The Gun (64 page)

Outside the prison, his victims suffered. The mother of one victim had died upon hearing of her son’s death; she collapsed with a heart attack. Ramazan Hama-Raheem was handicapped, barely able to walk. “Only I know my pain,” he said. “If you look at me now—look—my face, it is beautiful and calm. But inside, pain.” He entertained a dark fantasy,
which became a regular vision: He was alone and holding a pistol to his head. His depression was almost total. He was too strong to kill himself, not strong enough not to consider it every day. “My life,” he said, is “jail, and I can’t get out.” Balan Faraj Karim had no fantasy whatsoever, not even the despairing fantasy of relief through suicide. He found sanctuary in sleep, which provided him with a dream. In this dream, he said, “I am sleeping in a bed in an American hospital and they have just finished the surgery to my shoulder and two legs.” But always he would wake and find himself as Khadir had made him—a one-legged, disfigured man, unemployed, stuck in Iraq. He had two young children. His wife would later tell him that she did not know, hour by hour, what to do: to take care of their children, or to take care of him. Karim passed long days crying.

Karzan Mahmoud at first fared little better. He had lived to be reassembled, put back into the shape of a man with metal rods and screws. The shape of a man was not enough. Mahmoud had form, not function. His left leg and hip could barely support his weight, and his wounds, which had been soaked in a dirty puddle after he was shot, were contaminated. By late in 2002 his upper thigh was swollen, purple, and oozing; a deep and festering infection had settled in. His right arm did not bend. His left hand could not open and close. He was stooped and slowly weakening. His youth and the remains of his vigor kept him alive, though the infection and its fevers had such a hold on him that it seemed likely to finish his pain soon. Fortune and friendship intervened. Several months before he had been shot, Mahmoud had hired out as a driver for Kevin McKiernan, a reporter for ABC News. The two men became friends. McKiernan returned to Iraq in fall 2002. In the rush of work during the run-up to the American invasion, the two men met many times. Mahmoud brought McKiernan his medical records, and McKiernan taped the X-rays to a window, photographed them, and emailed them to a friend from high school, Dr. Michael Brabeck, who worked at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Brookline, Massachusetts McKiernan and Brabeck, half a world apart, made Mahmoud their project.

By spring 2003, as the American war in Iraq began, Mahmoud was living in Dr. Brabeck’s house in Massachusetts and receiving pro bono care that few victims of Kalashnikov bullets receive. By the summer, three surgeries later, his right arm had been reset with a ninety-degree bend at the elbow. His left hand was functional. His infection was defeated and
his femur partially repaired, enough so that he was on a trajectory to walk without a cane.
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His grimace subsided. His eyes brightened. By early in 2006, with Saddam Hussein ousted and the PUK’s leader serving as Iraq’s president, Mahmoud was working in Canada, at the Iraqi embassy in Ottawa. He was not, by any of the typical measures of mobility for a twenty-seven-year-old man, healthy and fit. He limped visibly, his right arm was almost useless, his right hand had little grip. And the former wiry bodyguard, adept at tae kwon do, was gaining weight, a consequence of his inability to exercise as he had before. But he was free from infection, able to dress and feed himself, and bathe, and shuffle up and down steps, and drive on the highway, and work at office tasks. He was blessed to be alive. He knew it. “My God helped me,” he said one night in Ottawa. “I like my God.” He had been helped, but not healed. He knew he never would be. And he found, when considering the rifle that had altered his body and diminished his life, that he wondered about Mikhail Kalashnikov, who lent his name to the weapon. He had a question for the man who proudly insisted he was the inventor of this device. “Why did you make this machine?” Mahmoud asked. “You don’t like living people? You are smart. Why not make something to help people, not make them dead?”

Mahmoud was sipping tea, pinching the small warm glass with a mangled hand, furrowing his bullet-scarred brow. “Are you not afraid to see the judge?”
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Mikhail Kalashnikov, in winter, adapted yet again.

The collapse of the Soviet Union both harmed and benefited him, and his world changed repeatedly. Financially, the end of the Soviet Union upended Izhevsk and the firearms industry. Defense budgets dried up.
Assembly lines fell quiet, and many workers, their salaries unpaid, left in search of work. Much of the labor force that remained was furloughed, called to work when orders needed to be filled but often told to stay home. Conditions on production days were gritty; sections of the factories were lit only by skylights, many workers had no protective clothing, and the ventilation was so poor that the air on days when weapons were assembled had a yellowish, particle-laden cast.
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Russia sought customers for its weapons. But its introduction to free markets was jarring. With so many assault rifles stockpiled, and other manufacturers competing—Arsenal in Bulgaria, Radom in Poland, Romtechnica in Romania, Norinco in China, F.E.G. in Hungary (now closed), Zastava in Serbia, and others—Izhmash and Izhmech, the paired companies in Izhevsk responsible for Kalashnikov production, struggled to make sales. Part of the problem was in management. The former communists who ran the companies knew much about their factories and almost nothing about marketing or service. They conducted business opaquely, and with patterns of patronage and nepotism not far beneath the varnish. But even sound managers might not have stopped the gun lines from stalling. Further Kalashnikov production fed a glut. The Russian arms-manufacturing sector was suffering from another of the varied ailments of the post-Soviet hangover. Several decades of mass production of the Kalashnikov line, which had once fit foreign-policy objectives and notions of national security, had destroyed business opportunities. Customers could always find other sellers. Those sellers undercut Russian prices.
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To keep workers employed and prevent the full erosion of the skill base, Izhmash produced a line of sporting rifles and shotguns, many of them using the underlying Kalashnikov design and some of them nodding to older gunsmithing traditions, with handsome wooden stocks and engraving. These were bourgeois guns. “We had to live on something,” Kalashnikov said. “So we began to think about how to try, using our knowledge base and military-fighting designs, to create weapons for hunting.”
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The line was a limited success. Markets for sporting arms were similarly crowded, and Izhmash competed against established brands. In 2009 the company, its finances and behavior largely impenetrable to outsiders, entered Russian bankruptcy proceedings. Its operations were limited and its prospects for large orders grim. It seemed unlikely to shut down entirely, though its security rested not in its performance as a private
enterprise but in a political fact: For the Russian military, the plants that produced the rifles remained a strategic enterprise. Similar problems manifested themselves throughout the firearms sector. Another Russian Kalashnikov manufacturer, the Molot joint stock company in Kirov, which complemented the production at Izhevsk, was so cash-strapped that in late 2008 it stopped paying wages to many employees. By 2009 it compensated workers not with rubles, but with food. This was, literally, subsistence labor.
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As the workers struggled, Mikhail Kalashnikov’s stature spared him from both material suffering and idleness. He fared, if not well, at least better than many of his generation. Though there was little work, he retained the title of chief designer of the Izhmash gun works and consultant to the general director of Rosoboronexport, the state arms-export agency.
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He also served as the informal ambassador of the sprawling Russian arms industry. Both the government and the factory had reason to ensure that he did not slide into the penury that enveloped Izhevsk’s workforce. His ceremonial ascension from former noncommissioned officer to lieutenant general served him especially well. Because of it he received two payments a month from the government: a salary of about $575 from Izhmash and a general’s pension from the military, too.
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His payments as consultant to the export agency were never disclosed. There was no doubt he was provided for—not lavishly, but far better than most.

The opening of borders and the loosening of restrictions also allowed Kalashnikov to travel, and beginning in the 1990s he was flying from place to place and seeing a world that for decades had been forbidden. Many trips followed invitations to military museums or gun clubs, whose members crowded around him at the chance to meet the face of the AK-47. He visited, among other nations, China, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, where he was a minor celebrity for many firearm owners: the aging Soviet general, hard of hearing, who had given the world its best-known gun. He seemed to enjoy these trips most of all. Kalashnikov, after a career as a state hero, was a man who liked being toasted as a genius. Other trips were part of his duties as Russia’s ceremonial arms ambassador. The state arms-export
agency shuttled him to arms shows to greet potential customers at the Russian booth. He claimed to have made more than fifty trips abroad, a pace of several expositions a year. In this way, he lived like Chekhov’s wedding general—an elderly and avuncular officer whose presence lent weight to gatherings otherwise routine. Sometimes he arrived in a sport coat or suit, which he adorned with a diamond-studded tie clip in the shape of an AK-47—a touch as paradoxical as post-Soviet Russia itself.

In performing his public duties, Kalashnikov was often earnest. He could seem sincere. Yet his official appearances were sometimes accompanied by an undercurrent of shabbiness, of a geriatric man being used. His assignment was to be the embodiment and caretaker of an idea—the notion, welcomed after the Soviet Union’s collapse, of Russian excellence. Post-Soviet Russia developed around him into an extraction state, an exporter of hydrocarbons, lumber, minerals, and people. It manufactured few commercial products widely recognized or sought beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union. In its lists of companies and exports, Russia had no Sony, Panasonic, or Samsung; no Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, or Nissan; no Vanguard, Lloyd’s of London, or Sotheby’s; no Gucci, Tag Heuer, or Cartier; no Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nestlé, or Kraft; no Nokia, Black-Berry, Apple, or Microsoft. Russian fashions were not coveted, Russian popular music was scarcely listened to outside the former Soviet Union. But Russia had invented one commercial product that had overtaken much of the world: the AK-47 line. The paired Kalashnikovs, man and weapon, became secular icons and subjects of enforced celebration. Sometimes the celebratory nods took on an air that conflicted with Kalashnikov’s talk of peace. For several years, the Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow displayed a Kalashnikov that the museum claimed was used to kill seventy-eight American servicemen in Vietnam on a single spring day in the Tet Offensive of 1968.
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The tale felt apocryphal. And the museum’s presentation (the director of the museum pointed the rifle out proudly to an American newspaper reporter in 1997) seemed both gleeful and odd.

Part of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s performances for the republic required more shading of the truth, including recirculating exaggerations about the degree of secrecy that had surrounded him during Soviet times. Kalashnikov and his handlers made it seem as if he had been locked off from the world and isolated even from his fellow citizens, a closely guarded national security asset who was prohibited from mentioning his work.

In the mid-1980s I went to my birth place in the Kuryinsky district of the Altai region for the unveiling of my own bust at the central square near the district library. My countrymen wanted to know how I became twice a Hero of the Soviet Union, they wanted details. But speaking about my work was not allowed.
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This was not exactly true. While some secrecy attended all Soviet arms enterprises, Kalashnikov’s existence and work were openly acknowledged, and he was interviewed for a foreign publication as early as 1967.
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Such remarks were a type, a feeding of a legend. Some of his statements were more boldly out of line with the record.

It was a complete secret. I wasn’t allowed to speak to my family or have any contact with foreigners. Even after seven years of production, the gun was still secret: it had to be carried in a special case; there could be no specifications published; even the cartridge cases had to be picked up after shooting.
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These statements were laden with falsehoods. His assertion that no specifications had been published after seven years of production was demonstrably untrue. By 1955, the United States Ordnance Technical Intelligence Service had obtained and translated the 121-page Soviet Ministry of War’s AK-47 manual, which, according to the date stamp on the original Soviet document, had been published in 1952—three years after mass production of the early AK-47s began in Izhevsk. The United States military began circulating the manual in its commands.
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The act had its purposes. To some, the general’s appearances in his official capacities—as design virtuoso, lubricator of arms sales, a state secret emerging into the postcommunist light to dispense wisdom by the pearl—spoke to his commitment to the state. Others detected his discomfort, his fatigue, and a sense that he was performing services scripted by others.

He goes, frankly, as a bauble, a banquet boy in the rolling Russian hospitality suite, to lend the peddling of planes and tanks some historical gravitas. He helps get the checks written… it is a special torture custom-made for him in a special capitalist hell.
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