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Authors: Larry Kahaner

AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War (31 page)

BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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Living on a meager pension, he made pocket money by appearing at arms shows, trotted out as a celebrity to help Russia move more military hardware. While this helped his financial situation, what he really wanted was some kind of royalty deal like Eugene Stoner, who had made millions from his M-16. Kalashnikov wanted financial recognition for his invention.
 
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian officials desperately tried to raise hard currency by exploiting Kalashnikov and the AK. Besides sending him to arms shows as a spokesman, they continued to strong-arm AK-producing countries into paying royalties. Officials claimed that if it were not for the prolific and illegal manufacture of the weapon, they would be back in the manufacturing business and able to compete and thrive in the current market. They said that the large number of cheap AK knock-offs undermined their products by selling for one-fourth the price of their own. The Russians had already stopped production of military AKs, and were selling off their large stockpiles. Had it not been for the illegal gun makers, they contended, the stockpiles would be drawn down and they could engage in new production.
 
Licensing rights to the gun itself now was impossible. Kalashnikov had never patented the rifle’s design—the thought had never occurred to him or anyone else under the Soviet regime—and now it was too late. Izhmash had won Russian patent rights to the AK after persuading the highest Russian patent court that they were the rightful inventors of the rifle. While this was a victory within Russia, enforcing such a patent outside the country was a non-starter. Kalashnikovs were being manufactured in almost twenty countries, and only a handful—China, Slovenia, and Turkey—were paying royalties, totaling less than $1 million. These were token payments designed to keep political relationships between the two countries friendly. Kalashnikov saw nothing from them.
 
Legally, unraveling the license agreements was an impossible task. For one thing, it was not clear if the then Soviet Union had actually signed license agreement documents with Soviet bloc countries or informally given them technical knowledge in exchange for their political friendship. Legal experts suggest that if such contracts existed they might have expired, or, on the other hand, might have been signed in perpetuity allowing continued and free manufacture. The Russian government has not made public any documents backing these claims. (Some international law scholars also argue that today’s Russia is a different legal entity from the former Soviet Union and previous agreements may not carry over.)
 
More important, each country put its own spin on the AK, altering it to suit its particular interests and needs. It might be argued that these changes made the new versions no longer close enough to the original design to be relevant. Additionally, intellectual property scholars and attorneys contend that some products have become so ubiquitous that any claims of ownership are impossible to prove. With so many AKs and variants in circulation, a case for public domain probably might be argued successfully in court.
 
Out of financial desperation, Kalashnikov got his feet wet in the world of branding in 1998 by lending his name to vodka. “Vodka Kalashnikov,” produced by the Glazovsky liquor and vodka distillery in the city of Glazov, was packaged in many different bottles, including one shaped like a hand grenade. Another in the shape of an AK displayed individually numbered dog tags on a chain around the bottle’s neck. Intended for export, the vodka was based on recipes approved by Kalashnikov and claimed to be the first vodka ever to be created by combining salt, sugar, vanillin, and glycerin as flavor enhancers. Unfortunately, sales were poor.
 
The vodka won several medals and honors, mostly within Russia, but it still lacked international marketing and promotion savvy. In hindsight, the company that employed the AK-shaped bottle, VRQ International, may have played the military angle a bit too heavily for Western tastes. Advertisements boasted, “It looks like the legendary AK-47 rifle, but it holds several rounds of the finest original Russian vodka.”
 
Consumers in the West enjoyed the antiestablishment nature of the AK, as long as it didn’t remind them of the dirty side of war. There was a fine line between reality and fantasy, and the Russian distillery was unable to successfully exploit it.
 
As the years rolled on, however, the phenomenon of the AK as a popular icon continued to grow. Kalashnikov and his invention became the subject of several documentaries, including
Automatic Kalashnikov
from widely known German filmmakers Axel Engstfeld and Herbert Habersack, in which they sympathetically portrayed the eighty-year-old designer living in relative obscurity and resigned penury while his weapon was changing the world. The film, released in Germany in 2000 and shown worldwide on the Sundance Channel, offered the parallel, somewhat disjointed story lines of the aging Kalashnikov, living quietly in his modest apartment on his fifty-dollar-a-month pension, juxtaposed with mujahideen thanking him for his invention that drove out the Russians, to Los Angeles police officers talking about how they were outgunned by street gangs with AKs.
 
The film portrayed a sad, conflicted man. “Like it or not,” he said, “you have to live with it, like a grenade splinter inside your body. I’ve got one in my body, long surrounded by scar tissue. You forget about it as you go about your daily routine, but then what do you do when a small twist or turn causes sudden acute pain?”
 
Years earlier, Kalashnikov had felt that pain as he stopped for a traffic light in his town. He saw an empty AK cartridge roll down the pavement. “It might have been hurled by a wheel of a car or blown by the wind,” he thought. He found another cartridge and realized that there had been a shootout the previous night in the middle of town. “No one gathers the blank cartridges. No one cares anymore.” He was so lost in thought that a police officer asked if he was all right, having missed the green light. “Armaments which should be kept in arsenals under the close watch of sentries are now freely bought and sold . . . yet it is not arms makers and not politicians that continue to be enemies of the people,” Kalashnikov mused.
 
Although the film gave Kalashnikov’s son Viktor only a cameo, he was an accomplished arms designer in his own right. Named after Kalashnikov’s brother Viktor, his son designed the PP-19 Bizon, a 9mm submachine gun used by military special forces and tactical police units in close-quarter environments. The weapon used many of the AK’s well-proven aspects, including its trigger mechanism and receiver cover. Its most unusual element was the magazine, which was helical and placed underneath the forestock instead of perpendicular as on other assault rifles and submachine guns. This feature gave the weapon a low profile, allowing it to be more easily concealed under clothing or held close to one’s side without being observed.
 
As a child, Viktor wanted to design aircraft, but the Kazan Aviation School where he applied did not accept him. Instead, he enrolled at the Izhevsk Institute of Mechanics, where he majored in small arms and received his PhD in 1980. Earlier, in 1967, his design bureau had moved to Izhmash, where his Alexandrov group competed against his father’s group for the 5.45 × 39mm rifle—a competition that his father’s group won.
 
Viktor was more outspoken and bitter than his father about not being paid royalties for the AK. “My father and I could have been millionaires, just like the U.S. inventor of the M-16 assault rifle, Eugene Stoner, who received a dollar for each gun sold.”
 
About the same time that the documentary hit the screens, a cutting-edge T-shirt company called OK47 began its growth into a three-continent, hundred-boutique source of fashion alternatives. The company admitted to playing on the surreal contradiction of its name and the AK, as OK47 considered itself a counterpoint to cookie-cutter clothing producers. Not only were its designs unique, but the Toronto-based company bucked the trend of offshore manufacturing and exploitation of workers in less developed countries by making all its clothing in North America. Like the AK, OK47 was rebellious in its fashion and business practices.
 
The gun was popping up in movies like
Jackie Brown
, directed by Quentin Tarantino, in which Samuel L. Jackson announced, “AK-47. The very best there is. When you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room.” In the HBO TV hit
The Sopranos
, Tony Soprano armed himself with an AK after a bear was discovered roaming his New Jersey backyard. Just like Shakespeare had an actor walk onstage and kick a dog to indicate to the audience that he was the antagonist, Hollywood has used the AK to show the antihero, the terrorist, the bad guy.
 
Artists were discovering the powerful symbolism of the AK. Because it was the definitive icon of protracted, dirty warfare, they incorporated the weapon into their work both as an ironic accent and as a symbol of protest against conflict. In Cambodia, a group of artists funded in part by the actresses Angelina Jolie and Emma Thompson worked almost exclusively in the medium of decommissioned AKs. Students at Phnom Penh’s Royal University of Fine Arts participating in the Peace Art Project took thousands of AKs collected by the government and turned them into sculptures. After decades of war, including the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge depicted in the book and movie
The Killing Fields
, the country still remained smothered in weapons, mainly AKs, but the artists hoped to send a peaceful message with these rifles. Changing Kalashnikovs into artwork seemed as natural as Western artists turning their everyday cultural items like cars and soup cans into avant-garde art.
 
“Taking the weapons and turning them into art seems to be the perfect symbolism of a step away from a post-conflict society towards a society with a culture of peace,” said David de Beer, head of a European Union arms decommissioning program in Phnom Penh. Because of Cambodia’s tradition of sculpture, the weapons turned art seemed a natural. Animals such as elephants, horses, birds, chickens, and snakes were popular subjects. More than a hundred thousand AKs were turned over to authorities. Ones that were not turned into art were burned, many of them in public “Flames of Peace” bonfires that attracted hundreds of onlookers.
 
The project was loosely fashioned after a similar program in Mozambique called Swords to Ploughshares that offered implements such as plows, bicycles, and sewing machines in exchange for small arms after that country’s civil war ended. Art played a role there, too, as several artists, including Feil dos Santos, turned AKs and land mines into sculptures. Christian Concern, a nongovernmental organization, collected the guns for dos Santos, which he welded together into a display titled
From Weapons to Art
that has traveled throughout Africa. The sculptures depicted the artist’s stress and sadness at living in a war zone. One sculpture in particular,
Dual Surrender
, showed a man with outstretched arms, begging for charity, resigned to his decrepit situation. AK trigger handles formed his ears; cartridge shells made his hair. Another work by dos Santos,
Melody
, depicted a man whose limbs were formed from AK parts. The man was playing a harmonica because many in Mozambique found comfort in music, filling the quiet void left by the long war.
 
For citizens of countries in which the AK killed millions, seeing the weapons turned into harmless, sometimes stunning and beautiful art pieces has gone a long way toward healing the wounds of war.
 
Even high-end commercial artists and designers joined the AK design movement, mainly for shock value and to titillate Western consumers. At the Milan Furniture Fair in 2005, world-renowned designer Philippe Starck revealed high-end table lamps fashioned from replicas of AKs, M-16s, and Beretta pistols. Black shades lined with crosses sat atop the lamps. Said Starck, “I am a designer, and design is my weapon. I want my furniture to show that everything, even furniture, can be a political choice.”
 
The founders of the online photography magazine
AK47
used the name to grab attention in the overcrowded Internet space. “The AK47—and those four symbols A-K-4-7 are iconic. So from an Internet magazine’s point of view, where you want to stand out on a search page—AK47 just grabs the eye,” said editor Joerg Diekmann. “Coming from South Africa, the AK47 has always played a terrifying role in our history. Bank robbers, burglars, carjackers, an angry disenfranchised people—it’s the AK47 that puts real fear into people. They cost about $30 in the streets. Using the name AK47 for a photography magazine is hopefully an affirmation that those dark days are nearing an end. It’s a signal of change. An icon from a different era. Yet it is still edgy and raw, and churns up emotions. I like photography that induces an emotional response—it can remain murky—but there has to be an emotion.”
 
 
 
KALASHNIKOV ATTEMPTED TO CASH in on the growing momentum. In 2003, he signed an agreement with Marken Marketing International (MMI) a Solingen, Germany, company that offered to market consumer items under the inventor’s name. For lending his moniker, Kalashnikov would receive a one-third stake in the venture. The company planned an ambitious line of goods including pocketknives, flashlights, snowboards, umbrellas, and tennis rackets. The goal was to transfer the Kalashnikov reputation for solidness, simplicity, and rugged design to these products in much the same way that Harley-Davidson sold branded clothing and the Dannon yogurt company had a line of bottled water. Although neither of these companies knew anything about clothes or water, consumers associated them with quality, and that made product extension possible and profitable. Kalashnikov had hoped for the same outcome.
BOOK: AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
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