AK-47: The Rifle That Armed Half the World

[00:00:00]One in every five guns on Earth is a Kalashnikov.

[00:00:04]That is the World Bank's arithmetic. Of [music] roughly 500 million firearms in the world, about 100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family and about 75 million of those are AK-47s.

[00:00:18]The small arms survey puts total production somewhere between [music] 70 million and 100 million. The reason that is a range and not a number is that nobody has ever been able to count them.

[00:00:30]Against that, its cold war opponent, the M16, was produced in something closer to 7 million units.

[00:00:38]It is on a national flag.

[00:00:41]The rifle appears on the flag of Mosamb beek and on the country's emblem, an acknowledgement that independence was won in large part with it. It is in the coats of arms of East Teour and Zimbabwe.

[00:00:55]In parts of Africa, the black market price has run between 30 and $125.

[00:01:02]In Kenya, it has been traded for five head of cattle. In some markets, it has gone for $6 or a chicken or a sack of grain.

[00:01:14]Now, the man who designed it, he was the 17th of 19 children born to peasants in a Siberian village. Eight of the 19 lived to adulthood. In 1930, the state confiscated his family's property and deported them as kulocks. He finished seventh grade. That is the whole of his formal education. He had one sentence he repeated for the rest of his life. A line he said he had read as a young man and kept as a rule. All that is too complex is unnecessary and it is simple that is needed. Hold on to that. It explains the machine and eventually it fails to explain the man because in January of 1948 on a testing [music] range south of Moscow, his rifle went up against two competitors and won. It did not win on accuracy. It lost on accuracy. The record is explicit about that. The reason the commission chose it anyway is the reason there are 100 million of them. A like and a subscribe genuinely help. And stay with me because the rifle that armed half the world lost the trials on paper to one almost nobody has heard of.

[00:02:33]Mikail Timovvich Kalashnikov was born on the 10th of November 1919 in the village of Kura in what is now Alai Cry. He nearly died of illness at 6. He was drawn to machinery from the start, but he also wrote poetry. And what he actually wanted to be was a poet. He kept writing verse until he was 90. In 1930, the government declared his father, Tim, a koolak. The property was confiscated. Most of the family was deported to the village of Nijnaya Movaya in Tomms Blast. His father was dead within the year. To survive, the family combined farming with hunting, which is how a boy in internal exile spent his adolescence handling his father's rifle.

[00:03:26]After 7th grade, he left. With his stepfather's permission, he set out for Kura on foot, covering close to a,000 kilometers to get back to the village he had been taken from. He found work as a mechanic at a tractor station. A party organizer embedded in the plant noticed how good his hands were and issued him a directive to a nearby weapons design bureau where he was set to testing fitted stocks in rifles. Nobody trained him. He was given machines and left with them. Conscripted into the Red Army in 1938, he was assigned as a tank mechanic on the strength of that aptitude and later became a tank commander. He was inventing while still in training and was handed a wristwatch personally by Georgie Zhukov for it. He served on T34s with the 24th Tank Regiment, 12th Tank Division stationed at Stry. His regiment fell back after the battle of Broady in June of 1941.

[00:04:33]In October at the Battle of Brians, a German shell hit his tank and he was wounded. He was in hospital until April of 1942.

[00:04:44]As the story is commonly told, everything follows from that ward. A soldier in the next bed asked why Soviet troops had one rifle for every two or three men when the Germans had automatics. and Kalashnikov lying there decided to build one. He told that story for 70 years. Hold it loosely. [music] The documented record complicates it considerably and we will come back to that.

[00:05:13]What is not in dispute is the problem the Red Army actually had. Soviet infantry in 1941 carried boltaction Mosen Nagants, some semi-automatic SVT40s and [music] PPSH41 submachine guns. Those are two opposite failures. The rifles fired a full power cartridge accurate far past any distance men were actually fighting at, and they fired it one round at a time. The submachine guns fired fast and were useless past 100 m. There was nothing in between. The Germans had built the thing in between. On the 15th of July 1943, [music] an early storm gave was demonstrated in front of the people's commissarat of arms. It fired a shortened cartridge. Less powder, less recoil, less range, but controllable on automatic and lethal at every distance [music] that mattered. The Soviets did not copy the rifle. They copied the logic. Within months, they were developing an intermediate cartridge of their own, the 7.62x 39 mm M43.

[00:06:29]That is the detail most accounts skip.

[00:06:32]The cartridge came first. Every designer who entered what followed was drawing a weapon around the state had already chosen for them. Kalashnikov's first submachine gun in 1942 was not accepted into service, but the people evaluating it noticed him and from that year he was attached to the central scientific developmental firing range of the chief artillery directorate. In 1944, he built a gas operated carbine for the new cartridge, heavily influenced by the American M1 Garand. It lost to Sergey Simonov's entry, which was adopted as the SKS. He had now been beaten twice.

[00:07:16]Then in 1946, the main artillery directorate opened the competition that would decide what the Red Army carried for the next 40 years. He entered under an alias assembled from his own first name and patronymic [music] miktim and his rifle failed.

[00:07:35]The weapon he submitted is known [music] as the AK-46 and almost nothing about it looks like what came after. It used a short stroke [music] gas piston above the barrel. It had a two-piece machined receiver with a separate housing for the trigger unit.

[00:07:52]It had one lever for the safety and a second separate one for the fire selector. Its charging handle sat on the left and did not reciprocate. In the second round of trials, it was judged inferior to its rivals in multiple respects.

[00:08:09]The commission's interest moved to two other designers, Alexe Bulkin of the Tula Design Bureau and Alexander Dement of Kov. What saved it was a colleague, Alexander Zaitzv, a staff designer at the Kov plant, argued that the rifle needed to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.

[00:08:31]Kalashnikov resisted. His design had outperformed most of the field and there was a schedule. Zaitzv kept at him until he agreed.

[00:08:41]The prototypes completed in November of 1947 were a different [music] machine.

[00:08:47]The gas piston was now long stroke and permanently fixed to the bolt carrier.

[00:08:52]The two receivers [music] became one.

[00:08:55]The safety and the fire selector were merged into a single large lever on the right side that also functions as a dust cover over the ejection port. The charging handle was attached directly to the carrier. Every one of those changes deleted parts.

[00:09:12]Here is how it works. Gas bleeds from a port near the muzzle into a cylinder above the barrel and drives that long piston rearward. Because the piston is one piece with the bolt carrier, the whole thing travels as a single heavy mass. The assembly gets roughly 5 1/2 mm of free travel before a cam track rotates the bolt about 35° and unlocks it, which means chamber pressure has already dropped before the seal between chamber and bolt is broken. There is no gas regulator anywhere on the weapon.

[00:09:49]Excess gas simply vents out [music] through a row of ports in the cylinder.

[00:09:54]There is nothing to adjust and therefore nothing a tired conscript [music] can set wrong. Then the decision that matters more than any of them. The clearances between the moving parts are generous. The rifle is built loose on purpose. A large piston swinging inside a chamber with room around it, driving a bolt carrier with room around it, feeding a cartridge whose case is sharply tapered so [music] it starts leaving the chamber the instant it is free. That combination will [music] keep cycling with sand, mud, snow, and combustion residue inside it. Precision fits are what jam. Slop is what survives. All that is too complex is [music] unnecessary. As an engineering doctrine, that is what it produced.

[00:10:43]Barrel and chamber chrome lined against corrosion. A selector detent ordered safe at the top, automatic in the middle, semi-automatic at the bottom, because a man under stress [music] shoves the lever all the way down, and semi-automatic is where you want him. A magazine with feed lips machined from a single steel billet, heavy enough that soldiers have used it as [music] a hammer. A rear sight with a battle zero at 300 m, so a soldier could stop estimating range and hold center mass.

[00:11:17]And it came at a price he [music] accepted deliberately. The AK is not accurate. United States proving ground testing in the 1980s put its singleshot hit probability on a crouching man silhouette at 94% at 300 m and 31% at 800 m. The M16A1 [music] at that same 800 m managed 39%.

[00:11:42]He gave away the far end of the range and bought reliability with it. The final round ran at the Sturro range from the 27th of December 1947 to the 11th of January 1948.

[00:11:57]Three rifles, Kalashnikovs, Dement, and Bulkins TKB415.

[00:12:03]The range report dated the 10th of January is unambiguous. Bulan's rifle was the only one that met the accuracy requirement. It was Kalashnikov's equal for simplicity and ease of maintenance.

[00:12:17]But Bulkin had never solved the durability of his parts and that decided it. The commission recommended the Kalashnikov for series production and troop trials. In 1949, it was adopted as the 7.62 62 mm Kalashnikov rifle index 56A212.

[00:12:38]He was 30 years old and was given the Stalin prize.

[00:12:43]And then the first production rifles began failing [music] not in the field but on the factory floor. The original receiver was stamped from sheet metal with a milled trunion and the plant could not reliably weld the guide and ejector rails into it.

[00:13:00]Rejection rates climbed. Rather than stop production, the Soviets did something counterintuitive. They went backwards, [music] substituting a heavy machined receiver cut from solid steel. That was the type 2 from 1951 with a chromeplated barrel and chamber. The lightened type 3 followed in 1954 at 3.47 kg, 7.7 lb. It cost far more to make, but the tooling and the workers were already there from Mosen Nagant production. Partly because of all this, [music] Soviet troops did not receive the rifle in large numbers until around 1956 and SKS production continued in the meantime. Only once the factories had mastered [music] stamping did the design become what the world actually got. In 1959 came the AKM, stamped and riveted receiver, slanted muzzle compensator to fight muzzle climb, a hammer retarder to keep it from firing out of battery, and a weight of 3.1 kg, roughly a third lighter than the rifle it replaced. Most Kalashnikovs ever built are AKMs.

[00:14:16][music] The name AK-47 belongs strictly only to the first three receiver types. Everyone calls all of them AK-47s anyway.

[00:14:28]Then it went everywhere.

[00:14:30]Contemporaneous reporting put licensed production in about 30 countries, though the Kalashnikov concerns own position today is that most foreign-made AK-T type rifles were never licensed at all.

[00:14:44]China built the Type 56. North Korea built the Type 58 and the Type 68. East Germany had the MPIK, Yugoslavia the M70, Iraq the Tabuk. Its opponents built from it too. Finland's RK62, Israel's Galil, South Africa's R4 all descend from the same architecture. In the workshops of the Kyber Pass, they were made one at a time by hand. In 2007, the head of Russia's arms export monopoly said close to a million a year were being produced with no license whatsoever.

[00:15:25]All that is too complex is unnecessary.

[00:15:28]That sentence is why a rifle with loose tolerances and few parts can be built on worn tooling by people with no training in a shed with no quality control and it will still work. That was never a design goal. It is the consequence of one. The service life of an AK runs between 6 and 15,000 rounds inside a doctrine that treated small arms as expendable and found it cheaper to replace a weapon than repair it, which produced the irony the whole story turns on. During the Soviet Afghan war, the CIA armed the Mujahedin fighting Soviet troops with Egyptian and Chinese Kalashnikov variants. And since 2001, as CJ Chivers has documented, the United States military has been one of the largest known purchasers of Kalashnikovs on Earth, handing out tens of thousands of them in Afghanistan and Iraq, where many again slipped out of state hands and were turned back on the people who bought them. The rifle [music] had stopped belonging to anyone, which raises a harder question about the man whose name is on it. how much of it was ever his.

[00:16:44]Zitzf, the colleague who talked him into the redesign, remembered it as his own idea that he proposed rebuilding the rifle entirely [music] and had to convince Kalashnikov he was right.

[00:16:57]Others on the team alleged that the integrated bolt carrier and gas piston, [music] the single most important feature of the finished weapon, was lifted from Bulan, the rival who lost. A former comrade, Major Vasilei [music] Leuti, claimed after the Soviet collapse that he had personally shephered a disappointing early Kalashnikov entry through the trials. Shivers's conclusion in the gun is bluntter than any of them.

[00:17:25]The AK was a product of the Stalinist state, and the state needed a proletarian hero to hang it on. But the internet's favorite alternative is worse history than the myth it attacks. The theory says Hugo Schmeicer, the German behind the storm gave really designed it. Schmeicer was in fact shipped to Agefsk on the 24th of October 1946 with 15 other German specialists and put in a special department at factory number 74.

[00:17:57]The trouble is the paperwork.

[00:17:59]Kalashnikov developed the AK-47 at Kovar and did not move tok until 1948.

[00:18:08]When production shifted in 1949, standing orders explicitly barred the German engineers from access [music] to classified work, the AK included, and Schmeicer's promised salary was cut in half in February of 1947, which is not what happens to the man doing the decisive [music] work. It has embarrassed the Russian state itself.

[00:18:32]On the 19th of September 2017, Moscow unveiled a 30-foot monument to Kalashnikov on the garden ring.

[00:18:42]3 days later, a workman with an angle grinder was cutting a panel out of the bass relief behind the statue because Russians had noticed that among the weapons credited to him, the sculptor had carved a German STG44.

[00:18:58]The sculptor's explanation was that it had crept in off the internet.

[00:19:03]And for all of it, he was never paid.

[00:19:06]The design was state property. There were no royalties, not once, not ever.

[00:19:12]Ishmash did not patent the weapon until 1997, half a century late, and by 2006 accounted for about a tenth of a world production, with roughly half of all Kalashnikovs in existence [music] estimated to be counterfeit. His line was that he had wanted to serve his country, not earn money. What commercial value? The name had ended up with a German merchandising firm run by his grandson selling Kalashnikov vodka and umbrellas and knives. In April of 2016, his family lost the AK-47 trademark itself in court to the company that makes the rifles. The most produced weapon in human history made its designer a hero of socialist labor twice over. a lieutenant general and a national brand and not one ruble richer for a design he did not finish alone.

[00:20:11]For most of his life, his public answer never wavered. He slept well, he said, and the blame belonged to politicians who could not reach agreement [music] and resorted to violence. He said he had wanted to build agricultural [music] machinery and told one interviewer he wished he had made a lawnmower instead.

[00:20:31]At 90 in Ivsk, [music] with a small metal AK pinned to his tie, he read his own poetry aloud to journalists [music] and told them he considered himself a happy man. He had wanted to be a poet before he wanted to be anything. Then there is what he did not say in public.

[00:20:51]He walked into a church for the first time at 91 and was baptized.

[00:20:57]And in the last years of his life, he wrote a long letter to Patriarch Kiril, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, which the newspaper is Vestia published in January of 2014, weeks after [music] his death. In it, he wrote that the pain in his soul was unbearable.

[00:21:17]He kept returning, he said, [music] to the same question he could not solve. if his rifle had taken people's lives, was he responsible for their deaths? He asked why the number of churches in Russia kept growing while evil did not [music] decrease. The patriarch wrote back and told him that when a weapon defends the motherland, the church supports the men who make it. All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed. [music] For 60 years, that sentence had been enough. It was true of the gas system and the single receiver and the merged selector lever and the deliberate gaps between the moving parts. Every problem he was handed he made smaller until it fit. The last question of his life would not get smaller. It could [music] not be reduced or stamped or lightened, and it had no parts to delete. So he typed it out on his own letterhead and mailed it to somebody else to answer. Not the monument on the garden [music] ring. Not the hundred million. That sheet of paper and at the bottom of it a [music] signature put down by a shaking hand. A slave of God. The designer Mikail Kalashnikov.