Weapon of choice

The Soviet Union did not often make a product superior to the American alternative. Nobody in his right mind would have chosen to drive a pokey Lada over a speedy Corvette or even a stolid Packard. One of the few exceptions was in the military sphere, where the Soviets devoted a disproportionate share of their resources. In the long run, their greatest engineering triumph may not have been the construction of an atomic bomb in 1949 (based on stolen Western secrets) or the lofting of the first satellite into orbit (1957) or even the first man in space (1961). Far more enduring was the development of the world's most ubiquitous firearm: the AK-47, or as it is often called, after its designer, the Kalashnikov.

Western experts initially dismissed this automatic rifle as crude and simplistic. As The New York Times correspondent (and former Marine) C.J. Chivers explains in The Gun, Westerners were used to making guns with "precision tools that allowed assembly lines to work within tight tolerances and mill parts to an exacting fit". That was not how the AK-47 was constructed in Russia's primitive assembly plants by workers.

"Anyone who removed the return spring from a Kalashnikov, for example, would find that many parts, when not held by its tension, would slide and rattle," Chivers notes. Even on a test range, the AK-47 was not particularly impressive, its accuracy inferior to that of Western competitors.

What made the Kalashnikov the winner in a global arms race that has been going on for more than 60 years was how it performed in the field. The very fact that its parts were "loose-fitting, rather than snug" meant that it was "less likely to jam when dirty, inadequately lubricated or clogged with carbon from heavy firing".

"It was so reliable," Chivers writes, that even when it was "soaked in bog water and coated with sand", its Soviet testers "had trouble making it jam".

Thus the AK-47 emerged as the Model T of assault rifles. With as many as 100 million copies in circulation (no one knows the exact figure), it is the bestselling gun of all time. Chivers explains how this success for the Soviet industry came about.

The 47 in the gun's name refers to the year it was invented, 1947. The AK stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova, "the automatic by Kalashnikov". That would be senior sergeant Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, who, in 1947, was just 28 years old and had no formal training in metallurgy, engineering or any other technical discipline.

Mikhail was one of eight children (out of 18) who survived childhood. He was drafted into the Red Army and, during the Second World War, was wounded while commanding a T-34 tank. While in hospital, he began reading an encyclopaedia of firearms and doodling his gun designs, which resulted in the creation of a sub-machine prototype.

This was rejected by the Red Army but Kalashnikov succeeded in getting assigned to a weapons design bureau. In 1947 his team entered a contest to develop an automatic rifle for the Red Army — a weapon more portable than a machinegun but with a longer range than a sub-machinegun.

This would represent a major advance over the magazine-fed, bolt-action rifles, such as the British Lee-Enfield or the German Mauser, that were common in the Second World War. The United States army had already fielded a semi-automatic rifle known as the M-1 (Patton called it "the greatest battle implement ever devised") but it still required a trigger pull for every shot and its magazine held only eight rounds. By contrast, the AK-47 could expend a 30-round clip in seconds.

Exactly how the winning design was created remains murky but contrary to Soviet propaganda, it is clear that Kalashnikov got plenty of help not only from other Russian konstruktors but (more embarrassing) from a captured German arms designer, Hugo Schmeisser, who, during the Second World War, had created an early assault rifle (the Sturmgewehr) that bore an uncanny resemblance to what became the AK-47. But even though the AK-47 was the product of collaboration, it was Kalashnikov who got the glory. He was twice named a Hero of Socialist Labour. Eventually he would become a lieutenant-general and a famous symbol of the Soviet arms industry.

The AK-47 and various knockoffs would be constructed not only in the Soviet Union but also in China, North Korea, East Germany, Egypt and numerous other countries that set up their own production lines with Soviet help.

This proliferation would in time make the AK-47 the emblem of terrorists and guerrillas. It would even appear on the flags of Mozambique and a number of terrorist groups. Chivers is a first-rate war correspondent and a prodigious researcher who has tracked down every relevant document (or so it appears). He even interviewed the ageing Kalashnikov. The Gun is likely to become the standard account of the world's standard assault rifle.

Max Boot, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.