For a man whose name is so inextricably connected with death, Mikhail Kalashnikov could not have asked for a more tranquil twilight to his life. He spends his summer days at a country house on the bank of a crystalline lake, in the heart of the south Urals countryside, a few miles from the industrial heartland of Izhevsk. Here, amid sky-high pines and mosquitoes the size of pigeons, he and his elfin granddaughter, Ilona, seven, play together at clearing wood, and breathe in the rich, clean air.
Yet for those around him, life is not so peaceful. Years of test-firing the automatic weapons that have both made and taken his name have left the 83-year-old very deaf indeed. If you want him to hear you, you have to put your mouth a few inches away from his ear and speak very loudly.
In 1947 the Avtomatni Kalashnikova (Automatic of Kalashnikov) won a Soviet competition to design the ultimate submachine -gun for the victorious Red Army. Fifty-six years, more than 100m guns, and many millions of dead later, it remains the world’s most prolific killing machine. But Kalashnikov is not the slightest bit reticent about showing the love and pride he still feels for his creation.
“You see, with [designing] weapons, it is like a woman who bears children,” he says. “For months she carries her baby and thinks about it. A designer does much the same thing with a prototype. I felt like a mother – always proud. It is a special feeling, as if you were awarded with a special award. I shot with it a lot. I still do now. That is why I am hard of hearing.”
According to Aaron Karp, senior consultant to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, Kalashnikov’s progeny “appear to have caused most of the 300,000 annual combat fatalities in the wars of the 1990s. They were the primary weapon for one or more sides in virtually all the 40-plus wars of the last decade.” It was perhaps the Soviet Union’s key export: there are now 10 times as many AK-47s in the world as M16s, their American rival, the Soviets having given them away free to any movement they felt an empathy with or saw a use for.
The key to its success is its simple design, intended to ensure that even the unskilled women and children running the Soviet arms factories during wartime could mass-produce it for their fathers and sons on the front. It is so basic that crude versions have been produced in village workshops in Pakistan. “Compared to other automatic rifles at the time,” says Maxime Piadiyshev, editor of Arms Export Review, “it was very simple in production, use and maintenance, with eight moving parts. This simplicity meant a poorly trained soldier could strip it within 50 seconds and easily clean and maintain it.”
But Kalashnikov seems to have found a way of absolving himself from any blame or responsibility for his baby’s death toll. He offers a simple, well-honed defence to convince both himself and his interrogators of his innocence: “I made it to protect the motherland. And then they spread the weapon [around the world] – not because I wanted them to. Not at my choice. Then it was like a genie out of the bottle and it began to walk all on its own and in directions I did not want.”
Yet “the positive has outweighed the negative,” he insists, “because many countries use it to defend themselves. The negative side is that sometimes it is beyond control. Terrorists also want to use simple and reliable arms. But I sleep soundly. The fact that people die because of an AK-47 is not because of the designer, but because of politics.”
To understand this enduring pride, you have to appreciate the Soviet mindset that still rules the elderly man. Earlier, Kalashnikov had described gleefully how much dead forest he and Ilona had shifted that afternoon. His joy exposes the Soviet worship of trud – a notion of labour and productivity that won him the Hero of Socialist Labour medal in 1976 for his inventions, and fuelled his ideas. For him, it was just his job, as a tiny cog in the greater Soviet enterprise.
