visiting the museum at the Izhmash (Izhevsk Machine Building Plant), where the factory’s famous motorcycles are lined up in an impressive array, are sure to stop by the Kalashnikov Museum. And those with a real passion for weaponry might even take advantage of the option of going out to the firing range to shoot from an AK-47 themselves. Ten years ago, the price for this treat was $2,000, so I’m not sure how many people availed themselves of the opportunity.

The son of exiled peasants, political office secretary, soldier, and inventor. One can only imagine what he must have seen in his life before becoming a walking statue bearing a chest full of medals, dictating his autobiography to eager ghostwriters. In photographs, he looks like a calm and kindly man, yet he is still a man of mystery.