The first reasonably effective rapid-fire arm was the Gatling gun, shown here in patent drawings submitted by its inventor, Dr. Richard J. Gatling, in 1862. Gatling claimed he entered the weapons business to save lives. His weapon was not a true machine gun; firing it required a man to turn a crank. But it was the precursor to the rest.
As the killing powers of rapid-fire arms became understood, and manufacturing technology improved, new types of weapons—machines guns, submachine guns, automatic rifles, and assault rifles—entered markets. With time they were brought down in size and price, and connected to planned economies that produced them whether there were customers or not. The lethality, availability, and small size of assault rifles ultimately made them attractive to most anyone, including terrorists. Here, a Kalashnikov with its stock removed, which had been worn on a makeshift sling under the parka of a man who attacked a police station in Nalchik, Russia, during an insurgent raid in 2005. Its owner was dispossessed of it when he was killed. The keys beside the weapon provide a sense of scale. A fully outfitted Gatling could weigh a ton. A Kalashnikov like this weighs less than 8 pounds. (Photo by C. J. Chivers)
EARLY PLAYERS
Richard Gatling—inventor, salesman, cunning businessman—shown late in life. He made a small fortune from the Gatling gun before it was displaced from markets. He died having borrowed money from his son. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Hiram Maxim, accused trigamist, suspected draft dodger, and self-taught inventor from backwoods Maine, who decamped for London, where he invented the first true automatic weapon, the Maxim machine gun. His weapon changed war. Maxim guns were first used against men in lopsided fighting in colonial Africa and then helped turn World War I into a grisly hell. Maxim, the man, seemed untroubled by it all. He died proud. (Photo from My Life by Hiram Maxim)
. . . AND BATTLEFIELD SUCCESS, AND HORROR
John H. Parker, U.S. Army, one of the first officers in conventional infantry service to grasp the significance of machine gunnery. In the battle for Santiago in 1898, his hastily assembled Gatling detachment pummeled entrenched Spanish positions as the infantry advanced—a new use of rapid-fire arms that earned praise from then-colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Parker was seen as an attention-seeking radical, and mostly was ignored by the army he served. (Photo from Parker, History of the Gatling Gun Detachment of the Fifth Army Corps at Santiago)
The MG08. The primary German version of Maxim’s machine gun. Maxim and his partners sold his weapons and the rights to manufacturer them indiscriminately, including to nations that would become the enemies of his adopted country. The German military grasped what other Western armies did not, and the MG08 shaped the Western experience of World War I, wrecking untold lives. But it was still large—an instrument of the state, not of the individual man. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)
AN EVOLUTION, AND A MYTH, TAKE THEIR DECISIVE FORMS
The celebrated face of a breakthrough arm. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the noncommissioned officer the Soviet Union credited with designing the AK-47, the descendants of which would become the world’s most abundant firearm. Shown here roughly two decades later, as a decorated Soviet hero. The rifle’s origins are more complex, and more interesting, than the Soviet fables that helped make Kalashnikov’s last name an informal global brand. (Photo courtesy of the Ezell Collection, College of Management and Technology, UK Defence Academy)
The guts of an AK-47. The weapon is of exceedingly simple design, and its durability is such that this early AK-47, manufactured in 1954 in Izhevsk, was still in use in 2010 in Marja, Afghanistan. Note the few parts and their intuitive relationship to one another; from top: the receiver cover, the recoil mechanism, the bolt carrier with gas piston. Note as well the external pitting, but the relative cleanliness inside. This was a fully functional rifle, made one year after Stalin died and still performing exactly as the Soviet Union intended more than half a century later in a war against the West. (Photo by C. J. Chivers)
THE RIFLE’S INITIAL SPREAD
The Soviet Army shared assault rifles and the technical information to manufacture them with like-minded states. By the 1950s, the weapon was being produced in the Warsaw Pact countries, China, and North Korea. It was also shared with Egypt and other states. As its numbers grew, it became a symbol. Here, a Chinese-Albanian propaganda poster drew resolve from the rifle’s presence, an accent to the thick-necked, strong-handed optimism of the propaganda-poster genre. The caption reads: “Long live the long-lasting, unbreakable fighting friendship between the Chinese and Albanian people.”
Fuller accounts, and honest assessments, were much more complicated than the propaganda would have it. József Tibor Fejes, far right, the first known insurgent to carry an AK-47. Fejes obtained his prize after Soviet soldiers dropped their rifles during their attack on revolutionaries in Budapest in 1956. This photograph, taken after a cease-fire agreement, appeared in Life magazine, and drew the attention the ÁVH, the secret police, who tracked Fejes down. The Hungarian Revolution marked the AK-47’s true battlefield debut. (Photo from the Budapest Municipal Archives)
AN INSTRUMENT OF REPRESSION
(Photo courtesy of AKG–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)
(Photo courtesy of Hermann–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)
One essential element of the Kalashnikov legend, as told by Mikhail Kalashnikov and the Soviet and Russian governments alike, is that the AK-47 was designed for national defense and then distributed for liberation struggles. The script misses a characteristic use: as the strongman’s tool for crackdowns. The case of Peter Fechter (inset), an East German teenager, provides a more complete view.
(Photo courtesy of Bera–ullstein bild / The Granger Collection)
Fechter tried to scale the Berlin Wall in 1962. Border guards opened fire on him with bursts of Kalashnikov fire. One round struck his hip. His fingers tell the rest of the story—they are coated in clotted blood from his efforts to save himself while the men who shot him watched. The Kalashnikov has been turned by government troops against civilians in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Tbilisi, Almaty, Moscow, Beijing, Baku, Bishkek, and a long list of other places where regimes have used violence to hold power.
. . . AND PROXY WAR
The weapon continued to spread far from its makers’ hands. By 1962, the breakout had accelerated. A Dutch soldier, from Bravo Company. 41st Infantry Battalion, in Western New Guinea. He is holding what may be the first AK-47 captured by conventional Western forces in battle, a rifle picked up after being abandoned by an Indonesian Special Forces team. The Soviet Union had provided the rifles to Indonesia. The new period of the Kalashnikov proliferation had begun. (Photo courtesy of a former officer in the unit who wished to remain anonymous)
VIETNAM: WHERE BOTH SIDES USED ASSAULT RIFLES AS PRIMARY ARMS FOR THE FIRST TIME
The young men of Second Battalion, Third Marines, were among the first Marines in Vietnam to receive the American answer to the AK-47: the M-16 assault rifle. From left to right are four lieutenants whose troops were issued rifles that failed: Mike Chervenak, Roger Gunning, Chuck Woodard, and Bill Miles. (Photo courtesy of Chuck Woodard)
The M-16 and its ammunition had been rushed into production. The early versions were plagued with reliability problems. The problems were largely resolved later, but its bungled and bloody introduction was a searing experience for men asked to put their faith in their commanders and their country, which failed them in war. The nature of war had abruptly changed. For the first time, the soldiers from an industrial nation were outgunned by an agrarian local population, for whom the Kalashnikov assault rifle was a battlefield leveler.
The military identification of Mike Chervenak, who spoke out publicly against the failures of M-16 rifles in combat—and was punished for it. (Courtesy of Mike Chervenak)
Staff Sergeant Claude E. Elrod, who led First Platoon, Hotel Company, Second Battalion, Third Marines, on July 21, 1967. The photograph was taken shortly before the fight against the North Vietnamese Army for Ap Sieu Quan, the day that ultimately would force the Marine Corps to admit its rifles were failing—and demand replacements.
After the battle, Hotel Company settled into the deserted village. First Lieutenant Chervenak is standing on the left, in a dark tee shirt. He was enraged, and set out to document the problems.
Marines inside Ap Sieu Quan, with M-14s against a wall. The Marine Corps had issued M-16s to replace M-14s, which were not supposed to be carried. Many Marines, not trusting their M-16s, procured M-14s through underground means and ditched their newer weapons. At Ap Sieu Quan, when at least forty of Hotel Company’s M-16s jammed, the M-14s allowed the grunts who had them to protect Marines whose rifles had gone silent. (Photos courtesy of Claude Elrod)
THE TEENAGERS’ WEAPON
The 1986 log book of preconscription training of Soviet students in Pripyat, the worker’s town beside the nuclear reactors at Chernobyl. The book was left behind after the power station exploded, bombarding Pripyat with radiation, and remained on the contaminated grounds in 2005.
Results of the students’ timed drills with Kalashnikov assault rifles—part of the curriculum in Soviet schools. The log book was a marker of both the rifles’s ease of use and the extent to which assault rifles had penetrated Soviet society. The practice persists in post-Soviet Russia. (Photos by Joseph Sywenkyj)
The Kalashnikov’s durability in the field and its ease of use, along with its slight recoil, have made it a weapon most anyone can use. These traits, coupled with its near ubiquity, have made it a primary arm of child soldiers. A boy soldier in the Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka, 1992. (Photo by Suzanne Keating)
Drawing by a former child soldier from the Lord’s Resistance Army, an millennial insurgent group that originated in Uganda in the 1980s. Armed with simple and lightweight assault rifles, the group has survived more than a quarter century in the field. (Photo by C. J. Chivers)
KILLING TOOLS, AND OBJECTS WITH MANY MEANINGS, AND REACTIONS
After its introduction, the AK-47 crept into national and insurgent propaganda alike, and can be seen in statuary, symbols, banners, and posters from Central America to North Korea. The caption reads of this poster was typical of its form: “Imperialism and all anti-revolutionists are paper tigers.” The weapon has similarly been appropriated as a mark of martial credibility and determination by dictators, criminals, rascals, and jihadists, a malleable icon that can convey whatever those who carry it wish to convey.
In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Army held classified tests examining the weapon’s lethality against that of American rifles. With cadavers procured in secret from India and with live goats, testers at Aberdeen Proving Ground fired into defatted and decapitated human heads that had been filled with gelatinous pseudobrains. The tests—hurried, macabre, free from peer review or public scrutiny, and ultimately useless—were a milestone of strange Cold War “science.” An embarrassed army covered them up for nearly fifty years. The effects of a bullet fired by an early American assault rifle passing through a human head were recorded, on a high-speed camera. The so-called terminal effects of an AK-47 round were displayed on another panel, after a tester fired into the skull. (Photos from“Wound-Ballistics Assessment of M-14, AR-15 and Soviet AK Rifles,”U.S. Army, 1964)
Sometimes, choosing not to display a Kalashnikov can have meaning, too. A member of Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, the Palestinian terrorist group, brandished an M-4 in an interview with the author in 2002. Carrying a rifle used by Israel signified defiance or fighting skill—to acquire its enemies’ rifles, the group depends on corruption or battlefield capture. Displaying the enemies’ guns is a common propaganda device, used the world over. (Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times)
Among those who use them, assault rifles can be intensely personal objects or symbols with many meanings. In 2009, an Afghan National Army soldier in Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, decorated his Kalashnikov with unveiled images of women—a seeming rebuke to the Taliban. (Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times)
EVERYMANS’S GUN
By the time the Kalashnikov line had entered its second half-century of service, it was firmly entrenched as a primary tool of violence in destabilized lands. The Soviet Union had fallen, the Warsaw Pact had dissolved. The armories and stockpiles were loose, and the weapon was so common in the field that it was scarcely remarked upon. Its effects were easy to find, and chilling. A wounded Taliban fighter, captured by the Northern Alliance in late 2001, on the approach to Kabul. The man was dragged from hiding onto a dirt road, and executed in a frenzy. What the Kalashnikov era has often looked like, in a way rarely documented by camera. The rifle is still used in crackdowns, too. (Photos by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times)
Karzan Mahmoud, at far right of bottom row. A bodyguard for a Kurdish prime minister in Northern Iraq, Mahmoud was shot repeatedly by assassins with Kalashnikovs not long after this photograph was taken in 2002. The doctors documented twenty-three bullet wounds in his shattered frame. Mahmoud survived. Later, he wondered whether Mikhail Kalashnikov feared for his soul. (Photo courtesy of Karzan Mahmoud)
For a near decade after going to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, the United States has become a busy distributor of the assault rifles of the former Eastern bloc. Here, a swiftly formed unit of the Afghan National Auxiliary Police in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, 2007, armed with a fresh batch of Kalashnikovs. These units were later disbanded, often without recovering the weapons, the whereabouts of which are unknown. (Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times)
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY’S RIFLE
Since their inception, Kalashnikov assault rifles have displayed remarkable durability in harsh conditions. Above, an original Soviet AK-47, manufactured in Izhevsk in 1954. The rifle was still in service in Afghanistan, now in the hands of an Afghan soldier, in 2008. (Photo by C. J. Chivers)
The Kalashnikov, centerpiece of the former Eastern bloc’s suite of small arms, remains the predominant infantry rifle in use today worldwide. Here, an Afghan patrol in 2007 with arms provided by the United States, approaching a village on a raid with a platoon of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. There is little reason not to expect the Kalashnikov line, and the consequences of its wide distribuition, to persist for many decades more. (Photo by Tyler Hicks / The New York Times)