KaIashnikov’s Deadly Global Brand-

AK-47: The Story of the People’s Gun.

The AK -47 is to assault rifles what Coca-Cola is to soft drinks. Like Coke it
has achieved extraordinary market penetration from Afghanistan to
Angola, no war is complete without it. As Coke is more than just a soft
drink but a symbol of the US, the AK47 is just a gun but the worldwide
symbol of Third World rebellion. Like Coke, it has hardly changed since its
creation 60 years ago.
 General Mikhail Kalashnikov, now 87 and living in retirement in Russia,
was lucky to live long enough to invent the weapon that bear his name.
His family were Kulaks, sent into exile during Stalin’s campaign to
liquidate them as a class. Young Kalashnikov escaped and with forged
papers secured an apprenticeship as an engineer at a railway yard in
Kazakhstan. There he joined the Communist Party. Badly wounded
fighting in the defence of Moscow in 1941, he was given six months leave
and was sent back to his railway yard to recover from shell-shock.

The fighting he had seen had impressed upon Kalashnikov the urgent
need for a Soviet machine gun, and in the railway yard he was given a
bench where he and a colleague set to work making one. After six
months “machine gun No1” was finished. Kalashnikov presented it and
himself to the Kazakhstan regional military headquarters. No one knew
who he was or believed his story. For three days he was in danger of
execution, but again he was lucky; somehow word got to the central
committee of the Kazakhstan Party, which had him released. He was sent
to work on arms development and in 1947 won the competition to design
a new assault rifle for the Red Army.

Though it was not the most powerful, nor the most accurate, the Avtomat
Kalashnikova (19)47 had two great advantages over its rivals, advantages
that would later make it the most popular gun in the world.

First, it was simple: an AK47 had only eight parts. Anyone – alas even a
child – can be taught to assemble, disassemble and fire one in minutes.
This simplicity also makes it easy and cheap to manufacture: they can be
had for as little as A$113 and according to the UN more than 70 million of
them are causing trouble somewhere in the world.

That there should be so many in circulation is a function of the second

advantage the AK47 has over its rivals: it is incredibly reliable and robust.
Drop one in the mud, sand or water and it will still fire. As the Americans
quickly discovered in Vietnam, the same could not be said of the M-16.
Indeed so prone were their guns to jamming that many American troops
swapped them for AK47’s they had taken off the enemy.

Michael Hodges book is the story of how the AK47 grew from a gun into a
brand, the symbol of rebellion and resistance the world over. He
illustrates his argument by telling the stories of several individuals whose
lives were changed by it: a North Vietnamese soldier, an African child
soldier and two dopey cousins from Yorkshire who travelled to Pakistan to
train with al-Qa’ida.

1968 was the year the AK47 came of age as a global brand. In January
during the Tet offensive the world watched as the Americans fought off
the Vietcong in the grounds of their Saigon embassy. Three months later,
Palestinians armed only with Kalashnikovs and dynamite, claimed to have
routed the Israeli army at Karemeh in Jordan. In fact, like the Vietcong,
they had been defeated, but TIME magazine put a Palestinian fighter on
its cover brandishing an AK47. The image of the third world freedom
fighter, clutching his Kalashnikov, was born. The relationship between
Palestinians and the AK47 remains close: indeed a French photographer
who became obsessed with it tells Hodges:”with these people the AK is
the man”.

At present the most famous AK47 owner is probably Osama bin Laden,
who always has one to hand in his videos. According to Hodges, bin
laden’s first AK47 probably came from the Pakistani security services,
who’d got it from the CIA. The CIA got theirs from the Israeli’s who had
captured thousands of them when they ran the PLO out of Lebanon in
1982. Some of these were very old – Chinese copies from the 1950’s and
even some original Soviet AK47’s from the 40’s – but are probably still in
use against our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq or causing headaches for
the Pakistani government.

Hodges book shows that anarchy has been the experience of every
society where the AK47 has become commonplace, from the sub Saharan
Africa to Iraq. In this the industrialised countries are no exception: he
concludes by showing how this demon is now loose in the slums of the US.

Kalashnikov told Hodges that he thought his invention had become a

golem (the figure from Jewish mythology that grows too powerful for its
creator and wreaks destruction). He wished that instead he had invented
a lawn mower.