Chávez did not immediately respond, but Kalashnikov felt compelled to counter Rumsfeld’s official U.S. position. While attending the 2005 IDEX international arms exhibition in Abu Dhabi, an annual trade show that brings together the world’s buyers and sellers of all kinds of weapons from small arms to tanks and fighter jets, Kalashnikov said, “We have been blamed and will be blamed for many things. We need to treat these accusations critically, as they are, as a rule, prompted by the Americans’ desire to bar us [Russia] from entering new markets. I believe we need to continue to promote our Russian weapons on foreign markets, because they must safeguard peace and friendship between nations.”
For his entire life, Kalashnikov had purposely kept his distance from politics. He disliked politicians, blaming them for the misuse of his weapon. However, the importance of this mammoth sale to the Russian economy drove the usually nonpolitical Kalashnikov to denounce American foreign policy.
What a change this was from the naive, less sophisticated Kalashnikov who had visited the United States in 1990, the first time he had ever been allowed to travel outside of Russia.
6
KALASHNIKOV AND HIS GUN VISIT AMERICA
IN 1990, UNDER THE GOODWILL of glasnost, Mikhail Kalashnikov, aging and poor, traveled outside the Soviet Union for the first time. He was the guest of Ed Ezell, small-arms curator at the Smithsonian Institution, who had visited Moscow two years earlier to meet the AK-47’s inventor as part of the museum’s program to videotape the twentieth century’s most influential inventors. Also in the collection were tapes of Eugene Stoner, inventor of the M-16, the AK’s rival.
Soon, the world’s gun titans would meet.
Prying Kalashnikov out of the Soviet Union had not been easy. Ezell wrote him a letter in 1972 through the Soviet embassy in Washington. When Kalashnikov received the envelope with a U.S. postmark he was both astonished and frightened. No one from the United States had ever contacted him before. Despite fame and notoriety in his home country, few outside the Soviet Union knew anything about the man whose weapon had changed the face of modern warfare. At home, he was a war hero who had helped protect the motherland and spread the Communist doctrine to every corner of the globe. To the rest of the world, his name symbolized two extremes—terrorism against legitimate governments and the struggle for freedom against ruthless dictators—but few knew that he was even alive. During the deadly conflicts of the cold war years, Soviet authorities purposely kept this man hidden from outsiders.
Fearful that government agents would deem the American’s note as his compliance in a subversive action, Kalashnikov contacted local Communist Party officials, who subjected him to a lengthy “consultation” during which they suggested he get in touch with the KGB. Kalashnikov’s first instinct upon discussing the unsolicited letter with the local KGB agent was to throw up his hands in an ignorant gesture. “Oh, no! Why should I ever write there, to the States?” After more than a year of these back-and-forth consultations, Kalashnikov received permission to respond to the letter with Ezell’s innocently requested items: a biography and a signed photograph.
The door opened.
Over the following years, Ezell mailed Kalashnikov several books he had authored, including The AK-47 Story, which he wrote by piecing together snippets of information about the history of Soviet firearms back to the 1800s, the AK-47, and Kalashnikov. With the softening of Soviet-U.S. relations in 1989, Ezell and a video crew met the sixty-nine-year-old Kalashnikov in Moscow for sightseeing and filming. At first apprehensive, Ezell was put at ease upon seeing an animated, congenial Kalashnikov, who greeted him with a hearty bear hug. It became clear to Ezell over the following days that Kalashnikov deemed the visit an important event for him, the first recognition of his contribution by those outside the Soviet Union. He was also flattered when Kalashnikov told him that he planned to have The AK-47 Story translated into Russian so he could see what Ezell and the English-speaking world knew about him.
Over the following days, the entourage visited firing ranges and museums, including Leningrad’s Central Museum of the Artillery, Engineer, and Communications Troops, which housed more than 120 types of AK rifles. Ezell soon understood that he was in the presence of a national celebrity whose name was known on the street by Soviet citizens, yet unknown elsewhere. In a private moment, away from the others, Kalashnikov confided to Ezell that he had appreciated the books he had sent over the years and his attention, but he was unable to express his appreciation during the cold war environment. Now he hoped this would change with the easing of tensions between the two superpowers.
And they were. During a later presentation before the Virginia Gun Collectors Association, Ezell spoke about his visit to Moscow and mentioned that he would like to bring Kalashnikov to the United States to meet Eugene Stoner but did not have funding in the Smithsonian budget. In concert with a hunting club called NORVA in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, the group footed the bill for the arms maker, his daughter Elena, and an interpreter to visit.
On May 15, 1990, Kalashnikov arrived at Washington’s Dulles Airport, the first time he had been permitted to visit a foreign country. After decades of animosity between the two nations, Kalashnikov had worried about his treatment by the American bureaucracy, but his anxieties disappeared when Customs and Immigration officials moved him and his small group quickly through the line.
The next day was the big day. He and Stoner finally met at the Seaport Inn in the Old Town section of Alexandria, Virginia, a restaurant where President George Washington had dined and slept two centuries earlier. Both men knew each other’s work intimately, but the two had never met or even corresponded, because the gulf of the cold war was too wide.
Before the gun makers met over dinner, Kalashnikov’s hosts took him shopping for new clothes to replace his tattered ones. The inventor of the world’s most popular firearm was so poor that his hosts gave him money for his purchases. He explained to them how the government had never patented his design, and it was licensed for free to many countries. Kalashnikov never saw a ruble from his work beyond his small government stipend. On a shopping trip to buy a pair of shoes, Kalashnikov didn’t see his size. He became dejected, until one of his hosts told him that the salesman could walk in the back and look for a different style in his size. His face brightened. This was typical of Kalashnikov’s Soviet perspective, where scarcity was commonplace and you made do without life’s niceties.
The irony of the situation was not lost on Stoner or Kalashnikov’s hosts. They saw a man whose invention was found in virtually every country, and had made millions of dollars for middlemen and gun dealers, yet he was a pauper who knew practically nothing of the outside world. His country had kept him purposely isolated.
These two symbols of the cold war were cordial as they discussed their competing weapons, but when they talked about money, Kalashnikov began to understand the stark difference between the Communist and capitalist marketplace. Stoner said that he made about one dollar per M-16 sold. At the time, about six million were in circulation. Kalashnikov admitted, sheepishly, that he made no money from his invention, which had sold ten times the number of M-16s, but added that he did it for the motherland, and it didn’t bother him a bit. Clearly, it did. The rest of the evening went well, but one could see Kalashnikov and his daughter engaged in lively but whispered discussions. They were talking about how much money Stoner enjoyed from the M-16 and scores of his other inventions. They were flabbergasted to learn that Stoner flew around the country in his own plane.