Mikhail Kalashnikov and the Rifle of Choice

Over six decades since this assault weapon was designed, nobody has been able to make a more lethal gun.

A chill ran down my spine, and it wasn’t just the biting cold of the mountain desert at Kumbitam, Ladakh. I was frightened and thrilled at the same time. You would be too, if you held death itself in your hands. I was about to fire another burst of rounds from the greatest piece of machinery ever invented by man in my opinion. The AK-47.

I follow instructions, load the cartridge of 30 bullets, take aim, unlock the safety catch, and fire. All this in less than 15 seconds. I was aware of the infinite lightness of this beast—whose burden is to kill. For a gun that can fire 600 rounds of 5.44 mm chambered steel-cased ammunition per minute, it weighs only a little more than 4 kg, about as much as a child’s school bag.

There is something strangely uplifting about this weapon. One feels free, liberated by the rawness of its touch and reassurance of its reputation. As I continue firing some of the 150 odd rounds I fired that day at the 8th Mountain Division of the Indian Army, the bullets whizz away at the rate of 780 metres per second, which is the AK-47’s average muzzle velocity.

Down the decades, its trademark rat-a-tat-a-tat sound has reverberated through thousands of conflict zones across the world. From the killing fields of Vietnam to the icy heights of Kargil, from the gang wars of Mexico to the death zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, on to the bad streets as darkness falls over Johannesburg. That rattle brings with it death or a terrible wound—it can also be a harbinger of victory.

In the high mountainous corners of desolate Ladakh, this gun generates a sort of resonance that cannot be described, only dreaded.

The AK-47 is at once a forbidding firearm and a piece of art. One instant the peacekeeper, the very next the instrument of terrorists’ carnage. At once, friend and foe. A darling of special forces of the State and beloved by revolutionaries from Mozambique to the Hezbollah (both have it on their flags) keen on its overthrow. This is a gun with multiple personalities enough to fill an entire psychiatric ward.

Make no mistake, the Avotomat Kalashnikova 47 is the world’s greatest assault weapon. It was conceived in 1942 in the midst of World War II. German forces were running the Soviet Union over, 1,500 miles had been conquered by the Wehrmacht, 7 million Soviet citizens lay dead. The assault rifle was already a German invention, splattering blood relentlessly on the Steppes. It was then, during the savage siege of Stalingrad that would eventually destroy the German 6th Army and with it Hitler’s ambition, and cost at least 350,000 Soviet and 400,000 German lives, that work began on the rifle that was to attain iconic status.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, the man who designed this magnificent firearm, was hurt in battle and was recouping in hospital; born in 1919, the year of Amritsar’s Jalianwalla Bagh massacre (thankfully, the gun came many years after Dyer), Mikhail was one of 18 children his mum bore. In this hospital, as he later recounted in interviews, he was encouraged by a fellow wounded soldier to develop an automatic rifle to rival what German soldiers had.

Kalashnikov, being a perfectionist, developed one better. He put brains and skills together and came up with the gun that even today, some 60 or more years on, remains the weapon of choice the world over. So successful has it been that more than 90 million pieces of this gun have been manufactured, since. The AK-47 has been used in at least 120 countries worldwide.

What is even more amazing is that in the technologically fast changing world of firepower, over half a century of the AK-47 has seen only two modifications, and that too, so minor you wouldn’t even notice. The first was when Chinese designers developed the AK-56 (in 1956), which differs slightly in its fully hooded sights in contrast with the original AK-47’s partially enclosed one. Some even consider this copycat version poorer since it lacks a threaded muzzle that gives the AK-47 its trademark soft recoil.

The other attempt at upgradation was by Soviet engineers, who developed the AK-74 (in 1974). Again, this had new bullets, but while more accurate, their killing capacity couldn’t match that of the old bullets. The original old killers have a way of producing what science terms ‘hydrostatic shock’. Once on target, each bullet pierces its way in and fragments into body tissue, making it almost impossible to treat. The new guns create much cleaner wounds.

What is more, given that the AK-47 gun can shoot 600 rounds a minute, it has turned target accuracy a mere matter of academic interest rather than operational performance.

Mikhail Kalashnikov is still alive. He has only two regrets. One, that the gun, though perfect, took so long to develop. It entered service with the Red Army only after the end of the War—in 1947. By then, the Soviet Union had made a dead mouse of the Nazi Hitler in his bunker, and an iron curtain was being drawn across Europe. The gun’s debut, thus, was in the clasp of an iron fist.

The Soviet Union lost nearly 20 million to the War which killed 5 million Germans. Had the gun come earlier, Soviet Russia could have suffered far fewer casualties, and perhaps even have ended hostilities sooner. This remains one of the intriguing what-ifs of world history.

Kalashnikov’s second regret is the sheer number of people his gun has killed and wounded. In an act of supreme irony, the man who designed this gun has now set up a fund for gunshot victims.

On that cold day, as we finished our test-firing of the AK-47 in Ladakh, I felt a strange numbness which overcame the uplifting sensation of freedom or even exhilaration that I had experienced just a moment earlier.

Next to me, firing away was a fellow journalist, Muzzamil Butt, working for Sahara, a TV channel. Later at the mess, as we finished our third round of Old Monk, both drinking at a slightly faster pace than we were accustomed to, I asked him how he felt. His answer was startling: “I have overcome fear. It’s the end of my nightmares—this gun began it, and now after firing it, has set me free.” Muzzamil had once been shot covering a protest in Srinagar; the bullet had come through the barrel of an AK-47. He has lived to tell and win his personal battle.

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