In the 1980s Kalashnikov received a letter from America, from a military historian who was writing a book about guns and who was asking him for some information. Mikhail Timofeyevich took the letter to the factory management.A year later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called.
‘They asked if I had had a letter from the USA. And whether we had written back. (As if they didn’t know.) We didn’t have permission, I replied. So write back, they said, and I did.’
THE DESIGNER’S LUSTRATION
Kalashnikov’s most dramatic year was 1956, when Stalin was condemned at the Twentieth Party Congress.
‘It turned out there might be various claims against me. Against a man who never made any career in the name of Joseph Stalin. Out of the blue, at a meeting of the factory’s Party organization, where we were discussing the personality cult, I was turned into a punch bag – anyone who wanted kicked me.’
To this day he has kept the issue of the factory news-sheet from that meeting:Comrade designer Drodonov cited a number of examples of how some individuals ascribe all the merits due to our collective to themselves alone. In particular he spoke of Comrade Kalashnikov’s high opinion of himself, who did not take a position on the previous speaker’s charges and ignored his conclusions.
‘The management didn’t like my creative independence and the fact that I got in touch with the ministry and people placing orders over their heads. And so under the pretext of the struggle against the remnants of the personality cult they started to attack me.Wherever I appeared, I was treated like a mangy dog. So I put all my work on hold and said I wouldn’t start working again until some sort of Party committee specified what exactly I had ascribed to myself. After all, I had come to Izhevsk with a ready-made automatic, which I constructed entirely on my own. So who was I meant to share the credit with? They thought I was finished, but I won the competition for the universal machine gun again, which in 1961 the Council of Ministers put into production. And again they started saying I was unbearable.’
‘Maybe you qualified for de-Stalinization?’
‘You’re joking! I was just a designer.’
‘Not just. Six terms of office, in other words twenty-four years on the Supreme Soviet.You survived all the secretary generals.’
‘And what of it?’ He’s upset and glances at his watch.
‘What about the fact that the nation was unable to elect you, because you were classified? No-one knew you; no-one was allowed to mention your name. How many meetings did you hold with the voters, Mikhail Timofeyevich? Let’s not delude ourselves.You weren’t chosen by the people, but the authorities.’
But Kalashnikov won’t take up the debate – in such circumstances he prefers to take offence and make it plain he finds the conversation tiring.
THE DESIGNER’S SOUVENIRS
Kalashnikov lives in a nice, three-room, seventy-square-metre apartment on the second floor of a small block. It isn’t just any old block made of Leningrad prefab, but a solid house made of bricks. The apartment has a piano and a fake fireplace, and is furnished with a solid suite bought with the proceeds of the Stalin Prize.The kitchen is large, and I count the refrigerators – two. And another one in the hall. A lot for a country where the citizens have trouble filling just one. So I check – two of them are switched off.
His study is a shock. It’s a real museum to communism, a mausoleum of Marxism-Leninism, a repository of proletarian internationalism. On the walls are diplomas, Lenin out hunting, and the flag of the Soviet border guards.There are also Kirov, Che Guevara, an Indian headdress given him by the Americans and a tasteful clock from the Chinese, bordered in a machine-gun ribbon. I count up twenty-three heads, busts and entire figures of Lenin, as well as a dozen Dzerzhinskys, picture frames containing photos of the designer in the company of famous people, little models of tanks, battleships and planes, souvenir medals, a vast collection of metal badges marking particular occasions pinned to a piece of black cloth, an ornamental dagger, an officer’s dirk and dozens of knick-knacks with an AK-47 motif: on a piece of rock, on a little stand, in a glass ball or in a green crystal.
THE DESIGNER’S PRIDE
‘Let’s talk about the war, Mikhail Timofeyevich’, I say, trying to steer the conversation onto a pleasant theme . . . Pleasant for an old soldier, that is.
‘The war? To hell with war! Come on then.’
‘You were called up in 1938. You were in a tank regiment. On which front? Were you in Poland in 1939?’
‘Where? In Poland . . . ?’ He’s gone deaf again.
‘Your army invaded Poland!!!’ I scream.
‘Just a moment . . . There’s a city in Poland called . . . What’s its name? Stryj!’
‘There was before the war. Now it’s in Ukraine.’
‘I served there.’
‘Did you fight against the Poles?’
‘I don’t know who was there. I was just a simple, young soldier. I was twenty years old, I do remember that the girls were pretty, but they wouldn’t let us out of the barracks.’
‘And did the slogan “For the fatherland, for Stalin” have real meaning for you? Did you believe in it, understand it?’
‘I was a child of the revolution. In those years I thought it was a grand, wonderful slogan. Look at the old documentary films, see how many people marched to that slogan. As they marched they wiped away their tears, and not just soldier boys like us, but the great men of this world.’
Kalashnikov doesn’t want to show me his medals, because they aren’t pinned to a suit. Finally he gives in. He fetches a bundle out of his study. He removes a rubber band and unwraps the cloth.
‘Three Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, two Orders of Socialist Labour, the Order of Friendship of Peoples, this is the Red Star First Class . . .’ His voice is faltering, but he gets a grip on himself. ‘Don’t think they just handed them out for nothing. For this you had to work hard and make a major effort.’
He forbids me to photograph the medals. He is indignant, saying this is not for show, this is not something you trade.
‘But you do sell yourself a bit’, I press him mercilessly. ‘You went to the weapons fair in Abu Dhabi with all your medals, like promotional key chains.You personally handed out Kalashnikov machine guns to Arab sheiks.’
It’s probably emotion that prevents him from speaking. He solemnly wraps the decorations in the cloth and takes them back to his museum-room.
THE DESIGNER’S LIFE STORY
Mikhail Timofeyevich was born in Altai Krai into a large peasant family. He completed ten years at school. He was nineteen when in 1938 he was taken into the army.
‘My entire earlier design experience’, he says, ‘was designing a control mechanism for a tank jack, which won me a competition for regimental rationalizers.’
He was in charge of a T-34 tank when the Land of the Soviets attacked Germany. He saw how much the infantry suffered, armed only with out-of-date, five-shooter rifles. Badly wounded, he ended up in a field hospital, where there was just one topic of conversation: if only they had a gun like the Nazis had. So Mikhail Timofeyevich bought a book about weapons construction and a square-ruled exercise book. On leaving hospital he didn’t go home to convalesce, but to the railway depot where he had worked before the war. There his colleagues made the first automatic pistol according to his drawings.
With this prototype and a recommendation from the deputy head of the Turkestan – Siberian Railway in charge of the Komsomol he went to Alma-Ata, to see the Kazakhstan Communist Party Central Committee. He was given a warm reception and sent to the Inventions Department at the People’s Commissariat for Defence in Moscow.
He was given a work permit, a room in a hotel, provisions and a salary. However, Kalashnikov’s automatic pistol was rejected, and the famous pepesha (PPSh-41) went into the Red Army weaponry instead.
His next design was an automatic rifle adapted to fire a medium-sized cartridge. The gun was entered for a competition, where the soon
-to-be-world-famous AK-47 beat the designs of the great Soviet arms makers Degtaryov, Shpagin and Simonov.
Kalashnikov was twenty-eight at the time.
GOODNIGHT, DESIGNER
‘So maybe to finish it’d be worth talking about Stalin, Mikhail Timofeyevich. Did you know about his crimes?’
‘I didn’t know a thing.’
‘Everyone says nowadays that they had never heard of the camps.’
‘I’ll tell you what – it’s hard to get your head around it. All that happened somewhere way off, high up, and we were far away from it.’
‘In an interview for Ogonyok you said it is hard for you to just wave goodbye to seventy years of the history of the Soviet Union.’
‘Of course . . .’
‘You asked if anyone could prove to you that people made a mistake. I can prove it. The communists are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of USSR citizens. One-and-a-half million of my compatriots lost their lives in your fatherland.’
‘I was far away from those things.’
I’m not entirely brutal – I didn’t tell him that in Germany too, everyone said afterwards that they had no idea what the Nazis were doing at the concentration camps. A week later I was in Crimea, and I saw some communists marching with their red flags through Simferopol for a demonstration. Don’t start thinking the communists have died out in Russia or flown off to Mars. Far from it – they’re still there.
‘Did you know, Mikhail Timofeyevich, that your automatic is known as the terrorists’ gun?’
But Mikhail Timofeyevich is no longer listening. He’s standing in the middle of the room, making it plain that our conversation is over. He switches on the television, which shows some Abkhazian peasants, with their hands folded on their heads. Behind them are some Georgian peasants, holding Kalashnikovs.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
An AK rifle of 7.62mm calibre can shoot through:• seven-millimetre armour plating from a distance of up to 300 metres;
• any NATO helmet from a distance of up to 900 metres;
• any bullet-proof vest from a distance of up to 600 metres;
• a twenty-five-centimetre wooden beam from a distance of up to 500 metres; and
• a fifteen-centimetre brick wall from a distance of up to 100 metres.
One can build a dam across the Bering Strait and the Straits of Gibraltar, direct the Kuroshio current into the cold Sea of Okhotsk and create a vast, freshwater sea in the Sahara. One can direct the great Siberian rivers to the south, sending their water to irrigate the deserts of Central Asia. What is the need for putting these great projects into action? Above all peace, friendship and mutual understanding between all nations, whose common home is the planet Earth.
Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.
Children at the orphanage in Ayaguz
The study aids store
To tell how strange the new place was,
I say we reached a barren plain
that lets no plant set root into its soil.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy,
Inferno, Canto XIV, vv. 7 – 9
(trans. Robert and Jean Hollander)
Arzamas-16, 400 kilometres east of Moscow. Before leaving this city, even five-year-olds were instructed by the NKVD (forerunner to the KGB) that they could not let anyone know how long their plane journey lasted, because otherwise their parents would suffer a terrible misfortune. Until 1950 this place was not on any Soviet map.
It was not an ordinary city, but a ‘military closed town’. It was impossible to enter or leave the place without permission.
From 1947, Soviet nuclear bombs were designed and manufactured here. The city was built for the needs of the Atomic Energy Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, in other words the institute responsible for making Soviet nuclear weapons. Like all the major construction projects of those days, this one too was dumped on the shoulders of prisoners. It was explained to the local population that within this vast area surrounded by barbed wire, and in the city built by the ‘zeks’ (prisoners), trial communism was going to be established. In terror, all the locals gave the place a wide berth. In 1949 a major armed rebellion erupted at the prison camps in this promised paradise (later described by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago). The prisoners murdered almost all the guards, got hold of weapons, occupied the zone and escaped into the steppes. Three NKVD divisions were alerted and surrounded the fugitives with a ring of steel, and using artillery, tanks and planes, wiped out thousands of people.
After this lesson the composition of prisoner labour forces was changed. The prisoners on long, serious sentences, who had nothing to lose, were replaced with dekretovtsy, people sentenced to short terms by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. They were serving a few years for hooliganism, voluntarily abandoning the work place, stopping a train, or for ‘spikes’, meaning picking up ears of corn left behind after the harvest in collective-farm fields.
But what was to be done with the prisoners once they had completed their sentences? They might betray the location of the newly built city to the enemy. So after serving their entire stretch, all former prisoners were sent for life to remote Magadan, where they couldn’t betray anything to anyone.
The plutonium-239 for the Soviet bombs was produced in a similar town near Chelyabinsk. The place is called Chelyabinsk-40.
And so the bombs were made at Arzamas-16, the charges at Chelyabinsk-40, and the whole thing was tested even further off, in Polygon (testing ground) 52-605 near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. To serve the needs of the nuclear industry a city was built here, called Semipalatinsk-22.
In 1953 the entire nuclear complex was incorporated into the Ministry for the Construction of Medium-Sized Machinery.
THE VESTIBULE OF HELL – THE CANCER HOSPITAL
Altysh is eighteen . . . I mean was, because she died before I left Semipalatinsk. She was a Kazakh. She spoke Russian very badly. She was lying in the District Oncology Clinic.
‘I’m a shepherd’, she told me,‘like my parents and brothers. I live in the village of Kaynar. One day I fell off my horse and hit my stomach. It didn’t hurt, but a couple of weeks later my stomach started to swell like a pumpkin. I was terrified, but I didn’t tell anyone. I was dreadfully ashamed. I put on loose clothing so it wouldn’t show, but eventually I was so fat I couldn’t get on my horse, and then it all started . . .’
The family suspected her of being pregnant, and tried forcing her to name the father. Her brothers lashed her with ropes used for tying up horses.
‘When they brought her to us, she still had marks from the beating’, says Dr Alexander Ivanovich Erayzer.
‘What on earth could I tell them?’The girl burst into tears. ‘When I didn’t know myself what was wrong. Finally my father said they’d give me away to the worst old man in the village, and they did. He’s an old Kazakh, a widower, who could be my grandfather. He’s sixty, and he beat me so badly and did such vile things to me . . . It was hell.’ Altysh covers her head with a pillow.
‘He said he’d taken in the worst whore in the village, so he could do what he liked to her.’
After a year the girl’s husband realized that something was wrong, and took her to hospital in the city.
‘I immediately operated’, says Dr Erayzer. ‘She had a huge fibroid in her uterus. It had already become cancerous. Round here cancer is lightning quick. There’s metastasis to everything.You know what? To this day she is still a virgin.’
‘What about the husband?’
‘Some sort of pervert.We don’t let him into the hospital, and she’ll never leave here now.’
The oncology clinic in Semipalatinsk opened in 1948, a year before the Polygon. Lots of young doctors came here from Russia on compulsory employment. They got down to the job so energetically that in the first year they came second in the district in a socialist labour competition. They found forty-five malignant tumours, mainly of the oesophagus, stoma
ch and uterus. I read all this in the clinic’s records book.
After that, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the cancer statistics were classified. For ten years the book was not kept up, and then it became top secret. In 1958 the clinic had 574 cases of cancer, and in 1963 it had 861. At present the cancers usually attack the lungs, stomach, breast, thyroid, skin and female reproductive organs.
‘In 1999 we examined all the women in the Abay region, which is on the border of the Polygon’, says Dr Erayzer. ‘Out of 4054 women, eighty-two had already had mastectomies, and 156 had had their ovaries removed. In twelve more we found cancer, and in 1182 precancerous cells, and we only examined the breasts, ovaries and fallopian tubes. One in nine of the women there has cervical erosion, on top of which there is terrible anaemia, gastric diseases, tooth loss, infertility and developmental anomalies I’d never dreamed of. I’d been a gynaecologist for twenty years before I came to Semipalatinsk, and I only knew from literature that this sort of thing was possible. Here from one village alone five women came to see me who each had two wombs. Several others had two cervices.’
‘Impossible.’
‘All of us at this hospital are constantly shocked by the fact that these tumours of ours don’t stick to any rules. They’re always surprising us. At college they taught us that Kazakh women almost never get breast cancer.That’s their nature. But here they have ten children each, they all breastfeed, until suddenly they start producing milk with blood in it. We know from the literature that children can have leukaemia, lymph or bone cancer, but definitely not thyroid, uterus or bowel cancer . . . Now we know nothing is impossible. Fifteen-year-old girls die of breast or ovarian cancer. Sometimes the cancer attacks two organs at once, and it’s not metastasis, but two entirely unrelated tumours with totally different structures, which we should combat using different treatments. For me as a doctor the worst thing is that very often I have no way of treating these people. Chemotherapy works badly on them, because they have awful blood morphology. The worst problem is the lack of white cells. You only have to live here for a bit and the number of leucocytes drops. We’ve all got it. I bet yours have done it by now too.’
White Fever Page 12
