Neither Dulce Nor Decorum

The Avtomat Kalashnikova, ak-47, a Soviet assault rifle, is the most recognizable weapon of modern warfare and criminal violence. The 47 refers to 1947, the year the prototypes were finished in a plant in Kovrov. The term ak-47, which designates the early configuration of this rifle, is incorrectly used for a variety of the descendants of this original, including the akm, the aks, the Chinese Type 56, and others manufactured in North Korea, Egypt, Iraq, and the old members of the Warsaw Pact. Often carried by thugs, terrorists, and child soldiers when seen on the news and in movies, the Kalashnikov is on the flag of Mozambique, and in Lebanon it is the symbol of the militant Islamists of Hezbollah. Osama bin Laden used the ak as a symbolic prop in photographs and news releases. C. J. Chivers has written a long and detailed study of the creation and influence of this weapon capable of fully automatic as well as semi-automatic fire, reliable and compact, a weapon simple enough for school children to disassemble and reassemble in “less than thirty seconds flat.”

These characteristics, Chivers writes, meant “the small-statured, the mechanically disinclined, the dimwitted, and the untrained might be able to wield, with little difficulty or instruction, a lightweight automatic rifle that could push out blistering fire for the lengths of two or three football fields.” (The ak is not, however, known to be a highly accurate rifle, and a number of people who have been shot at with an ak have escaped without injury.) The armorers of the Soviet Union under Stalin produced this rifle that was very effective “as a device that allowed ordinary men to kill other men without extensive training or undue complications”—a rifle that survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and continues to play a major role in criminal and terrorist operations as well as in armed conflict around the world. “The nations that made [aks] lost custody of them, and then control, and now in much of the world they are everyman’s gun.” This everyman’s gun meant that peasant soldiers in Vietnam could outgun highly trained U.S. troops equipped with fatally unreliable early versions of the M16.

The ak-47 and its more modern versions are the result of a desire to make a fully automatic weapon lightweight enough to be carried and fired by a single soldier—an assault rifle that would replace bolt-action rifles and the high powered but low capacity semiautomatic rifles that most soldiers carried. Chivers attempts to write a history of this rifle’s origin and early production, a history obscured for years by Soviet secrecy and propaganda that presented Senior Sergeant Mikhail T. Kalashnikov as a proletarian hero and inventive genius “who wanted to present his nation an instrument for its defense.” Chivers sees the ak series as the culmination of attempts to miniaturize machine guns based ultimately on the designs of Richard Gatling and Hiram Maxim, the inventors of the first true recoil-operated machine gun. With long chapters on those two, it is odd that Chivers pays scant attention to John M. Browning, whose gas-operated M1895 was the first machine gun used by the U.S. military and whose automatic rifle, the bar, was used successfully from World War i through the Korean War by U.S. soldiers. The aks are all gas-operated.

This is a readable account of a significant story of “slaughter made industrial,” and serious gun nuts will find it delightful and only occasionally irritating. As only a minor-league gun nut, I had to spend time looking up some of the weapons and cartridges that Chivers does not insult his reader by explaining. An appendix would have been most helpful.