The Gun (35 page)

I was filled with awe. I remember with perfect clarity the way he came into the great hall in which we had gathered. Stalin was wearing his eternal semi-military suit. He sat in his place, the same one as ever, in the midst of a total silence. And then there was [a] thunderous outbreak of applause that lasted an eternity, since nobody wanted to be the first to stop! After several minutes, Stalin gestured with his hand, asking for quiet in the assembly. All at once, you could have heard a pin drop.
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And then the dictator died. The reign of terror closed with a whimper. After a dinner with party officials and Lavrenty Beria, Stalin was found on the floor of one of his residences on March 1, 1953, incapacitated by what seemed a stroke.
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He died on March 5. Kalashnikov was devastated. He had separated Stalin’s predation on the Soviet Union’s people from the despot himself. When party newspapers had written of enemies of the
state, of saboteurs and lurking assassins, Kalashnikov accepted the propaganda. He wanted the traitors—many of whose plots were fabricated by the dictator himself—put to death. Stalin’s infiltration into Kalashnikov’s mind had eclipsed the most basic human relationships. “He was almost closer to us than our own parents,” he wrote. “When Stalin was buried, the whole population wept. We felt that life couldn’t go on without him. Fear of the future gripped our hearts.”
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Kalashnikov was not naïve. He knew the terror. But he accepted the sinister side of the system that had chosen him for rewards. He had joined the Communist Party. He had become a party man.

The shifts were tectonic. Beria became a deputy prime minister and set out upon what seemed a program of domestic reforms, officially banning torture, a jarring idea given the violent excesses of the
chekists
he had led. Beria was not to last. A plot to remove him was organized by Nikita Khrushchev and other party figures. He was arrested on June 26. His reversal of fortune was total. He had been untouchable, the man who sat beside Stalin and supervised the incarceration and killing of uncountable Soviet citizens, the architect of a great sorrow. Now he was exposed and alone. Shorn of his wire-rimmed spectacles, he groveled in a letter from his cell, offering to work as a laborer anywhere.

Dear comrades, you should understand that I am a faithful soldier of our Motherland, a loyal son of the party of Lenin and Stalin and your loyal friend and comrade. Send me wherever you wish, to any kind of work, [even] a most insignificant one. See me out, I will be able to work ten more years and I will work with all my soul and with complete energy. I am saying this from the bottom of my heart, it is not true that since I have held a big post I would not be able to perform in a small position. This can easily be proven in any region or area, in a Soviet farm, in a collective farm, on a construction site of our glorious Motherland. And you will see that in 2 to 3 years I will improve my behavior strongly and will be still of some use for you. I am to my last breath faithful to our beloved party and our Soviet government.

Beria’s last breath was not far off. He was tried in the fashion he would recognize: in secret, on largely fabricated charges, before a court that offered
no appeal. After the verdict on December 23 he was blindfolded, gagged, and shot.
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The events of 1953 allowed the Kremlin to reconsider its role at the international socialist vanguard. The changes—first in personnel, then policies—were integral to the assault rifle’s spread. Khrushchev became general secretary in the autumn, inheriting both the foreign-policy portfolio and the military-industrial complex. He grasped ways the two could be linked.

One early challenge was in institutionalizing security arrangements in the European buffer zone. In World War II, the Soviet military had moved onto foreign territory previously under German occupation and become the region’s premier military power. During the war the Red Army equipped and trained fighting units in Eastern Europe that became foundations for new national armies, all subordinate to Soviet command. For the Cold War’s opening years, such relationships were sufficient for the Kremlin. But in 1949, Western powers had formed NATO and sponsored the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Kremlin replied by founding the German Democratic Republic on the portion of Germany under Soviet occupation. Moves and countermoves continued. In 1955, West Germany joined NATO. The Kremlin’s parallel step would stoke assault-rifle proliferation in ways that persist: It bound its satellites together into a mutual-defense agreement of its own, the Warsaw Pact. The treaty was signed by eight nations—the Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania—in May 1955. Its initial significance was retaliatory and symbolic, a tit-for-tat escalation. In the event of armed attack on any one member, the others agreed to come to the attacked nation’s aid. The parties also declared, in a bit of doublespeak boilerplate, that they would strive for “effective measures for universal reduction of armaments.” The armaments buildup was actually just about to begin, spurred by the treaty’s fifth article, in which the members accepted a unified command.
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In fall 1955, when the details of the command were circulated via a top-secret memorandum from Moscow, the commander’s deputies were instructed that they would be responsible for supplying “military items, in accordance with accepted systems of armaments.”
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The language referred to Soviet-pattern weapons, including the most common weapons of all—cartridges and firearms. The instructions formalized the idea of standardizing equipment in
the Eastern bloc, a concept that became a Warsaw Pact cornerstone. The goal became:

. . . constant modernization of weapons and combat equipment and the development of new and more sophisticated prototypes of weaponry. The Soviet Union plays a leading role here. Possessing a powerful military-economic potential and scientific-technological base, it gives the necessary assistance to fraternal countries in strengthening their defensive might. Not only direct deliveries of new types of weapons and combat equipment are made, but also licenses and technical documentation are transferred for their production. Joint scientific research and test-design work is conducted, and scientific-technological consultations are widely employed.

The Soviet state plays a large role in the creation and development of the defense industry in the fraternal countries. One of the important ways for coordinating military-technical policy is to standardize weapons and combat equipment of the allied armies, which simplifies their materialtechnical support in case of military operations.
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In this way, most Eastern bloc soldiers would carry the same weapons,
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which fired the same ammunition, thereby streamlining production and training while reducing the expenditure of research-and-design energy for weapons that had already met the state’s standards. This made military sense, albeit for a war that never came. Looked upon years later, a different result is obvious: The political and industrial groundwork for overcapacity in assault-rifle production had been laid. Plants producing AK-47s, their derivatives, and the ammunition they fired were sponsored and subsidized in Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. These countries not only would arm their military and security services with them, but would become assault-rifle exporters. Dangerous rules applied. The assault rifle was a socialist military product. Its production, sale, and distribution were not controlled by market forces. They were connected to centralized decisions and national goals. The fine print of the Warsaw Pact had put the Kalashnikov assault rifle at the center of a socialist arms franchise, an example of the law of unintended consequences viewed through the prism of the Cold War. Production would surge under the the unified command’s directives. And the bloc’s members
would provide arms for conflicts long after their alliance was no more, extending the treaty’s influence beyond the region in indelible ways.

Under Khrushchev, the Kremlin also distributed arms and arms technology beyond its European vassals. There were two principal types of arrangements: first, direct transfers of finished goods, and later the transfer of licenses and technical specifications to produce them. In September 1955, within months of the Warsaw Pact’s signing ceremony, Khrushchev had discovered the political practicality of the arms industry and the new alliance, too. Using Czechoslovakia as a cover, the Kremlin organized a huge arms sale to Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.
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The deal included tanks, airplanes, artillery, and Czech small arms, and equipped Egyptian forces for war with the young Israeli state. It also thrust the Kremlin into Middle Eastern brinksmanship, putting it into competition with the West and presaging arms deals with Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere.

As Khrushchev’s agents closed his deal with Nasser, the Soviet army was arranging for the first arms plant outside Russia to manufacture AK-47s. The plant, an urgent project for China, had origins reaching to a secret collaboration between Stalin and Mao. In late May 1951, Xu Xiangqian, chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army, had led a delegation to Moscow. Mao’s victory over the Kuomintang, the party of Chiang Kai-shek, and the founding of the People’s Republic of China had reinforced Stalin’s almost religious conviction of the allure of socialism and global revolution. The Chinese wanted to update their arms industry. The Soviet Union was the natural source. There was precedent. Soviet arms technicians had surreptitiously helped Mao’s arms production since at least 1949, even while the Kremlin maintained diplomatic ties with the Kuomintang. In the summer of 1949, a senior Chinese revolutionary, Liu Shaoqi, who later became China’s head of state, secretly traveled to Russia, where he met Stalin and appealed for help in arming the People’s Liberation Army. The Soviet Union sent two hundred technicians to assist the effort, including eighty who rode back to Manchuria on the same train with the Chinese delegation. This was part of a slyly hedged Kremlin bet to put the Soviet Union in the winner’s camp. In November 1950, as the Korean War was accelerating, Mao asked Stalin for a long list of weapons for the war, including more than 140,000 rifles, 9,000 machine guns, and 1,000 pistols for pilots. Within two days, Stalin personally approved a list. In August 1951, Mao sought more aid, enough
to arm as many as sixty divisions. The Soviet army agreed to provide specifications for eight weapons, including Mosin-Nagant rifles, 82-millimeter mortars, machine guns, pistols, and an antiaircraft gun. Documents were transferred and a Russian delegation traveled to China for at least four months, to outfit plants and train workers. By 1953, production had begun, and cooperation expanded to include artillery and tanks. The AK-47 was still in its earliest production runs; the Soviet army did not initially share the specifications.

Four years later, under Khrushchev, the impetus for Chinese production of Kalashnikov-pattern rifles began, by one account, with a minor diplomatic jolt. In June 1955 a Chinese delegation toured the arms plant in Tula, where China’s second machinery minister, General Zhao Erlu, saw Slavic laborers producing the SKS. The minister was furious. The only data for rifles provided in 1951, by this account, had been for the M-44 Mosin-Nagant rifle, a weapon based on designs that were decades old. China wanted newer guns. Negotiations resumed. The Soviet army promptly agreed to share the technology behind the M1943 cartridge and both rifles that fired it—the SKS and the AK-47.
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(Another Chinese account described a less dramatic transfer of SKS and AK-47 technology. In this version, as part of Khrushchev’s courting of China early in his tenure as general secretary, the Soviet military offered the technical specifications for the two rifles, beginning with an exchange of letters in early 1955. The AK-47, by this account, was offered as a replacement to the PPSh, which the Chinese had been manufacturing with Soviet approval for several years.) This much is clear: Production of the Type 56, the first Chinese version of the AK-47, began in a blandly named arms plant, Factory 626, in Beian.

Khrushchev had moved quickly. At the time of Stalin’s funeral, the AK-47 had been made only in Izhevsk. Three years later, with the beginning of Chinese production, the world’s two largest military forces had parallel assembly lines. By 1958, the Kremlin would share AK-47 technology with North Korea. The Soviet Union’s escalating military aid to Egypt would then expand to tool a Kalashnikov plant there. Between these deals and the rolling openings of assault-rifle assembly lines in the Warsaw Pact
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the Kremlin had ensured production of the Kalashnikov at
a scale no other firearm had ever seen. The next questions were not industrial or political. They were tactical. How would the assault rifle be used?

The armored column growled through the streets of Budapest and came to a stop in Boráros Square, idling near the eastern embankment of the Danube River. Leading the formation were six Soviet tanks, including three T-54s, the most powerful tank the Soviet Union had yet made. Behind them were armored personnel carriers, bitterly known as “open coffins,” in which Hungarian soldiers had been crowded against the better judgment of their commanders, who worried for their lives. These vehicles were followed by more tanks still.
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This was an assault group staging to attack. Their objective would not be easy. Several blocks away, behind dense rows of buildings and warrens of narrow streets, stood the Corvin Theater, an insurgent stronghold. It was the morning of October 28, 1956. The armed popular uprising in Hungary was entering its sixth day.

The Hungarian fighters waiting to meet the column’s advance hid in four- and five-story buildings, watching from windows to the streets below, waiting for whatever came next.
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Circumstances had transformed them into impromptu urban fighters. They had seen enough of Hungarian state terror and Soviet occupation to turn out spontaneously, an unanticipated force that had leaped onto the world’s stage. Some were not yet old enough to shave. Others were veterans who had been Soviet prisoners of war. The adults came largely from the workers’ ranks.
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Together they formed a hard-nosed group: clean-cut, lean, rugged, intent. The weather was chilly by day in Budapest in midfall; the nights cold. Rebels wandered their turf in trench coats, lending them a sartorially proper air. One worker fought with a bowler on his head. He had found it in the rubble. After he brushed off the brick dust, it became a whimsically unforgettable highlight to his rebel dress.
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Though many insurgents were spread throughout Budapest, the Corvinists, as they were called, were among the most daring and determined of the lot. Their stubbornness made them a priority. Soviet generals and Hungarian hard-liners wanted to
crush them as a lesson for the rest. But how? The area was an urban trap. Most of the neighborhood’s buildings were constructed of thick stone and highly defendable. Within them the Hungarians had selected shooting positions from which they could pour out interlocking cones of fire. The Kilián Barracks—a fortress—stood nearby, and rebels took positions here as well, expanding their zone of control. Details had been tended to. To give warning of approaching threats, the rebels had posted spotters on rooftops. They had organized medical care and a field kitchen. They had made a jail for captured troops. They had assembled obstacles and barricades on the streets, so that fighting vehicles would have to slow down and pick their way through tight passages, exposing them to attack.
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They placed cooking pans on the pavement to resemble mines, a trick to frustrate the tanks more. At the theater’s doorway, the Corvinists had an artillery piece.
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