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BY THE MID-1990S, Kalashnikov begrudgingly accepted the hard truth about his life. Even though he had invented the world’s most popular weapon, and received numerous accolades, he would never become rich from his efforts. Kalashnikov had always considered himself a simple, peasant man who embraced the Communist ideal that duty was more important than money, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a few extra rubles in one’s pocket? He wished there was a way to cash in on the AK’s growing popularity as a cultural icon if not as a military weapon. Was there some way to make money off of his name?
Living on a meager pension, he made pocket money by appearing at arms shows, trotted out as a celebrity to help Russia move more military hardware. While this helped his financial situation, what he really wanted was some kind of royalty deal like Eugene Stoner, who had made millions from his M-16. Kalashnikov wanted financial recognition for his invention.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian officials desperately tried to raise hard currency by exploiting Kalashnikov and the AK. Besides sending him to arms shows as a spokesman, they continued to strong-arm AK-producing countries into paying royalties. Officials claimed that if it were not for the prolific and illegal manufacture of the weapon, they would be back in the manufacturing business and able to compete and thrive in the current market. They said that the large number of cheap AK knock-offs undermined their products by selling for one-fourth the price of their own. The Russians had already stopped production of military AKs, and were selling off their large stockpiles. Had it not been for the illegal gun makers, they contended, the stockpiles would be drawn down and they could engage in new production.
Licensing rights to the gun itself now was impossible. Kalashnikov had never patented the rifle’s design—the thought had never occurred to him or anyone else under the Soviet regime—and now it was too late. Izhmash had won Russian patent rights to the AK after persuading the highest Russian patent court that they were the rightful inventors of the rifle. While this was a victory within Russia, enforcing such a patent outside the country was a non-starter. Kalashnikovs were being manufactured in almost twenty countries, and only a handful—China, Slovenia, and Turkey—were paying royalties, totaling less than $1 million. These were token payments designed to keep political relationships between the two countries friendly. Kalashnikov saw nothing from them.
Legally, unraveling the license agreements was an impossible task. For one thing, it was not clear if the then Soviet Union had actually signed license agreement documents with Soviet bloc countries or informally given them technical knowledge in exchange for their political friendship. Legal experts suggest that if such contracts existed they might have expired, or, on the other hand, might have been signed in perpetuity allowing continued and free manufacture. The Russian government has not made public any documents backing these claims. (Some international law scholars also argue that today’s Russia is a different legal entity from the former Soviet Union and previous agreements may not carry over.)
More important, each country put its own spin on the AK, altering it to suit its particular interests and needs. It might be argued that these changes made the new versions no longer close enough to the original design to be relevant. Additionally, intellectual property scholars and attorneys contend that some products have become so ubiquitous that any claims of ownership are impossible to prove. With so many AKs and variants in circulation, a case for public domain probably might be argued successfully in court.
Out of financial desperation, Kalashnikov got his feet wet in the world of branding in 1998 by lending his name to vodka. “Vodka Kalashnikov,” produced by the Glazovsky liquor and vodka distillery in the city of Glazov, was packaged in many different bottles, including one shaped like a hand grenade. Another in the shape of an AK displayed individually numbered dog tags on a chain around the bottle’s neck. Intended for export, the vodka was based on recipes approved by Kalashnikov and claimed to be the first vodka ever to be created by combining salt, sugar, vanillin, and glycerin as flavor enhancers. Unfortunately, sales were poor.
The vodka won several medals and honors, mostly within Russia, but it still lacked international marketing and promotion savvy. In hindsight, the company that employed the AK-shaped bottle, VRQ International, may have played the military angle a bit too heavily for Western tastes. Advertisements boasted, “It looks like the legendary AK-47 rifle, but it holds several rounds of the finest original Russian vodka.”
Consumers in the West enjoyed the antiestablishment nature of the AK, as long as it didn’t remind them of the dirty side of war. There was a fine line between reality and fantasy, and the Russian distillery was unable to successfully exploit it.
As the years rolled on, however, the phenomenon of the AK as a popular icon continued to grow. Kalashnikov and his invention became the subject of several documentaries, including Automatic Kalashnikov from widely known German filmmakers Axel Engstfeld and Herbert Habersack, in which they sympathetically portrayed the eighty-year-old designer living in relative obscurity and resigned penury while his weapon was changing the world. The film, released in Germany in 2000 and shown worldwide on the Sundance Channel, offered the parallel, somewhat disjointed story lines of the aging Kalashnikov, living quietly in his modest apartment on his fifty-dollar-a-month pension, juxtaposed with mujahideen thanking him for his invention that drove out the Russians, to Los Angeles police officers talking about how they were outgunned by street gangs with AKs.
The film portrayed a sad, conflicted man. “Like it or not,” he said, “you have to live with it, like a grenade splinter inside your body. I’ve got one in my body, long surrounded by scar tissue. You forget about it as you go about your daily routine, but then what do you do when a small twist or turn causes sudden acute pain?”
Years earlier, Kalashnikov had felt that pain as he stopped for a traffic light in his town. He saw an empty AK cartridge roll down the pavement. “It might have been hurled by a wheel of a car or blown by the wind,” he thought. He found another cartridge and realized that there had been a shootout the previous night in the middle of town. “No one gathers the blank cartridges. No one cares anymore.” He was so lost in thought that a police officer asked if he was all right, having missed the green light. “Armaments which should be kept in arsenals under the close watch of sentries are now freely bought and sold… yet it is not arms makers and not politicians that continue to be enemies of the people,” Kalashnikov mused.
Although the film gave Kalashnikov’s son Viktor only a cameo, he was an accomplished arms designer in his own right. Named after Kalashnikov’s brother Viktor, his son designed the PP-19 Bizon, a 9mm submachine gun used by military special forces and tactical police units in close-quarter environments. The weapon used many of the AK’s well-proven aspects, including its trigger mechanism and receiver cover. Its most unusual element was the magazine, which was helical and placed underneath the forestock instead of perpendicular as on other assault rifles and submachine guns. This feature gave the weapon a low profile, allowing it to be more easily concealed under clothing or held close to one’s side without being observed.
As a child, Viktor wanted to design aircraft, but the Kazan Aviation School where he applied did not accept him. Instead, he enrolled at the Izhevsk Institute of Mechanics, where he majored in small arms and received his PhD in 1980. Earlier, in 1967, his design bureau had moved to Izhmash, where his Alexandrov group competed against his father’s group for the 5.45 × 39mm rifle—a competition that his father’s group won.
Viktor was more outspoken and bitter than his father about not being paid royalties for the AK. “My father and I could have been millionaires, just like the U.S. inventor of the M-16 assault rifle, Eugene Stoner, who received a dollar for each gun sold.”
About the same time that the documentary hit the screens, a cutting-edge T-shirt company called OK47 began its growth into a three-continent, hundred-boutique source of fashion alternatives. The company admitted to playing on the surreal contradiction of its name and the AK, as OK47 considered itself a counterpoint to cookie-cutter clothing producers. Not only were its designs unique, but the Toronto-based company bucked the trend of offshore manufacturing and exploitation of workers in less developed countries by making all its clothing in North America. Like the AK, OK47 was rebellious in its fashion and business practices.
The gun was popping up in movies like Jackie Brown, directed by Quentin Tarantino, in which Samuel L. Jackson announced, “AK-47. The very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room.” In the HBO TV hit The Sopranos, Tony Soprano armed himself with an AK after a bear was discovered roaming his New Jersey backyard. Just like Shakespeare had an actor walk onstage and kick a dog to indicate to the audience that he was the antagonist, Hollywood has used the AK to show the antihero, the terrorist, the bad guy.
Artists were discovering the powerful symbolism of the AK. Because it was the definitive icon of protracted, dirty warfare, they incorporated the weapon into their work both as an ironic accent and as a symbol of protest against conflict. In Cambodia, a group of artists funded in part by the actresses Angelina Jolie and Emma Thompson worked almost exclusively in the medium of decommissioned AKs. Students at Phnom Penh’s Royal University of Fine Arts participating in the Peace Art Project took thousands of AKs collected by the government and turned them into sculptures. After decades of war, including the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge depicted in the book and movie The Killing Fields, the country still remained smothered in weapons, mainly AKs, but the artists hoped to send a peaceful message with these rifles. Changing Kalashnikovs into artwork seemed as natural as Western artists turning their everyday cultural items like cars and soup cans into avant-garde art.
“Taking the weapons and turning them into art seems to be the perfect symbolism of a step away from a post-conflict society towards a society with a culture of peace,” said David de Beer, head of a European Union arms decommissioning program in Phnom Penh. Because of Cambodia’s tradition of sculpture, the weapons turned art seemed a natural. Animals such as elephants, horses, birds, chickens, and snakes were popular subjects. More than a hundred thousand AKs were turned over to authorities. Ones that were not turned into art were burned, many of them in public “Flames of Peace” bonfires that attracted hundreds of onlookers.
The project was loosely fashioned after a similar program in Mozambique called Swords to Ploughshares that offered implements such as plows, bicycles, and sewing machines in exchange for small arms after that country’s civil war ended. Art played a role there, too, as several artists, including Feil dos Santos, turned AKs and land mines into sculptures. Christian Concern, a nongovernmental organization, collected the guns for dos Santos, which he welded together into a display titled From Weapons to Art that has traveled throughout Africa. The sculptures depicted the artist’s stress and sadness at living in a war zone. One sculpture in particular, Dual Surrender, showed a man with outstretched arms, begging for charity, resigned to his decrepit situation. AK trigger handles formed his ears; cartridge shells made his hair. Another work by dos Santos, Melody, depicted a man whose limbs were formed from AK parts. The man was playing a harmonica because many in Mozambique found comfort in music, filling the quiet void left by the long war.
For citizens of countries in which the AK killed millions, seeing the weapons turned into harmless, sometimes stunning and beautiful art pieces has gone a long way toward healing the wounds of war.
Even high-end commercial artists and designers joined the AK design movement, mainly for shock value and to titillate Western consumers. At the Milan Furniture Fair in 2005, world-renowned designer Philippe Starck revealed high-end table lamps fashioned from replicas of AKs, M-16s, and Beretta pistols. Black shades lined with crosses sat atop the lamps. Said Starck, “I am a designer, and design is my weapon. I want my furniture to show that everything, even furniture, can be a political choice.”
The founders of the online photography magazine AK47 used the name to grab attention in the overcrowded Internet space. “The AK47—and those four symbols A-K-4-7 are iconic. So from an Internet magazine’s point of view, where you want to stand out on a search page—AK47 just grabs the eye,” said editor Joerg Diekmann. “Coming from South Africa, the AK47 has always played a terrifying role in our history. Bank robbers, burglars, carjackers, an angry disenfranchised people—it’s the AK47 that puts real fear into people. They cost about $30 in the streets. Using the name AK47 for a photography magazine is hopefully an affirmation that those dark days are nearing an end. It’s a signal of change. An icon from a different era. Yet it is still edgy and raw, and churns up emotions. I like photography that induces an emotional response—it can remain murky—but there has to be an emotion.”
KALASHNIKOV ATTEMPTED TO CASH in on the growing momentum. In 2003, he signed an agreement with Marken Marketing International (MMI) a Solingen, Germany, company that offered to market consumer items under the inventor’s name. For lending his moniker, Kalashnikov would receive a one-third stake in the venture. The company planned an ambitious line of goods including pocketknives, flashlights, snowboards, umbrellas, and tennis rackets. The goal was to transfer the Kalashnikov reputation for solidness, simplicity, and rugged design to these products in much the same way that Harley-Davidson sold branded clothing and the Dannon yogurt company had a line of bottled water. Although neither of these companies knew anything about clothes or water, consumers associated them with quality, and that made product extension possible and profitable. Kalashnikov had hoped for the same outcome.
The fact that AKs enjoyed an antiestablishment cachet would help sales of products aimed at youths and those who liked to think of themselves as outside the mainstream. Harley-Davidson had successfully fostered an outlaw biker patina even though most Harley riders were males over forty, who had wives and children and enjoyed high family incomes from straitlaced jobs. For masculine sports and camping gear, the Kalashnikov name probably could move products if the marketer was skillful. “The articles are very similar to my rifle,” Kalashnikov said. “Reliable, easy to use, and indestructible.”
The announcement was met with great fanfare and media attention, but nothing ever became of the scheme. The company simply disappeared, and once again Kalashnikov failed to make money on his invention.
Still, the AK mystique grew stronger. Playboy magazine in 2004 listed the AK-47 as number four in its feature “50 Products That Changed the World: A Countdown of the Most Innovative Consumer Products of the Past Half Century.” That the AK was considered a consumer item, behind the Apple Macintosh desktop computer (number one), the Pill (number two), and the Sony Betamax VCR (number three), was a true indication of the gun’s seminal and long-lasting effect on the modern world. Citing a July 1999 State Department report mentioning the weapon, Playboy’s editors noted, “In some countries it is easier and cheaper to buy an AK-47 than to attend a movie or provide a decent meal.” The magazine also cited a Los Angeles Times article calling the gun “history’s most widely distributed piece of killing machinery.”
Amid the AK hype, museums began looking at the rifle’s effect on civilization and culture in a more somber and thoughtful way. The Dutch Army Museum in 2003 and 2004 hosted an exhibit on the AK called Kalashnikov: Rifle without Borders that offered visitors a look at multimedia displays on wars in which the rifle had played a deciding role. It showed combat children holding AKs in Africa and elsewhere. One exhibit dramatically illustrated the weapon’s destructive ability by showing a bullet pattern in a porous block. However, even a serious museum could not ignore the Kalashnikov’s pop culture side: attendees saw AKs that had been chrome-plated; others were covered with hot pink fabric and glitter. Even a military-oriented museum could not escape the fact that AKs had become so ingrained in world culture that people adorned them with bright colors, perhaps to defuse some of their power. Kalashnikov himself opened the exhibit amid fanfare. Again, as he had done at every public opportunity in the past, he used the forum to blame politicians for misusing his invention and to absolve himself of the AK’s terrible legacy.
At home, his countrymen were preparing to honor their most famous inventor, too. In 1996, construction of a Kalashnikov museum in Izhevsk began but was suspended due to insufficient funding. With pleas for money throughout Russia and on the Internet, the $8 million Kalashnikov Weapons Museum and Exhibition Center opened on the arms maker’s eighty-fifth birthday in 2004. The museum was designed not only to honor Kalashnikov’s work, but also to jump-start the decaying city of Izhevsk, a boom-town during World War II and the cold war years, now fallen on hard times. Isolated and far from much of Russia’s commerce, the city existed for the production of arms, which it made at the rate of more than ten thousand a day during World War II. Later during the cold war it continued to produce weapons, mainly AKs in great numbers, providing employment and prosperity.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, with no more AKs being made, Izhevsk officials hoped that the museum would attract tourists. In what was once a top-secret location, closed to outsiders and casual tourists alike, city officials were hoping for urban renewal and better times based on the AK’s star power. During speeches, the mayor conveyed that the museum embodied the strength of the city in that it produced a dependable product, one that worked reliably and was revered worldwide. Like commercial marketers hoping to make money off of Kalashnikov by selling consumer items with his name and endorsement, his adopted town was relying on his celebrity status, too, to help jump-start its economy.
So far, the results have been lukewarm.
PERHAPS THE INVENTOR’S GREATEST chance at financial success came in 2003, when British entrepreneur John Florey was looking for his next big thing. Florey reasoned that Russia was known for its vodka, the way France was known for wine, the Caribbean for rum, and Scotland for scotch whiskey. Russia was also known for producing the AK, and the Kalashnikov had already achieved global cult status. For Florey, the mix of Russia’s favorite spirit and favorite celebrity seemed the perfect concoction. Over dinner one evening, the idea of Kalashnikov’s AK and vodka seemed like a sure shot.
Florey had been a representative for chess champ Gary Kasparov and understood how to promote Russian culture. He had also helped to establish the Moscow Business School, so he was introduced to Kalashnikov in 2001 through the school.
Kalashnikov was interested albeit wary of the idea. He had been burned several times before. The failure of Kalashnikov’s first excursion into the world of vodka branding was not lost on Florey, who approached this project with a showman’s vision for big, bold promotions but without leaning too heavily on the gun angle. He believed that the previous vodka deal did not “extend” the Kalashnikov brand. He also brought a solid business plan. Kalashnikov was named honorary chairman of the “Kalashnikov Joint Stock Vodka Company (1947) plc.” and was to receive a small equity stake and 2.5 percent of net profits for using his name and likeness on the bottle. A 1947 picture of a young and vibrant Kalashnikov was etched into the bottles, and non-rolling shot glasses, invented by Kalashnikov himself for the Russian navy, were slated for use at bar promotions.
Florey assembled an all-star cast including David Bromige, the creator of Polstar Vodka, an Icelandic spirit that played on the motto “Strength Through Purity” along with a polar bear logo. Bromige also was a director of Reformed Spirits Company, owners of Martin Miller’s Gin, a product that had received a lot of attention for its citrus, pear, and clove flavors in Icelandic glacial water, all contained in a hip, angular bottle that bartenders liked to handle as they imitated Tom Cruise’s dexterous motions in the movie Cocktail. Although the brand had come into existence only in 1999, it boasted using “England’s oldest copper still.” With the opening of the former Soviet Union, vodka was growing more popular in Europe and North America as venerable vodka makers like Stolichnaya, Absolut, and Finlandia (the last two were not from Russia) were wooing younger drinkers with offbeat flavors, edgy bottles, even edgier advertisements, and higher prices that pushed prestige appeal. Florey hoped to catch the wave.
The Kalashnikov 41-proof vodka was going to be produced by a distillery in St. Petersburg, with bottling done in England. Florey had to position the product just right for it all to work. Too much on the military angle would turn off drinkers. Too little and it was just another vodka. Florey pushed a well-honed message: “Kalashnikov stands for Russian design, integrity in so far as the product is true to itself, comradeship and strength of character, which epitomizes the General’s life and the role he has played in Russian culture.”
The company’s public offering went well with investors—it was oversubscribed—and listed on the United Kingdom’s JPJL market, a junior market to the OFEX, the country’s independent market focused on small and medium firms.
Florey’s approach was spot-on. Having Kalashnikov as your pitchman guaranteed that the story would be picked up by the world’s major media. By the summer of 2004, Kalashnikov, clad in his honorary general’s uniform complete with colorful ribbons, graced the pages of magazines and newspapers worldwide. Instead of holding an AK across his chest with his traditional two-handed grip, Kalashnikov delicately raised a martini glass up to the camera in a mock toast. This was a brilliant promotional trick; even though vodka was usually served in regular glasses, the martini glass’s unique triangular shape was instantly recognizable as a cocktail drink, whereas a normal cylindrical glass could have contained any ordinary liquid. There was no doubt that the AK-47’s inventor was enjoying a shot of liquor.
At the official launch at London’s Century Club, Kalashnikov stayed on message, too. In Russian, he said to the crowd, “I would like the product we are about to launch to be as reliable and easy to use as my gun.” It would be a message that he would repeat on many other occasions.
The reception included samples served to the crowd by Natasha, Anoushka, and Ivana, models clad in white, military-type uniforms and short skirts and known as the “Nikita Girls.” Their role was to visit bars during promotional efforts to push the Kalashnikov brand.
In an effort to cash in on his weapon’s newly established status as a cultural icon, Kalashnikov lent his name to a branded vodka. “I’m not interested in war anymore—only my military-strength vodka,” he said. The Kalashnikov Joint Stock Vodka Co. (1947) plc.
In interviews after the reception, Kalashnikov said, “I am to blame only for having designed a reliable weapon…. I am very sad when I see my weapon being used when they shouldn’t be used, but the designer is not to blame. It’s the politicians who are to blame.” Like a good soldier, he also stuck with his commercial message during public appearances touting the new brew. “I’ve always wanted to improve and expand on the good name of my weapon by doing good things,” he said. “So we decided to create a vodka under my name, and we wanted that vodka to be better than anything made up until now in both Russia and England.”
In less public moments, however, he expressed his resigned reluctance at becoming a shill, saying, “What can you do? These are our times now.” As he had been for most of his later life, Kalashnikov found himself torn between the capitalist reality of making money in the New Russia and holding firm to his lifelong Communist belief that what matters is doing your duty for the motherland without any thought of financial compensation.
Propelled by Florey’s skill and Kalashnikov’s notoriety, the vodka juggernaut was on a tear. Hip magazines like FHM placed it among the top ten best vodkas in their staff taste tests. Talk Loud PR, a public relations firm that had worked on the Polstar Vodka account, convinced bartenders to create trendy drinks using the vodka and submitted them to magazines. The London Sunday Times Style magazine displayed a picture of actress Julia Roberts with the caption reporting her interest in a drink called a Scorpino that contained Kalashnikov Vodka. The soft-porn men’s magazine ICE featured an irreverent Q&A with Kalashnikov along with a pictorial titled “Raise Your Glass the Ruskie Way,” on how to drink vodka in the traditional Russian style.
The initial $90,000 public relations blitz was paying off. The company was on the way to its goal of selling forty-four thousand cases by 2006 to bars and restaurants before targeting the retail trade. Florey even hoped to place a new phrase into the English drinking lexicon: “I went out last night and got Kalashed.”
Then a problem arose.
Alcohol Focus Scotland, a group dedicated to “changing Scotland’s drinking culture,” complained to the Portman Group, a regulatory body funded by the drinks industry. It claimed that Kalashnikov Vodka “suggested an association with bravado, or with violent, aggressive, dangerous or anti-social behavior,” and therefore violated the group’s code of practice.
Complaints of this nature were fairly common as drink makers pushed the envelope as far as they could to create interest in their products, especially among younger consumers. For instance, during the time that the Portman Group was deliberating possible action against Kalashnikov Vodka, it was considering other breaches including whether a line of “tube drinks” named Blow Job, Orgasm, Foreplay, and Bit on the Side violated regulations because they implied a connection between alcohol use and sexual behavior, a group no-no. Another complaint at the time was that a pair of vodka drinks named Rocket Fuel Vodka and Rocket Fuel Ice, in concert with their prominent positioning of their very high alcohol content, 42.85 percent, were clearly using the intoxicating effect to sell themselves, another breach of the code. Both were found to be violations.
Of the more than 140 complaints dating back to 1996 (the group was started in 1989), the vast majority of upheld complaints concerned blatant sexual content in labels or packaging or false and misleading labels. Until Kalashnikov Vodka came along, only two actions had been taken against companies for violent content: a beer named Heist (even though the group conceded that it was American slang for a robbery), and a product named TNT Liquid Dynamite designed to represent a stick of dynamite with a fuse in it.
Florey argued that the Kalashnikov brand was based on “comradeship” and not military imagery. Company officials admitted that the brand was “funky” and “in your face,” but that it “didn’t cause people to take up armed conflict.”
Florey put Kalashnikov out front to help spin public opinion their way. He gave interviews saying that it was wrong to associate the AK with aggression. Wearing an AK tie clip, Kalashnikov told Financial Times reporters, “The gun serves peace and friendship because it is used to defend one’s country. Look how many countries have been liberated using this gun.”
His arguments did not persuade the Portman Group, and they found that Kalashnikov Vodka violated the industry’s own rules.
The group’s assessment was both good and bad news for Florey and Kalashnikov. Although the Portman Group upheld the complaint, it officially recognized the pop icon status of the AK to the Western world. Even though the vodka’s packaging did not look like an AK or contain any violent or antisocial references, the Kalashnikov name alone was enough to provoke a passionate response in the hearts of consumers. To marketers, this was a good thing. The panel said in its January 21, 2005, report, “Having considered the product as a whole, including its packaging and overall presentation, the Panel concluded that a name that primarily evoked an image of a contemporary gun, namely the AK, which was one of, if not the most widely used firearm in the world, was an unacceptable choice of brand name for an alcoholic drink, because it indirectly suggested an association with violent and dangerous behavior.”
In true entrepreneurial flip style, Florey told those around him that any publicity was good publicity. At the same time, however, he took Portman to task publicly, complaining that other alcoholic beverages were named for weapons, including Spitfire beer, Bombardier beer, and Claymore scotch, and they had not been banned.
Florey had no choice but to begin negotiations with the panel to find a solution, which probably would mean changing the name in the United Kingdom. The company could still keep it for export. In fact, the vodka was doing extremely well in the Middle East. “There’s an affinity in the Middle East with the gun,” Florey noted. “And we’re setting up a franchise in South Africa called ‘AK-47 Freedom Vodka.’”
With negotiations going nowhere and bottles banned from shelves, the situation was looking grim until a journalist at a Portman-held news conference—convened to explain its decision—suggested a name that Portman chairman Sir Paul Condon admitted would probably work. By fall 2005, “General Kalashnikov Russian Vodka” was slated for a comeback in England and a push toward North America.
ALTHOUGH MANY PEOPLE (like the Portman Group) considered exploiting a deadly weapon for financial gain in bad taste, even more bizarre examples began to crop up. No longer only part of the military, counterculture, or Middle Eastern “Kalashnikov Culture,” the AK was being seen and mentioned almost daily in mainstream movies, books, and on TV. What once was a horrible but everyday item in some parts of the world was now a solid part of contemporary global culture.
Rapper Eminem, whose rise to notoriety was portrayed in the hit movie 8 Mile, used the powerful image of the AK to express his anger at the U.S.-led war in Iraq and to convince young people to vote against President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. In an animated video titled “Mosh,” Eminem was seen leading a group of disenfranchised citizens wearing hooded sweatshirts through the dark “police state” streets of America. The keyed-up mob entered a government building, but instead of rioting, the group quietly lined up to register to vote. Eminem attacked President Bush as a liar and thief for putting his own agenda before that of the country. Along with an animation of Bush holding an AK, Eminem sang, “Let the president answer our high anarchy / Strap him with an AK-47 / Let him go fight his own war / Let him impress daddy that way.” By invoking the AK image, Eminem brought his controversial message home.
Perhaps the weirdest consumer item to hook into the AK’s iconic status was the AK-MP3 Jukebox from UK audiobook publisher AudioBooksForFree.com. The music player was built into a banana-shaped magazine of the rifle and could be attached to the Kalashnikov rifle instead of the regular magazine or played on its own. It could hold up to nine thousand songs or three thousand hours of audiobooks. “This is our bit for world peace,” said Russian ex-rock star Andrey Koltakov, founder of the successful company. “We hope that from now on many militants and terrorists will use their AK-47s to listen to music and audiobooks…. They need to chill out and take it easy.” The company featured the product on its web site along with camo-bikini-clad models holding the weapon and player/magazine in provocative stances.
In India, the vibrant Bollywood dream factory played on the AK’s drawing power with a terrorism potboiler titled AK-47. At the time of its release, reviewers chided it for being formulaic, base, and too violent. Drawn by its name, however, audiences flocked to see it. It didn’t seem to register with moviegoers that India had been undergoing frequent, severe, and large-scale hit-and-run attacks on rural oil, chemical, and mining facilities by Maoist terrorist groups wielding AKs.
That same year, the AK had reached another cultural mile-stone. Stuff magazine, which appealed to young men with pictorials and text about gadgets, semiclad women, and the latest video games, featured the gun in a two-page spread along with a Q&A with the inventor. The automatic rifle was held up as a hip classic tool, a cool accessory like a fast motorcycle, a beautiful woman, an edgy video game, or the latest earphones. As expected, Kalashnikov seized the platform to blame politicians and not weapons designers for the misuse of his weapon. He also assured U.S. troops in Iraq that he didn’t have them in mind as targets when he made his rifle.
Kalashnikov used the opportunity to push his latest branding venture. “I’m not interested in war anymore—only my military-strength vodka. I like to sit and toast friendship. If the world did more of that and little less fighting, it would be a better place.”