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Against all the sophisticated weaponry of the world's military power, against its bombers and ships, the Viet Cong had little more than the AK-47, provided by the Chinese. It was "a signature moment in the evolution of automatic arms".Īnother "signature moment" came during the Vietnam war. It was a kerbside execution," writes Chivers. The first known rebel to brandish an AK-47 was Jozef Tibor Fejes, who fired into the guts of a defenceless security police officer during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Russia provided them to win friends in the revolutionary third world. Moscow gave them to China and North Korea. To counter Nato, the Soviet Union gathered socialist states into the Warsaw pact, and AK-47 factories sprang up in Bulgaria, Poland, East Germany, Romania. Stalin's defence policy produced the AK-47, Khrushchev's foreign policy proliferated them. The planned economy couldn't produce "a good toilet, elevator, or camera, or produce large crops of wheat or potatoes, or provide its citizens with decent toothpaste or bars of soap", but it could produce weapons on demand. But the true history of the AK-47 is hard to know, because of the Soviet's need for proletarian heroes, and mythmaking which has produced "simplified distillations and outright false accounts." In the ultimate analysis, the AK-47 was not the inspiration of one man, but the product of Stalin's state – socialist bureaucracy more than capitalist entrepreneurship.
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It is a fascinating story, and Chivers tells it well. Sergeant Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov is widely credited with having invented the rifle that bears his name.
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But armies and states were still trying to develop a simple weapon for the infantryman, one that could fire with the speed of a Maxim, but was light enough for one man to carry. The machine gun changed how armies were organised and war was waged, and "killed men in quantities beyond counting".īy the end of the second world war, nuclear weapons had been invented and used. Its infamy was sealed on the Somme, when German soldiers used it to slaughter British troops. It made its public debut at an exhibition in South Kensington, and was inaugurated in battle by the British in Sudan.
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An egomaniacal trigamist, cad and draft dodger, he gave the world the first truly automatic weapon. In the arms race of the time, the next winner was Hiram Maxim. The legendary General Custer used them against native Americans, the British used them against Zulus, the Russians against the Cossacks. First came the Gatling gun, invented by Richard Gatling, an American idealist sickened by the thousands of dead and dying on the civil war battlefields, who envisioned a weapon that would allow one man to kill as many as hundred, thus reducing the need for large armies. It is so durable that, as a reporter in Afghanistan in 2008, Chivers saw an AK-47 stamped with a manufacturing date of 1954.Ĭhivers's history begins with the AK-47's predecessors. Or as Chivers summarises, it is a weapon for "the small-statured, the mechanically disinclined, the dimwitted, and the untrained" – a weapon, he notes chillingly, that allows "ordinary men to kill other men without extensive training or complications". It is everywhere because it is everything: lightweight easy to disassemble, clean and reassemble immune to jungle humidity, desert sand, arctic cold. It has been used by regimes against civilians "in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Tbilisi, Almaty, Beijing, Baku and Bishkek, and a long list of other places where regimes have used violence to hold power." And it has been just as widely deployed by rebel groups – Tamil Tigers Lord's Resistance Army (Uganda) FMLN (El Salvador) Farc (Colombia) Moro Liberation Front (Philippines) ad nauseam – and terrorists, from the eight masked men who attacked the Israeli Olympians in Munich to Osama bin Laden. No weapon has been responsible for more deaths than the AK-47, aka the Kalashnikov. But CJ Chivers, a former officer in the United States Marine Corps, has written a book that is as accessible and compelling to the general reader as it is for the military specialist. The history of a gun? The evolution of war? Sounds as exciting as a thesis by a Sandhurst graduate.