The Gun (29 page)

The tank was a central instrument of the Soviet army. Kalashnikov said his interest in such a machine and its well-being earned him both a commendation and a meeting with Georgy K. Zhukov, the general commanding the military district that covered Ukraine. The general transferred Kalashnikov to a tank plant in Leningrad in 1941, to work on the device.
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Kalashnikov’s conversion was nearly complete. With war threatening, the Red Army was a repository of national pride and a sense of communal commitment. Kalashnikov had limited contact with his scattered family. The party and the army were becoming surrogates, anchoring him in the complex and formerly hostile Soviet world. Young Kalashnikov, a son of an enemy of the people, whose brother had just finished a long term of hard labor, was being drawn into the system that had set upon his family. He was finding purpose, community, respect—and perks.

Then came the war, in June 1941, which would turn Kalashnikov finally and completely into a right-thinking Soviet man. The Wehrmacht’s opening actions surprised Stalin and his generals. While German planes and artillery attacked their targets, the Blitzkrieg rolled over the borders and smashed an army that had not armed itself adequately and was not on alert. The Germans pushed on. As they overpowered Soviet defenses, front-line Soviet commanders either were in disbelief or dismissed the sounds of battle as noise from maneuvers.
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The Kremlin seemed paralyzed; Stalin did not make a public statement for almost two weeks. Propaganda filled the air. The German columns advanced across Russian soil.

The Red Army and the party leadership sank into confusion and recrimination. In Leningrad, Kalashnikov was ordered from the tank factory back to his regiment, promoted to the rank of senior sergeant, and sent to fight as the commander of a newly issued T-34 tank.
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The T-34 was one of the more successful pieces of military equipment in Soviet history, a durable, quick machine, and a technical match for the German Panzers. It was a welcome replacement for the aging T-26s that Kalashnikov’s regiment had driven before. But the Red Army units remained inadequately trained and poorly led, and the soldiers were mismatched against the German Blitzkrieg.

Not too many years later, after Kalashnikov became an approved symbol of the proletariat, a biography was necessary for him. This manufactured biography required whitewashing entire chapters of his life and inventing approved substitutes to bring him to this moment: the transformative experience of combat against the Germans. Such were the demands of saccharine Soviet mythmaking, part of the propagandists’ norm for framing the population’s understanding of their nation and figures the party chose to make historic. (Marshal Zhukov’s memoirs were to become a classic case).
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In one moment in the tale built around Kalashnikov, he was at a bunker on the front lines reading a letter from his mother, who had written, “How are you whipping the enemy there?” She then described the secure condition of the Kalashnikov home in the Altai steppe, in lovely Kurya, where the family had recently repaired the roof. Sergeant Kalashnikov closed his eyes and dreamed of the home he had left behind. Everything was about progress.

How many beautiful hours he had spent as a child there! There was a tower from which it seemed one could see a whole miraculous world which lay beyond the Altai steppe; filled with shavings from the shop in which they were born, everything like now, tractors or machinery thundering so that in tens of courtyards chickens flew up into the sheds from fright.
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The story was Soviet invention, a fabricated homespun yarn. It was also striking in the audacity of its deception, which Kalashnikov tolerated and participated in for years. Sergeant Kalashnikov’s mother tended to no home in the Altai. The home had been seized during collectivization
when she and her family had been exiled. And there was not much need for fixing a roof on a home that party arsonists had burned to the ground. As for fond memories of the family’s life at the edge of “the miraculous world,” Kalashnikov later said he returned to the ruins of his childhood house once. The collective farmers complained of his visit. “Misha was looking for something on the site of your house,” one of them said to his sister. “Must have been after gold.”
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There was no such letter from Kalashnikov’s mother. And the Germans were not being whipped. Rather, by October, German Panzers were overrunning Bryansk, a city in western Russia along the route between Kiev and Moscow. Kalashnikov’s regiment, newly equipped and reorganized, was fighting them in the rolling countryside to the city’s south. And his experience of the war was much different from the predetermined struggle described in the party’s propaganda organs.

What really happened in Kalashnikov’s tank company has been lost in the multiple retellings. But he and the legends alike say he was wounded, apparently by an exploding shell during a skirmish. In one account, Kalashnikov said a group of Soviet tanks had become separated from the main unit, and he opened his turret hatch to look around. At that instant, he said, a shell exploded nearby, blasting shrapnel through his chest and back.
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In another account, a shell slammed into his tank. “A big boom echoed in my ears and an amazingly bright light blinded my eyes for an instant,” he said. He was knocked out. In the explosion a piece of the tank’s armor struck him. “I do not know for how long I remained unconscious. Perhaps, I was out for a considerable time. . . . Somebody was trying to undo my overalls. I felt as if my left shoulder and arm were someone else’s. . . . A fragment of the tank armor had passed through my left shoulder after a direct hit.”
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The official Soviet account, formerly embraced by Kalashnikov, was the most dramatic of all. In this version, Kalashnikov’s platoon commander, his head bandaged and bloodied, fought off a German assault on his regiment’s right flank. The officer managed to maneuver his platoon of T-34 tanks behind a group of Panzers, scattering the German infantry with machine-gun fire. The commander’s tank was immolated in an explosion, and Senior Sergeant Kalashnikov—shouting, “The dirty swine, they set fire to our commander!”—rushed his own T-34 forward to help. Kalashnikov’s tank was struck. A bright light flashed. He passed out. The account continues: “How long this went on, Kalashnikov
didn’t know. When he opened his eyes, he saw Kuchum. ‘Mish, Mish, are you alive?’” In this version, Kalashnikov was wounded only in the shoulder; there is no mention of chest or back wounds.
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The account followed the mores of the Soviet hero tale. Soon Kalashnikov regained consciousness and was able to walk. Soaked in blood, he rode outside his damaged tank, exposed on the vehicle’s armor, to help his company pick a withdrawal route. He then refused medical treatment and left his unit only when his company commander ordered him to a hospital. In later accounts, Kalashnikov has said that in fact when he regained consciousness he found his tank company had vanished. By one of these later accounts, his wounds were serious enough that he could not fight, and after hiding for two days in a bunker he was ordered by a doctor to travel to a hospital on a truck. In another account, he said his battalion commander ordered him to the hospital. The various versions Kalashnikov has circulated all converged briefly at the same point, a moment in which Kalashnikov was transported by truck with a group of wounded fellow soldiers.

Setting aside the diverging particulars of Kalashnikov’s final battle and his medical case, the larger situation was certain: The Red Army was being routed as the wounded sergeant was driven off in search of a hospital. From the strategic confusion sowing fear in the Kremlin down to the tactical disarray of the units scattered around Bryansk, disaster was near. The German units were about to capture the city, which they would occupy until 1943. Panzer columns and light motorized patrols roamed the countryside. The truck with the wounded Red Army soldiers stopped at a village that seemed deserted, and Kalashnikov, the driver, and a lieutenant with burned hands reconnoitered the town. They were spotted by a German patrol, came under fire, and escaped. But as they returned to their friends, they discovered that the Germans had found the truck. Next came an incident that appears in all his memoirs: The Germans, Kalashnikov said, executed the wounded Soviet soldiers with close-range automatic fire. After the Germans drove away, the three surviving Soviet soldiers emerged from hiding and gathered at the truck to look in horror upon the dead and dying men, whom they had left only a few minutes before. “Our lieutenant was already vomiting and suddenly I doubled over, too, and threw up,” Kalashnikov wrote.
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The official Soviet account is again much more dramatic. In it, as
the truck moved through the countryside, Kalashnikov and the other wounded soldiers talked at length and in detail about the need for a new automatic weapon in the Red Army. When they reached the deserted village, Kalashnikov volunteered in spite of his injury to reconnoiter the town and set off with another soldier. They were fired upon by a German patrol but escaped and returned to a place near the truck and saw that the Germans had surrounded it. As they watched, the doctor protested about a Nazi soldier touching a wounded Russian, and a German hit him with a rifle butt. One of the Red Army soldiers on the truck—Kuchum, who in this version had tended to Kalashnikov after he was wounded—wrestled a gun from the Germans and killed a German officer, but was shot dead in the struggle. The Germans then leveled their submachine guns and opened fire. “Barbarians!” the Red Army doctor shouted as he died. Kalashnikov opened fire with a pistol, but it was no use. He was chased away by the Germans’ superior firepower. Like much in the Soviet version, it is an engaging, powerful, and fully unverifiable tale.

By Kalashnikov’s later telling, the three survivors wandered the countryside and were taken in and hidden and fed by a peasant, who happened to be a doctor. The man cleaned the soldiers’ wounds and dressed them with new bandages. The soldiers hid in a pile of hay for two or three days, and at last, after more days of walking, reached Red Army lines near the village of Trubchevsk. “We gave ourselves up as prisoners of our own army, since we’d crossed German lines and weren’t carrying any papers,” Kalashnikov wrote. “Every Russian soldier’s worst nightmare was to fall into German hands: We’d avoided the worst, and were safe. After a short interrogation, the lieutenant and I were sent to hospital, while Kolya reassumed his job as an army driver.”

Sergeant Kalashnikov’s first sustained treatment for his injuries was at Evacuation Hospital 1133 in Yelets, a city about four hundred miles south of Moscow.
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There he stayed into early 1942, among wounded soldiers in a crowded ward. In Yelets, he said, his interest in arms design took serious shape. “My roommates included tankers, infantrymen, artillerymen and sappers. We often argued about the advantages and shortcomings of various kinds of weapons. I did not take active part in those debates, yet they made an impression on me. I listened with particular interest to
those who had themselves attacked the enemy with a submachine gun or checked enemy attacks on their trenches. Their description of how the automatic weapon worked in close combat was most convincing.”
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In Yelets, Kalashnikov said, he was racked with nightmares of the execution of the wounded soldiers in the truck, and of being underequipped against German troops. “I woke up, my heart beating fast, only to hear the moans of my neighbors. They were having nightmares, too, and woke up one by one: a wonderful silence fell on the room, but not because everybody was asleep—on the contrary. I, too, lay in the dark with my eyes open and thought: How come? We had been told before the war that we would not incur heavy casualties and that we would fight with up-to-date weapons. But now, whoever I asked said that he had to share a rifle with another soldier when fighting. . . . Where were our automatic arms?”
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Kalashnikov said he began reading
Encyclopedia of Arms,
by General Fedorov, the czarist and Soviet armorer, which he found in the hospital library. As his understanding of arms grew he started to sketch possible designs. “That helped me forget those nightmares,” he said. “And the constant pain would seemingly go away for a while.” A wounded lieutenant from a paratrooper regiment befriended him, he said, and encouraged him to work. (In the official Soviet account, Kalashnikov was urged on by a Moscow storekeeper who had become an army scout.)
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The collection of wounded soldiers, by Kalashnikov’s telling, together knew the history of most Soviet and German weapons on the battlefield. Kalashnikov absorbed their words, he said, kept at his sketches, and imagined ways to equip the beleaguered Soviet troops.

In early 1942 he was granted a convalescent leave and boarded a train intending to return to Kurya. His two sisters still lived there. En route, however, Kalashnikov said he changed his mind, choosing to head to Matai, where the railway depot might provide a workshop. He wanted to try to convert his sketches to a submachine gun. According to Kalashnikov’s memoirs, the chief of the locomotive department granted his request and assigned several people to assist him, including a welder, a fitter, and a machinist. A group of women at the depot’s technical bureau helped with the drawings. After three months, he said, his ad hoc design team had its prototype—a “black lacquered submachine gun number one,” he called it, which fired 7.62x25 Tokarev pistol cartridges.
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(How long Kalashnikov worked on the first prototype is a subject of confusion. His
memoirs say three months. In an interview, he said he worked “about half a year.”)
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Once the crude prototype was ready, the team held firing tests, first to ensure that it functioned and then to examine its accuracy. The official Soviet version is again more colorful. According to Kalashnikov’s party chronicler, the depot chief was not interested in helping the sergeant, but a Communist Party organizer saw the error in this, intervened, and convinced him to allow Kalashnikov to work on the depot’s grounds. Often in the official version, party officials appear to provide well-timed pushes.
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