The Gun (31 page)

Ultimately none of the submissions were accepted outright in the second phase; all had defects. Several weapons were eliminated, and three
⁹²
—those submitted by Aleksei A. Bulkin, Aleksandr A. Dementyev, and Kalashnikov—were ordered to be reworked and brought back for a second round. Their
konstruktors
were issued detailed instructions for improving their arms and sent to their workshops.

The AK-46 test rifles that Kalashnikov brought to the firing trials were much different from the rifles he would return with a short while later. An overhaul was to occur, which would give generations of assault rifles their distinctive qualities. At this point, the available record, already obscured by propaganda and conflicting statements, becomes cloudy once more. Many years later, Kalashnikov, by then a lieutenant general
and a Soviet hero in the mold of General Degtyarev, would describe his thinking as he prepared. “In order to achieve the best results in this ‘run-off’ contest, I had to make a breakthrough in the design, not just improve it,”
⁹³
he said. By this account, at Kalashnikov’s insistence, he and Aleksandr Zaitsev made a series of changes that fundamentally altered the prototype and assured its selection.

The pair had already borrowed features from Allied and Axis weapons and others from his own previous work. In a hurried fashion in late 1947 at the design bureau in Kovrov, a new weapon emerged. Kalashnikov and Zaitsev shortened the AK-46’s barrel by 80 millimeters. They altered its main operating system, combining the bolt carrier and the gas piston into one component, a modification that closely resembled the previous prototype by Bulkin. The alteration proved invaluable. By reducing the number of parts, it made the rifle easier to disassemble and clean. A second result was more important. The combined bolt carrier and gas piston were now massive, and by giving these parts heft, the designers provided the AK-47’s operating system an abundance of excess energy every time a shot was fired. Each time the piston and bolt were pushed backward by the gas vented from the barrel into the expansion chamber, this energy was available to push through any dirt or accumulated carbon inside the weapon. The massive operating system, combined with the looser fit from the earlier prototype, would later give the rifle much of its legendary reputation.

The team was at work on other components, too. The trigger mechanism was also overhauled—a project that seems to have been led by Vladimir S. Deikin, a Soviet army12 major and test official assigned to work with Kalashnikov.
⁹⁴
The bureau also changed the safety catch, removing the AK-46’s small selector lever and replacing it with a large sheet-metal switch. As a result of this revision, when the weapon was on safe this lever served as a protective cover over the bolt and the area around the chamber and blocked sand, dust, and dirt.
⁹⁵
They also designed a large, one-piece receiver cover. The modifications completed much of what would become the AK-47 and made the already simple prototype more simple still. Time was tight. The field tests had ended in August. Revised prototypes were due back at NIPSMVO in mid-December. Zaitsev said that by working
day and night, the group managed to finish the documents for the new design in a month, and a month and a half later had made the first of the new models in wood and steel. By November they had made three models. “We felt that we were on an uphill path,” he said.
⁹⁶

Exactly who was responsible for all of these final modifications is unclear. General Kalashnikov would describe a near epiphany, a eureka moment. “I came up with several new ideas that turned my life upside down. I completely altered the general structure. As the rules of the competition didn’t allow me to change its overall design, I had to pretend I was working on a mere improvement. Sasha Zaitsev, my faithful right-hand man from the start of the competition, was at this time the only person aware of my real plan.”
⁹⁷
He added, “Our design represented a real leap forward in the history of automatic weapons construction. We broke all the stereotypes that had dominated the field.”
⁹⁸
He also claimed the changes were related to an inherent flexibility in his design style.

Often times designers become affixed to a certain idea and hesitate to discard it. They are so attached to their original concept, you could say, like a spinster to her cats! I am just the opposite. Today this idea seems good, tomorrow I might just toss it. The day after I might do the same until such a point, when I can feel the design is completed. When you work with somebody who is afraid to discard an idea that has outlived its usefulness, you notice that they find it difficult to part with it. They think their accomplishments should last for all times. I am referring here to the need for a certain flexibility (of mind), i.e., the ability to test as many ideas as possible and not get too attached to any one in particular. This enables one to develop models of high reliability. . . . There is no limit to improvement!
⁹⁹

That was Kalashnikov’s version. Zaitsev remembered events differently. He said that in fact he had conceived of the changes. Kalashnikov, he said, opposed them. His recommendations were made at Kovrov after Kalashnikov returned from NIPSMVO with the judges’ recommendations. “I suggested the Kalashnikov assault rifle be entirely redesigned,” Zaitsev wrote. Kalashnikov resisted, Zaitsev said, because he thought there was not enough time to overhaul the design before the final trials. “I managed to convince him I was right.”
¹⁰⁰
D. N. Bolotin, a Soviet arms
writer who was friendly with many designers, thought enough of Zaitsev’s account to include it without challenge in his published work.
¹⁰¹
Aleksandr Malimon, an officer who worked as a test officer at the polygon, also chronicled Zaitsev’s contributions as matters of fact.
¹⁰²
These accounts present a credible challenge to Kalashnikov’s accounts, which blended the official Soviet biography with post-perestroika inserts and edits.

Further challenges to the rifle’s parentage have also suggested that Kalashnikov had not been forthcoming about the origins of the AK-47. Central to these claims were two allegations that flowed from forces both historical and personal. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, many legends were questioned by a population weary of propaganda and state lies; this larger re-examination led to a revisiting of the official story of the AK-47. Kalashnikov appeared to have drawn some of the attention on himself. Several colleagues thought the designer, who had basked in state glory and enjoyed benefits and favored treatment for decades, had assigned in his writing and public remarks too much credit to himself. They came forward with a fuller story.
¹⁰³
Their counterclaims, largely ignored in the West, have proven long-lasting within arms circles in Russia.

One allegation asserted that Kalashnikov’s final prototype included a primary design feature—the integrated bolt carrier and gas piston—lifted from Bulkin’s earlier submission. Bulkin led a design bureau from Tula, a city south of Moscow that was another center of Soviet arms production. Unlike Kalashnikov, who was adept at endearing himself to his army and party superiors, Bulkin had a quarrelsome personality. He was not well liked by the judges.

The other allegation asserted that Kalashnikov had inside help from a testing officer at the range, Major Vasily Fyodorovich Lyuty, who provided Kalashnikov many ideas he applied to his prototype. Lyuty, who worked at Schurovo, claimed that he shepherded the early Kalashnikov design through a disappointing first showing and overruled a stern report from U. I. Pchelintsev, a testing engineer, which concluded: “The system is incomplete and cannot be further developed.” In all, Lyuty claimed, he recommended eighteen changes to the first prototype, which Kalashnikov accepted. Pchelintsev’s rejection letter was then rewritten.

I felt the test frustration deeply with Mikhail, because we were friends. This is why when he asked me, as the chief of the testing
unit, to have a look at the gun and Pchelintsev’s account to outline the improvement program, I agreed of course. In fact, I took up all the subsequent business in my hands, thank God I had the knowledge and experience needed for it. Having studied the test report scrupulously I came to the conclusion that the design had to be redone almost anew, since according to my calculations 18 improvements of different complexity had to be made. I told Mikhail about it and explained what, and most important, how, this can be done to the
avtomat.
With the account of my remarks, I changed Pchelintsev’s conclusion and recommended the gun for further improvement.
¹⁰⁴

Major Lyuty added that after the first round of tests, he and Kalashnikov worked side by side, along with Colonel Deikin, and the trio made the prototype that became a finalist. Major Lyuty later fell into official disfavor. He was arrested in April 1951 and taken to Lubyanka, the headquarters of the Soviet intelligence service, where he was beaten and accused of preparing a terrorist act against party leaders, of circulating anti-Soviet propaganda, and of participation in a counterrevolutionary group. He feared he would be executed. After torture and with coaching from another inmate, he agreed to confess to involvement in anti-Soviet propaganda. He was sentenced to ten years. Lyuty served four years in a labor camp, cutting wood near Kansk, and then was transferred to a
sharaga
near Moscow, where scientists and designers served their sentences. In 1954, after Stalin died, he was rehabilitated and returned to work, but not before Kalashnikov had become a proletarian legend and model of socialist virtue. Kalashnikov’s public standing precluded serious challenge to his record in Soviet times.

On one level, claims that the Kalashnikov design bureau, by appropriating elements of Bulkin’s design or accepting help from a test officer, tainted the contest do not account for the nature of the Soviet army’s pursuit of new arms. The Soviet Union did not operate by Western rules. Notions of intellectual property were incompletely formed. Officials encouraged designers to copy features of any weapon that could be usefully applied to their prototypes, even weapons in development by competitors.
¹⁰⁵
Kalashnikov’s final design did not copy Bulkin’s test model in full; it incorporated a central idea but changed details, including
the location of the cams. Kalashnikov never denied that he was an aggressive borrower. Collecting good ideas from existing firearms was, to him, fundamental to sound design. One of his reflections was resonant on this point. Sometimes originality does not go with expediency, he said. The first
avtomat
that his bureau produced for the M1943 cartridge, the AK-46, borrowed from John C. Garand, the designer of the standard infantry rifle for the United States, and his bureau tinkered with variations on Schmeisser’s trigger assembly, obtained by studying captured German arms. More broadly, as tests for an automatic weapon proceeded from Sudayev’s AS-44 to Kalashnikov’s final prototype, many submissions by different designers came to resemble one another in significant ways. Design convergence seemed to have been a welcome byproduct, even an aim, of holding competitions.

Kalashnikov always rebutted his accusers. He berated a Russian newspaper for publishing a story arguing that he had copied Bulkin’s work in an untoward way. “Certain people would like to cast doubt on the paternity of the AK-47,” he wrote. “I’m 83 years old, but fortunately I’m still here to reply to those mendacious accusations!” The questions persisted. The changes in his prototypes just before the final phase were so striking, and a central change bore enough physical and conceptual resemblance to Bulkin’s earlier design, that they pointed to the broader nature of the AK-47’s creation, which had been cocooned in a simplistic narrative for decades. They suggested that the weapon came into existence via expansive collaboration rather than springing from the mind of one man.

Whatever the exact origins of the final changes and whoever deserved the credit—Kalashnikov, Zaitsev, Bulkin, Lyuty, Deikin, and others—the AK-47 had taken its recognizable form. And many of its mechanical merits were evident. Kalashnikov described an encounter with Vasily Degtyarev, the general who had designed some of Russia’s most successful arms. The meeting, if the account is to believed, said much about the redesigned weapon’s potential. It occurred as the last prototype neared completion. The general and Kalashnikov met at Kovrov. Someone in the group proposed that they show each other their work. “Cards on the table,” he said.

The graying sixty-six-year-old general and the twenty-eight-year-old sergeant presented their weapons. Kalashnikov had disassembled his, so the general could examine each part. These two men were not
the sort who would be expected to meet like this. The general had been predestined to be an armorer. Born into a family of czarist gunsmiths in Tula in 1880, he began working in the city’s arms factory at age eleven. Like Fedorov, he endeared himself to the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution and began working on automatics. As Leon Trotsky was building a socialist army, he worked at the gun works at Kovrov, which became his home. Fedorov was aging. Degtyarev was heir apparent to be the Soviet Union’s
konstruktor
emeritus. His chest was adorned with state prizes and medals; his party contacts were extensive. With his short gray hair, parted to the side, he vaguely resembled Nikita Khrushchev, though he had a restrained and dignified air. He looked at the AK-47, the work of unknowns. As Kalashnikov tells it, he was impressed.

All of a sudden, General Degtyarev made this staggering declaration: “The way Sergeant Kalashnikov has put the components of his model together is much more ingenious than mine. His model has more of a future—of that I’m certain. I no longer wish to participate in the final phase of the competition.”