AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (33 page)

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Authors: Larry Kahaner

BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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Of the more than 140 complaints dating back to 1996 (the group was started in 1989), the vast majority of upheld complaints concerned blatant sexual content in labels or packaging or false and misleading labels. Until Kalashnikov Vodka came along, only two actions had been taken against companies for violent content: a beer named Heist (even though the group conceded that it was American slang for a robbery), and a product named TNT Liquid Dynamite designed to represent a stick of dynamite with a fuse in it.
 
Florey argued that the Kalashnikov brand was based on “comradeship” and not military imagery. Company officials admitted that the brand was “funky” and “in your face,” but that it “didn’t cause people to take up armed conflict.”
 
Florey put Kalashnikov out front to help spin public opinion their way. He gave interviews saying that it was wrong to associate the AK with aggression. Wearing an AK tie clip, Kalashnikov told
Financial Times
reporters, “The gun serves peace and friendship because it is used to defend one’s country. Look how many countries have been liberated using this gun.”
 
His arguments did not persuade the Portman Group, and they found that Kalashnikov Vodka violated the industry’s own rules.
 
The group’s assessment was both good and bad news for Florey and Kalashnikov. Although the Portman Group upheld the complaint, it officially recognized the pop icon status of the AK to the Western world. Even though the vodka’s packaging did not look like an AK or contain any violent or antisocial references, the Kalashnikov name alone was enough to provoke a passionate response in the hearts of consumers. To marketers, this was a good thing. The panel said in its January 21, 2005, report, “Having considered the product as a whole, including its packaging and overall presentation, the Panel concluded that a name that primarily evoked an image of a contemporary gun, namely the AK, which was one of, if not the most widely used firearm in the world, was an unacceptable choice of brand name for an alcoholic drink, because it indirectly suggested an association with violent and dangerous behavior.”
 
In true entrepreneurial flip style, Florey told those around him that
any
publicity was
good
publicity. At the same time, however, he took Portman to task publicly, complaining that other alcoholic beverages were named for weapons, including Spitfire beer, Bombardier beer, and Claymore scotch, and they had not been banned.
 
Florey had no choice but to begin negotiations with the panel to find a solution, which probably would mean changing the name in the United Kingdom. The company could still keep it for export. In fact, the vodka was doing extremely well in the Middle East. “There’s an affinity in the Middle East with the gun,” Florey noted. “And we’re setting up a franchise in South Africa called ‘AK-47 Freedom Vodka.’”
 
With negotiations going nowhere and bottles banned from shelves, the situation was looking grim until a journalist at a Portman-held news conference—convened to explain its decision—suggested a name that Portman chairman Sir Paul Condon admitted would probably work. By fall 2005, “General Kalashnikov Russian Vodka” was slated for a comeback in England and a push toward North America.
 
 
 
ALTHOUGH MANY PEOPLE (like the Portman Group) considered exploiting a deadly weapon for financial gain in bad taste, even more bizarre examples began to crop up. No longer only part of the military, counterculture, or Middle Eastern “Kalashnikov Culture,” the AK was being seen and mentioned almost daily in mainstream movies, books, and on TV. What once was a horrible but everyday item in some parts of the world was now a solid part of contemporary global culture.
 
Rapper Eminem, whose rise to notoriety was portrayed in the hit movie
8 Mile
, used the powerful image of the AK to express his anger at the U.S.-led war in Iraq and to convince young people to vote against President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. In an animated video titled “Mosh,” Eminem was seen leading a group of disenfranchised citizens wearing hooded sweatshirts through the dark “police state” streets of America. The keyed-up mob entered a government building, but instead of rioting, the group quietly lined up to register to vote. Eminem attacked President Bush as a liar and thief for putting his own agenda before that of the country. Along with an animation of Bush holding an AK, Eminem sang, “Let the president answer our high anarchy / Strap him with an AK-47 / Let him go fight his own war / Let him impress daddy that way.” By invoking the AK image, Eminem brought his controversial message home.
 
Perhaps the weirdest consumer item to hook into the AK’s iconic status was the AK-MP3 Jukebox from UK audiobook publisher
AudioBooksForFree.com
. The music player was built into a banana-shaped magazine of the rifle and could be attached to the Kalashnikov rifle instead of the regular magazine or played on its own. It could hold up to nine thousand songs or three thousand hours of audiobooks. “This is our bit for world peace,” said Russian ex-rock star Andrey Koltakov, founder of the successful company. “We hope that from now on many militants and terrorists will use their AK-47s to listen to music and audiobooks. . . . They need to chill out and take it easy.” The company featured the product on its web site along with camo-bikini-clad models holding the weapon and player/magazine in provocative stances.
 
In India, the vibrant Bollywood dream factory played on the AK’s drawing power with a terrorism potboiler titled
AK-47
. At the time of its release, reviewers chided it for being formulaic, base, and too violent. Drawn by its name, however, audiences flocked to see it. It didn’t seem to register with moviegoers that India had been undergoing frequent, severe, and large-scale hit-and-run attacks on rural oil, chemical, and mining facilities by Maoist terrorist groups wielding AKs.
 
That same year, the AK had reached another cultural mile-stone.
Stuff
magazine, which appealed to young men with pictorials and text about gadgets, semiclad women, and the latest video games, featured the gun in a two-page spread along with a Q&A with the inventor. The automatic rifle was held up as a hip classic tool, a cool accessory like a fast motorcycle, a beautiful woman, an edgy video game, or the latest earphones. As expected, Kalashnikov seized the platform to blame politicians and not weapons designers for the misuse of his weapon. He also assured U.S. troops in Iraq that he didn’t have them in mind as targets when he made his rifle.
 
Kalashnikov used the opportunity to push his latest branding venture. “I’m not interested in war anymore—only my military-strength vodka. I like to sit and toast friendship. If the world did more of that and little less fighting, it would be a better place.”
 
EPILOGUE
 
THE LAST DAYS OF THE AK?
 
IN 1980, SOVIET OFFICIALS searched for a remote place to exile Nobel Prizewinner and dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov. Hoping to contain him and his democratic rhetoric, they sent him to Gorky, a city sequestered from the rest of the world for decades. Despite his being relocated to this remote location, however, his beliefs and writings spread throughout the world, leading to his release in 1986 and fueling the eventual downfall of the Communist superpower.
 
When Russian military officials in 1993 sought a venue to display a radically new assault rifle to select government officials and engineers, they chose the same city. By then it had reverted to its prerevolutionary name, Nizhni Novgorod, but still maintained an air of isolation. In an attempt to keep information about the weapon from spreading, soldiers manning the arms fair booth offered nothing about the rifle beyond what was printed on a small caption card.
Just as Sakharov’s ideology could not be contained by this isolated location, neither could information about the new rifle. Speculation grew among military officials worldwide, who were abuzz about this new entry in the world of small arms. Russian officials remained mum about plans for the rifle, and it would not be shown again for another three years, but anticipation in military circles grew.
Finally, Russian officials announced that the AN-94 would replace the venerable AK as the standard infantry weapon in the Russian arsenal. Many had predicted this, but even so, members of the world military elite still were stunned by the pronouncement.
This change had been in the works for a long time. As mentioned earlier, when the Soviets built the AK-74 in order to accommodate the smaller 5.54 × 39mm round, the rifle was a compromise, a way to get them into the small-cartridge game in a hurry by adapting Kalashnikov’s design. Not that the design was substandard—the weapon and its “poison bullet” had proven itself in Afghanistan—but the Soviet Union’s military was not satisfied with the AK-74. They desired accuracy on a par with the M-16 to go along with the AK’s awesome killing power.
Any new design would have to wait, however. The Soviet economy was then falling into disarray—largely because of the high cost of the Afghan war—and research money was scarce. On the other hand, the Soviets were lagging in small-arms technology, and something had to be done.
The economical answer was a contest that would pit the nation’s best arms designers against each other. The main requirement was for the new rifle to have a “hit ratio” of one and a half to two times better than the AK-74—in other words, one and a half to two times more accurate in automatic mode. It would also have to be reliable and easy to use by troops. Although the AK-74 was a superior weapon in many ways, it was still hard to control in automatic mode (although greatly superior to its predecessor the AKM with its larger 7.39mm round). While it was perfect for poorly trained troops who could “spray and pray,” the Soviets realized that greater lethality could be achieved with greater accuracy—hitting the same spot several times in rapid succession. This was particularly important in confrontations with enemy soldiers wearing the newest body armor.
Recoil was the age-old enemy of accuracy. When a soldier fired his rifle, the recoil from the first bullet would always make the following shots less accurate. Not even the best marksmen can fire several shots rapidly in a row exactly on target because the weapon moves from the recoil of the preceding shot.
There were several standard ways to mitigate recoil. First was to use a smaller, less powerful round; however, designers believed they had made it as small as they could while maintaining its lethality. Other methods included a counter-recoil system like in the AL-7 that lessened the recoil blast with springs. While this greatly reduced recoil—and was cutting-edge for the time—it was still not what military planners sought. Other obvious possibilities included different types of shock absorbers in the shoulder stock, and even having the shooter wear more cushioning in his shoulder.
None of these “inside the box” ideas proved satisfactory. A totally new design was necessary if military officials were to realize their dream of zero recoil. This meant jettisoning the Kalashnikov design all together.
Many arms designers believed that a truly zero-recoil assault rifle was akin to designing a perpetual motion machine. According to the law of physics, it could not be done. In fact, through the years the Soviets had touted the AK-74 as recoilless because its recoil had been greatly diminished. True, it was better than those before it. Now they were reaching for the sky in the hope of designing a weapon that, like the Kalashnikov, could one day become an arms classic: no recoil, light, dependable, and easy to use by troops.
Code-named Abakan (a town in south-central Russia), the contest began in the late 1970s with about a dozen design groups competing against each other. Izhmash, where Kalashnikov held the post of senior designer (although it was more of an emeritus position), threw two design groups into the fray. His son Viktor headed one design bureau and the other group was headed by Gennady Nikonov, a well-established arms maker who had worked at Izhmash since he graduated technical school at eighteen. Both Nikonov’s parents worked at Izhmash and early in his career he had distinguished himself by designing a trigger mechanism for an underwater rifle. He had also worked on sporting weapons and won accolades for the accurate and smart-looking Izbur (Buck Deer), a high-end carbine that was produced in limited quantities for discriminating shooters. During his tenure at Izhmash, Nikonov snared two prestigious awards, the Company’s Top Designer and the Top Designer of the Ministry, and he was awarded more than forty patents. His wife, Tatiana, worked as an engineer in the same design center.
Kalashnikov lobbied heavily for his son’s team to win the contest. Even after the winning rifle received its official name, AN-94—Automatic Nikonov 1994—and its adoption appeared certain, the elder Kalashnikov continued to push for his son’s design. He wanted to carry on the family tradition, but his efforts at calling in political favors were of no use. Viktor’s group came in second.
To add further insult to the dean of Russian weapons makers, Nikonov further separated himself from the AK by announcing publicly that his designs were influenced by the legendary designers Evgeny Dragunov and Azariy Nesterov, not Kalashnikov. The AN-94 looked and acted nothing like the AK.
One of the startling differences of the AN-94 was the muzzle attachment. Called a flash eliminator, this asymmetrically shaped muzzle device featured two vent holes on either side plus a vent hole in the upper right side of the first of two chambers. The upper vent hole was configured like a dog whistle, designed to produce a sound out of the range of human hearing caused by the fast-moving air pushing out of the barrel.

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