AK-47

INSIDE STORY

IT STARTED WITH SOMETHING I READ

I was reading an article about the movement of weapons around the world.

One thing stayed with me.

The AK-47 seemed to be everywhere.

Millions had been manufactured. They moved into stockpiles, were sold and resold, and traveled from one conflict to another.

A weapon could outlive the war it was made for.

It could outlive governments.

It could just keep moving.

That interested me.

Then I began looking into the man whose name was attached to it.

THERE WAS A MAN NAMED KALASHNIKOV

Mikhail Kalashnikov was a Soviet soldier.

He was wounded in 1941 and, while recovering, began thinking about the weapons soldiers were using and how they might work better.

How do you make something simple? Reliable? Something that will continue to work in mud, dirt and cold? Something soldiers can depend upon?

He began designing.

Eventually, it worked.

INGENUITY

That was the contradiction that interested me. We admire ingenuity. Someone sees a problem, thinks about it differently and finds an elegant solution. The AK-47 became famous for exactly those qualities - simplicity, durability and reliability.

It was ingenious.

Bit there was no second purpose hiding inside it. It wasn’t a tool that could also be used as a weapon. It was made to kill people. And it did its job extraordinarily well.

Years later, Kalashnikov was still wrestling with what he had made.

“I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov… am responsible for people’s deaths, even if they were enemies.”