AK-47

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The AK-47 is a Soviet assault rifle chambered for the 7.62×39mm cartridge. Its official name is Avtomat Kalashnikova, after its designer, Mikhail Kalashnikov. The World Bank estimates that about 100 million of the roughly 500 million firearms in the world belong to the Kalashnikov family. Design work on the original rifle began in 1945. More than seven decades later, it and its variants remain among the most widely used firearms anywhere. How did one Soviet rifle spread so far? What did its builders accept in order to make it cheap and dependable? And why does the same weapon stand for pride in one place and for death in another?

  9056362

• 2. A Hospital Bed Idea

  ›

  In 1941, Mikhail Kalashnikov was recovering from a shoulder wound received at the Battle of Bryansk, and that hospital stay started his career as a weapon designer. He later told the story himself. A soldier in the next bed asked, "Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men when the Germans have automatics?" Kalashnikov answered by designing one. He summed up his motive this way: "I was a soldier, and I created a machine gun for a soldier."

  The German weapon behind that question had already unsettled Soviet officers. On the 15th of July 1943, an early Sturmgewehr 44 was demonstrated before the People's Commissariat of Arms of the USSR. It fired a new intermediate cartridge, the 7.92×33mm Kurz, and could shoot in automatic mode. It joined a submachine gun's firepower to a rifle's range and accuracy. The Soviets set about building an intermediate-caliber automatic rifle of their own, meant to replace the PPSh-41 submachine guns and the outdated Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles that armed most of the army.

  The cartridge came first. Soviet engineers developed the 7.62×39mm M43, which first served in the semi-automatic SKS carbine and the RPD light machine gun.

  The finished AK-47 is best understood as a hybrid of earlier ideas. One account says Kalashnikov set out to combine the best features of the American M1 Garand and the German StG 44, and his team could examine both weapons. Kalashnikov offered this advice to young designers: "before attempting to create something new, it is vital to have a good appreciation of everything that already exists in this field."

  Not everyone accepted even that modest account, because some claimed he had copied designs such as Bulkin's TKB-415 or Simonov's AVS-31.

  129983

• 3. Failed Rifles and a Redesign

  ›

  Kalashnikov started on a submachine gun design in 1942 and a light machine gun in 1943. Early in 1944, he was handed some of the new 7.62×39mm M43 cartridges and told that other designers were building weapons for them. Someone suggested that a successful weapon might lead to greater things, so he turned to a rifle.

  His first entry, in a 1944 competition, was a semi-automatic, gas-operated carbine with a long-stroke piston, strongly influenced by the M1 Garand. It lost to a design by Simonov.

  A new competition opened in 1946. This time Kalashnikov submitted a gas-operated rifle with a short-stroke piston above the barrel and a curved 30-round magazine. He built two versions, the AK-1 with a milled receiver and the AK-2 with a stamped one. Both proved reliable and advanced to a second round. These prototypes, also called the AK-46, had a rotating bolt, a two-part receiver and separate safety and fire selector switches. They resembled the StG 44 in many respects.

  Late in 1946, while the rifles were under test, an assistant named Aleksandr Zaitsev proposed a major redesign to improve reliability. Kalashnikov hesitated, since his rifle was already doing better than its rivals. Zaitsev eventually persuaded him.

  In November 1947, the new prototypes were completed and became the AK-47. They used a long-stroke gas piston above the barrel. The upper and lower receivers became one, the selector and safety were merged, and the bolt handle was attached to the bolt carrier. These changes simplified both the design and its manufacture. The first army trial series began in early 1948, and the rifle handled a wide range of conditions well. In 1949, the Soviet Army adopted it as the "7.62 mm Kalashnikov rifle (AK)".

  39610489

• 4. Production Problems

  ›

  Welding the guide and ejector rails onto stamped sheet-metal receivers caused trouble in the first production run, and many parts were rejected. Rather than halt the line, the factories switched to a heavy machined receiver. Production of these milled rifles began in 1951. They were officially called the AK-49, though collectors and the commercial market know them as the "Type 2 AK-47".

  The machined receiver was the costlier route, yet it sped things up, because the tooling and labor from the Mosin-Nagant's machined receiver were easy to adapt. Even so, the Soviets could not issue large numbers of the new rifle to soldiers until 1956. The interim SKS stayed in production through those years.

  In 1959, the redesigned AKM arrived, with M standing for modernized. Once the stamping problems were solved, it used a stamped sheet-metal receiver. It also added a slanted muzzle brake to counter the muzzle's climb under recoil. A hammer retarder stopped the rifle from firing before the bolt was fully closed. As a side effect, it also slowed the rate of fire in automatic mode. The AKM weighed 3.1 kg, against 3.47 kg for the Type 3 AK-47.

  The AKM became the most common variant of the whole family, and most foreign factories, licensed or not, copied it because the stamped receiver was so much easier to make. In the West and parts of Asia, every Kalashnikov-pattern rifle is casually called an AK-47, though strictly that name fits only the original three receiver types. In most former Eastern Bloc countries, people simply say Kalashnikov or AK.

  The Soviets began replacing the AK-47 and AKM in 1974 with the AK-74, which fires 5.45×39mm ammunition. That rifle had barely begun production in Eastern European nations when the Soviet Union collapsed, which sharply slowed its manufacture.

  3968764

• 5. Built to Keep Firing

  ›

  The AK-47 was meant to be a simple, reliable, fully automatic rifle that could be turned out fast and cheaply, using the best mass-production methods the Soviet Union had in the late 1940s. Its long-stroke gas system is generally linked with dependability in bad conditions. A large piston, generous clearance between moving parts and a tapered cartridge case let the rifle swallow dirt and fouling without jamming.

  A shot starts a quick chain of motion. Gas from the burning propellant is bled off through a vent near the muzzle into a cylinder above the barrel. It drives the piston and bolt carrier backward, and a cam on the carrier rotates the bolt about 35 degrees to unlock it. The moving parts have about 5.5 mm of free travel first. That delay lets chamber pressure fall to a safe level before the bolt breaks the seal. There is no gas valve, so extra gas escapes through radial ports in the cylinder.

  The selector lever has three positions: safe at the top, full-auto in the middle and semi-auto at the bottom. The order is deliberate. A soldier under stress tends to slam the lever down hard, which carries it past full-auto and leaves the rifle firing single shots. Choosing full-auto takes a deliberate stop at the center. The price is awkwardness, because right-handed shooters must briefly take their hand off the pistol grip to reach the lever.

  The standard magazine holds 30 rounds and has a pronounced curve that feeds cartridges smoothly into the chamber. Its heavy steel body and feed-lips machined from a single steel billet make it hard to damage. One description says "Soldiers have been known to use their mags as hammers, and even bottle openers". That toughness costs weight. An early steel magazine weighed 430 g empty. A lighter aluminum version weighed 0.19 kg but proved too fragile and was pulled from service quickly. The steel-reinforced plastic replacement weighed 0.24 kg, and people often mistake it for Bakelite. It is actually a glass-reinforced phenol-formaldehyde composite.

  The rifle itself was not meant to last forever. Its service life is about 6,000 to 15,000 rounds, which suits a Soviet doctrine that treats weapons as disposable and cheaper to replace than repair.

  31248173

• 6. Aim and Accuracy

  ›

  The 7.62×39mm cartridge leaves the muzzle at 715 m/s. The whole round weighs 16.3 g, and the bullet weighs 7.9 g. The original M43 bullet has a steel core inside a copper-plated steel jacket, and it penetrates heavy foliage, walls and vehicle bodies well. It does not usually fragment, even after hitting bone. Most ammunition found today is the later M67, which dropped the steel insert. That moved the center of gravity backward, so the bullet tumbles at about 3.3 inches into tissue, much earlier than the M43 does.

  The rear tangent sight is marked in 100 m steps from 100 to 800 m. One setting carries the Russian letter П, short for постоянная, meaning constant. It corresponds to a 300 m zero. Soviet doctrine tells soldiers to aim at the center of mass, the belt buckle, for any target inside that range. Within that distance, the bullet stays between 5 cm below and 31 cm above the line of sight, so a misjudged distance still hits the torso.

  In the 1980s, the US military measured single-shot hit probability on a crouching-man silhouette under ideal proving-ground conditions. The AK-47 scored 100 percent at 50 and 100 m, 94 percent at 300 m and 31 percent at 800 m. The M16A2 managed 100 percent at 300 m and 43 percent at 800 m. Under the worst field exercise circumstances, every rifle tested fell from 34 percent at 50 m to just 3 to 4 percent at 600 m, with no significant difference between them.

  Tight groups are not the AK's strength. One test found a 10-shot group of 5.9 inches at 100 m and 17.5 inches at 300 m. The tougher stamped AKM is less accurate than the milled rifles before it. Milled AK-47s shoot 3 to 5 inch groups at 100 yards, while the stamped AKM shoots 4 to 6 inch groups.

  82100238494

• 7. A Rifle for Everyone

  ›

  In Somalia, Rwanda, Mozambique, Congo and Tanzania, black market prices for an AK run between $30 and $125, and mass counterfeiting has pushed them down over the decades. In Kenya, one AK-47 fetches five head of cattle in barter, roughly 10,000 Kenya shillings or 100 US dollars. A cash buyer pays almost half that. In some places, the price drops as low as $6, or a chicken or a sack of grain.

  Small workshops have turned the rifle into a cottage industry. Gunsmiths in the highland areas of Pakistan near the Afghan border hand-build copies one at a time, known as the Khyber Pass Copy. The Kalashnikov Concern, formerly Izhmash, says most foreign-made AK-type rifles are unlicensed. The Small Arms Survey suggests that between 70 and 100 million of these weapons have been produced since 1947. Because so many were made in so many countries, often illicitly, nobody can know how many exist.

  During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and China handed out arms and technical knowledge around the world. Western forces carried costlier rifles such as the FN FAL, the HK G3, the M14 and the M16. The AK's low cost let the Soviets and Chinese make it in vast numbers. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union became the main arms dealer to countries under Western embargo, including Libya and Syria. After the Soviet collapse, AK-47s were sold openly and on the black market to anyone with cash.

  The list of conflicts where the rifle has appeared starts with the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. It runs through the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War and the Iran-Iraq War, and reaches the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Gaza war.

  The roster of former users includes the Viet Cong, the Khmer Rouge and the Afghan mujahideen, who received Egyptian and Chinese variants supplied by the CIA. It also names the Provisional Irish Republican Army, whose rifles came from Libya.

  9062339555

• 8. Symbol and Souvenir

  ›

  The flag of Mozambique carries an AK-47 on its emblem, an acknowledgment that the country won independence largely through its effective use. The rifle also appears on the coats of arms of East Timor, Zimbabwe and revolution-era Burkina Faso. It is on the flags of groups including Hezbollah, FARC-EP and the New People's Army.

  The United States and Western Europe tend to link the rifle with their enemies. Western movies, television, novels and video games often give it to criminals, gang members, insurgents and terrorists. Across the developing world, it is often credited to revolutionaries resisting foreign occupation, imperialism and colonialism. In Ireland, it recalls The Troubles, and in 2013 a decommissioned AK-47 was included in A History of Ireland in 100 Objects. The 2005 Nicolas Cage film Lord of War returns to the weapon again and again in its monologues. Mexicans call it "Cuerno de Chivo," or goat's horn, after its curved magazine, and it sometimes turns up in Mexican folk song lyrics.

  In 2006, the Colombian musician and peace activist César López turned an AK into a guitar, called the escopetarra. One sold for US$17,000 at a fundraiser for victims of anti-personnel mines. Another was exhibited at the United Nations' Conference on Disarmament.

  In Russia, the Kalashnikov name is a tremendous source of national pride. Kalashnikov Vodka comes in souvenir bottles shaped like the rifle, and there are Kalashnikov watches, umbrellas and knives. The inventor's family authorized the German engineering company MMI to use the name on a range of far less deadly goods. The Kalashnikov Museum opened on the 4th of November 2004 in Izhevsk, in the Udmurt Republic, and draws about 10,000 visitors a month. Its director, Nadezhda Vechtomova, said it aims to "separate the weapon as a weapon of murder from the people who are producing it and to tell its history in our country".

  On the 19th of September 2017, a 9 m monument to Kalashnikov was unveiled in central Moscow. A protester tried to unfurl a banner reading "a creator of weapons is a creator of death" and was later detained by police.

  666883981