Can a gun be great? If you don't think so, you probably shouldn't be reading this piece, but the AK-47 was great. It was invented by a peasant sergeant, and it was manufactured in a tractor factory. What could be more Red?
Though they won't acknowledge it -- just as they won't acknowledge that the Wright Brothers invented the airplane -- the Russians must know deep in their hearts that the AK family of weapons was influenced heavily by a German creation from late in World War II called the Sturmgewehr-44. Yes, folks: Sturmgewehr decrypts perfectly into . . . assault rifle.
The Stg-44 represents what might be called the "base of fire" approach to military doctrine, something the Russians, who were machine-gun nuts, agreed with enthusiastically. The Russians, in fact, armed whole battalions with the PPSh-41 submachine gun in World War II -- that's the real clunky-looking one with a ventilated barrel, no handgrips and a giant drum to hold 71 9mm rounds. They just sprayed out blizzards of lead and marched in behind them. But late in the war, one story has it, the Russians ran into an SS unit armed with the new Stg-44s, and the result was a slaughter. The submachine guns fired that 9mm pistol round and their effective range was about 50 yards. The assault rifle fired a shortened rifle round just as fast, but its range was about 200 yards. Simple reality: 200 is farther than 50 by 150. So as they advanced, the Russians were in a 150-yard kill zone and couldn't even bring fire to bear on the hidden Germans who mowed them down from so far out. Ultimately, the Russians simply called in air support and dumped white phosphorus on the Germans.
But they learned: In the small physics-driven universe of terminal ballistics, the faster round beats the slower round, and the rifle round always beats the pistol round. If you can fire it fast and accurately, you will win.
Thus, the AK-47, officially adapted by the Soviet Army in 1949 -- when our men were still carrying the M1, which had been designed in the early '30s. Later, in Vietnam, the AK-47 so outperformed the Army's M14 (a sort of super M1), we hastily adapted, as a countermeasure, the M16. The AK-47 is what might be called a rough masterpiece, with its weird choreography of slants and curves, the bluntness of its receiver. It looks like a tommy gun designed by Mr. Moto, after reading Dostoyevsky and a favorable history of Peter the Great. The curved magazine is necessary for technical reasons, but it provides an aesthetic: It gives the rifle an Orientalized sensibility. Then there's the peasant thickness of the gas tube over the barrel like a Siberian pipeline, and that wicked high front sight that just keeps on going. It has no elegance whatsoever, and no wit. Its cleverness lies in its contempt for cleverness. It's a tractor of a rifle, a serious piece of work.
The genius behind this was one Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov, a senior tank sergeant who, wounded in the battle of Bryansk in 1941, conceived of the weapon's design while in sick bay. Later he fabricated early prototypes "with the help of the leadership and comrades," according to the official Kalashnikov Web site. (Yes -- it's at kalashnikov.guns.ru/!) For his efforts he was ultimately awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour (twice), the Stalin Prize and the Lenin Prize Laureate, as well as a chestful of other cheesy Red doohickeys.