... According to the official line, Kalashnikov, the humble tank sergeant, dreamed up the perfect fighting tool after being wounded by German forces. Sitting in a hospital bed, he sketched the basic design, without any formal engineering training, which he later presented to the industrial arms complex, where it ultimately won a competition. Kalashnikov was hailed as a proletariat hero, an unlettered farm boy who saved the country. He was swiftly promoted to general and presented with a dacha, at a time when most citizens were scrambling to find the basic necessities.
In fact, as Chivers painstakingly reconstructs from interviews and archival sources, Soviet propagandists manipulated the story. They neglected to mention the inconvenient fact that their champion actually had lived in Siberian exile as a boy, after his family was blacklisted during Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Kalashnikov himself nervously guarded this secret, lest he lose his coveted privileges. More to the point, he did not spontaneously come up with his famous prototype. As Chivers shows, he was a simply a cog in the team effort to mass-produce a defensive rifle, and one whose early work was deemed of little promise.
Whatever its provenance, the gun performed better than anything before it. The genius of the design was a loose fit and big parts, which made it less likely to get stuck when dirty. The bore and chamber were chromed to reduce corrosion. During testing, models were dunked in water and buried in sand. The AK held up. It quickly became standard issue for the Red Army and was exported or licensed for knockoffs in the Warsaw Pact countries. Plants producing the AK were subsidized in Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Romania. ...
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