Lewis Jones reviews AK47: the Story of the People's Gun by Michael Hodges
At the beginning of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), in which Sylvester Stallone takes on the entire North Vietnamese army with an AK47, an American colleague regards the weapon with scepticism: "A beat-to-**** AK? Every 12-year-old in 'Nam's got one of those." Rambo looks pleased, slowly nods his meaty head, and laboriously masticates his reply: "Exactly."
Unlike practically everything else in the film, Rambo's choice of gun is historically accurate. American soldiers in Vietnam were equipped with the M16 rifle, invented by Eugene Stoner, which tended to malfunction if it was even sneezed on. When they came across the Chinese AKs of the fallen Viet Cong, they discovered that they still worked, even if they had been lying in the rain for weeks, so at every opportunity they abandoned their modern capitalist gun for a 25-year-old socialist one.
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Michael Hodges's breezy history describes how a Soviet antique became the world's favourite gun. The A stands for "automatic", the K for "Kalashnikov", and the 47 for the year of its invention. Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in 1919, the second son of a family of Siberian kulaks who were persecuted under Stalin's first Five Year Plan. During the German invasion of Russia in 1941, he was a tank sergeant, wounded in a battle with Panzers. The next winter he began work on a prototype, and five years later won a national competition for a new automatic rifle.
Promoted to the rank of general, and proclaimed a Hero of Socialist Labour, Kalashnikov was honoured by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yeltsin and Putin, collecting the Order of the Red Star, the Stalin Prize First Class, and three Orders of Lenin. He is still alive, subsisting on a modest pension in Izhevsk, and though proud of his invention he describes it as a golem, an imp with a life of its own.
All Soviet schoolchildren were taught to strip an AK in under a minute - it has only eight moving parts - and the gun was deployed throughout the Evil Empire, most notably in Afghanistan and Chechnya. In both places it proved a double-edged sword, appropriated by the locals and turned on their aggressors, as it has been elsewhere.
In Vietnam it became an emblem of resistance, winning victory for peasants in pyjamas and sandals against the world's greatest military machine; according to Viet Cong propaganda, a soldier named Phan actually shot down a B52 with one. In 1972, it became an emblem of terrorism, when it was used by the Palestinian Black September gang to attack Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. And in Ramallah today it is emblematic of both, so ubiquitous that one observer said she wouldn't be surprised to see a dog armed with one.
In 1982, the Israelis gave the Kalashnikovs they had captured from Palestinians to the CIA, which shipped them via Pakistan to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Russians. Osama bin Laden's first AK was a Palestinian gun supplied by the Israelis and given to him by the Americans.
Africa was sent millions of AKs by Russia, China and North Korea. In Mozambique and Angola, sons were named Kalash in its honour, and when Mozambique achieved independence, its flag featured a book, a ploughshare and a Kalashnikov.
After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military neglected to guard the arms dumps and the entire stock of the Iraqi Army's AKs was stolen, available soon afterwards on the street at less than $100 each, and universally prized as "a flamboyant symbol of masculinity".
In 2004, a Russian rock star launched an MP3 player modelled on an AK magazine, which when attached to an AK47 plays music into headphones. "This is our bit for world peace," he explained. The same year Vladimir Putin sent George W Bush a bottle of Russian vodka in the shape of a Kalashnikov, which might have seemed a peculiar present for a teetotaller who has never fought on a battlefield, but was no doubt meant as a timely reminder that, for all its popularity in America - with gun clubs (as a "sporting" weapon, its firing rate of 650 rounds per minute making it just the thing for quail or elk), disaffected students and the enterprising gangs of Detroit and New Orleans - the AK was invented in Russia rather than Hollywood.
Hodges pursues his subject with commendable energy and bravery - on patrol with Alpha Company in Baghdad he comes under AK fire - but his prose tends to over-excitement and cliché, and one sometimes wonders about the reliability of his reporting. He writes, for example, about drinking coffee in an Arab café with a view of Edgware Road Tube station. I don't know about Baghdad, but I live across the road from that station, and there's no such place.
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