Authors: Roberto Saviano
Mariano did get to meet Mikhail Kalashnikov. He spent a month traveling around Eastern Europe. Russia, Romania, Moldavia: a reward from the clan. I saw him again in the usual bar, the bar in Casal di Principe. Mariano had a stack of photographs bound with a rubber band, like baseball cards for trading. Autographed pictures. Before coming home he had hundreds of copies printed up of Mikhail Kalashnikov wearing his Red Army uniform, his chest dripping with medals: the Order of Lenin, the medal of honor from the Great Patriotic War, the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. Mariano was introduced to the general through some Russians who did business with the Caserta clans.
Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov lived with his wife in a rented apartment in Izhevsk, formerly Ustinov, a city at the foot of the Ural Mountains, which didn’t even appear on the map until 1991. One of the many locations the USSR had kept secret. Kalashnikov was the town’s big draw. He had become a sort of tourist attraction for elite visitors, so they set up a direct connection from Moscow just for him. A hotel near his house, which is where Mariano had stayed, was making a mint putting up the general’s admirers, who would wait there for him to return from some Russian tour or simply for him to receive them. Mariano had his video camera in hand when he entered Kalashnikov’s house, and the general had allowed him to use it as long as he didn’t make the film public. Obviously Mariano agreed, knowing full well that the person who had arranged the meeting knew his address, phone number, and face. Mariano gave Kalashnikov a Styrofoam cube sealed with tape with buffalo heads on it. He had brought
a box full of mozzarella di bufala all the way from the Aversa Marshes in the trunk of his car.
Mariano showed me the video of his visit to Kalashnikov’s home on the little screen that folded out from the side of his camera. The images jumped around, and the zoom action deformed eyes and objects, the lens rattled by thumbs and wrists. It was like a video from a school trip, filmed while running and jumping. Kalashnikov’s house resembled Arzano secessionist boss Gennaro Marino McKay’s dacha, or maybe it was simply a classic version, but the only other dacha I had ever seen was his, so it looked like a replica to me. The walls were plastered with Vermeer reproductions, the furniture was laden with crystal and wooden knickknacks, and every inch of the floor was covered with carpets. At a certain point the general placed his hand over the lens. Mariano told me that, traipsing around with his camera and a huge dose of bad manners, he had gone into a room that Kalashnikov didn’t want filmed under any circumstances. In a small metal cabinet on the wall, clearly visible through the armored glass, was the first AK-47, the prototype built from the designs that, according to legend, the old general—then an unknown, low-ranking officer—had made on scraps of paper while in the hospital recovering from a bullet wound and eager to create a weapon that would make the Red Army’s frozen and starving soldiers invincible. The first ever AK-47, hidden away like the first dime earned by Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the famous Number One he keeps in an armored shrine, far from the clutches of Magica De Spell. It was priceless, that model. A lot of people would have given anything for a military relic like that. As soon as Kalashnikov dies, it will end up on the auction block at Christie’s, like Titian’s canvases or Michelangelo’s drawings.
Mariano spent the entire morning at Kalashnikov’s house. The Russian who introduced him must have been quite influential for the general to treat him so warmly. The video camera was running as they sat at the table and a tiny, elderly lady opened the Styrofoam box of
mozzarella. They ate with relish. Vodka and mozzarella. Mariano wanted to record it all, so he set the camera at the head of the table. He wanted proof that General Kalashnikov ate the mozzarella from his boss’s dairy. In the background the lens also captured a piece of furniture covered with framed photos of children. Even though I wanted the video to end as soon as possible as I was already feeling seasick, I couldn’t contain my curiosity:
“Mariano, Kalashnikov has that many children and grandchildren?”
“They’re not his children! They’re all photos people send him of children named after him, people whose lives were saved by a Kalashnikov or who simply admire him.”
Like doctors who put pictures of children they have treated on their office shelves as mementos of their professional success, General Kalashnikov had photographs of children named after his creature in his living room. A well-known guerrilla fighter with the Popular Liberation Movement in Angola once told an Italian reporter, “I named my son Kalash because it is synonymous with liberty.”
Born in 1919, Kalashnikov is now a well-preserved, sprightly old man. He’s invited all over the place, a sort of movable icon that substitutes for the most famous assault rifle in the world. Before retiring from the armed services, he received a general’s stipend of 500 rubles, at the time more or less $500 a month. If Kalashnikov had been able to patent his weapon in the West, he would undoubtedly be one of the richest men in the world. Approximately—for lack of concrete figures—more than 150 million Kalashnikovs of varying models have been produced, all based on the general’s original design. Even if he had only earned one dollar for each weapon, he would be swimming in money now. But this tragic loss of wealth did not bother him in the least. He had given birth to the creature, had breathed life into
it, and that was gratification enough. Or maybe he made a profit after all. Mariano told me about presents arriving every now and then from admirers: financial tributes, thousands of dollars deposited in his bank account, precious gifts from Africa—there was talk of a gold tribal mask from Mobutu and a canopy inlaid with ivory that Bokassa had sent him. And it is said that a train, complete with locomotive and cars, arrived from China, a gift from Deng Xiaoping, who knew of the general’s difficulty in boarding airplanes. But these are merely legends, rumors that circulate among journalists who, unable to interview the general—he receives no one without an important introduction—talk instead to the employees in the arms factory in Izhevsk.
Mikhail Kalashnikov’s responses were automatic, always the same answers no matter what the question was. His English, which he’d learned as an adult, was smooth, and he used it as he would a screwdriver. To calm his jitters, Mariano posed generic and pointless questions about the AK-47. “I did not invent that weapon to make money, but only and exclusively to defend the Motherland in a moment in which she needed it. If I had to go back and do it all over again, I would do exactly the same things and live my life just as I have. I have worked all my life, and my life is my work.” This is how he answers every question about his invention.
Nothing in the world—organic or synthetic, metal or chemical—has produced more deaths than the AK-47. It has killed more than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than HIV, more than the bubonic plague, more than malaria, more than all the attacks by Islamic fundamentalists, more than the total of all the earthquakes that have shaken the globe. An exponential amount of human flesh, impossible to even imagine. Only one image came anywhere close to a convincing description, an advertisement at a convention: fill a bottle with sugar by pouring the grains from a small hole
in the corner of the bag. Each grain of sugar is someone killed by a Kalashnikov.
The AK-47 can fire in the most disparate conditions. It won’t jam, will shoot even when crammed with dirt or soaking wet, is comfortable to hold, and has a feather trigger that even a child can pull. Luck, error, imprecision—all the elements that might spare a life in battle—are eliminated by the certainty of the AK-47. Fate has been prohibited from playing a role. Easy to use and easy to transport, it allows you to kill efficiently, without any type of training. “It can turn even a monkey into a combatant,” as Laurent Kabila, the fearsome Congolese political leader, used to say. AK-47s have been used by armies in conflicts in more than fifty countries over the last thirty years. Massacres perpetrated with AK-47s—verified by the UN— have taken place in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Chechnya, Colombia, Congo, Haiti, Kashmir, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Uganda. More than fifty regular armies are supplied with AK-47s, and statistics on the irregular, paramilitary, and guerrilla groups that also use them are impossible to formulate.
Anwar el-Sadat was killed by an AK-47 in 1981, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa in 1982, and Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. Salvador Allende was found in the Palacio de La Moneda with AK-47 bullets in his body. And these excellent cadavers are the weapon’s historic PR headliners. The AK-47 has even found its way onto the flag of Mozambique and the symbols of hundreds of political groups, from Al Fatah in Palestine to the MRTA in Peru. When Osama bin Laden appears in a video, the AK-47 is his one and only menacing symbol. It has been the prop for every role: liberator, oppressor, soldier, terrorist, robber, and the special forces who guard presidents. Kalashnikov’s highly efficient weapon has evolved over the years: eighteen variants and twenty-two new models, all from the original design. It is the true symbol of free enterprise. The absolute icon. It can become the emblem of anything: it doesn’t matter who you are, what you think,
where you come from, what your religion is, who you’re for, or what you’re against, as long as you do what you do using our product. Fifty million dollars will buy about two hundred thousand weapons. In other words, with $50 million, you can create a small army. Anything that destroys political bonds and mediation, that allows for enormous consumption and exponential power, is a winner on the market, and with his invention Mikhail Kalashnikov allowed every power and micropower group a military instrument. After the invention of the AK-47, no one can say they were defeated because they didn’t have access to arms. He leveled the battlefield: arms for everyone, massacres for all. War is no longer the exclusive domain of armies. The AK-47 did on an international scale what the Secondigliano clans did locally by fully liberalizing cocaine and allowing anyone to become a drug trafficker, user, or pusher, thus freeing the market from pure criminal and hierarchical mediation. In the same way, the AK-47 allowed everyone to become soldiers, even young boys and skinny little girls, and transformed people who wouldn’t be able to herd a dozen sheep into army generals. Buy submachine guns, shoot, destroy people and things, and go back and buy some more. The rest is just details. In every photo Kalashnikov’s face, with its angular, Slavic forehead and Mongolian eyes that shrink into tiny slits as he ages, is serene. He sleeps the sleep of the righteous. He goes to bed tranquil if not happy, his slippers tucked neatly under his bed. Even when he is serious, his lips are pulled up like those of Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence in
Full Metal Jacket.
Kalashnikov smiles with his lips, but not with his face.
Whenever I see Mikhail Kalashnikov’s portrait, I am reminded of Alfred Nobel, famous for the prize that bears his name, but also the father of dynamite. The pictures of Nobel taken after his invention—after he realized the use that his mix of nitroglycerin and clay would be put to—show a man devastated by anxiety, his fingers tormenting his beard. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but when I look at Nobel, with his arched eyebrows and lost eyes, he seems to be saying just
one thing: “I didn’t mean to. I intended to move mountains, crumble rocks, and create tunnels. I didn’t want everything else that happened.” Kalashnikov, on the other hand, always looks at peace, like an old Russian retiree, his head full of memories. You can imagine him, the trace of vodka on his breath as he tells you about some friend of his from the war, or whispering as you eat that when he was young, he could make love for hours on end. And in my childish imagination, Mikhail Kalashnikov’s picture seems to say, “Everything’s fine, it’s not my problem, all I did was invent an assault rifle. It’s no concern of mine how other people use it.” A responsibility that doesn’t go beyond your own skin, and is circumscribed by your actions. Your conscience applies only to the work of your own hands. I think this is one of the elements that makes the old general an involuntary icon of clans around the world. Mikhail Kalashnikov is not an arms trafficker, carries no weight in arms deals, has no political influence, and lacks a charismatic personality, yet he embodies the daily imperative of the man of the market: he does what he has to do to win, and the rest is none of his concern.
Mariano had on a hooded sweatshirt and a knapsack, with KALASHNIKOV on both. The general had diversified his investments and was becoming a talented businessman. No one’s name was better known, so a German businessman launched the Kalashnikov label. The general had taken a liking to distributing his name, even investing in a company that made fire extinguishers. In the middle of his story Mariano stopped the film and ran out to his car, took a small military suitcase from the trunk, and came back and placed it on the bar. I was afraid he had gone completely crazy with machine-gun mystique and had driven across Europe with an AK-47 in his trunk, which he was about to unveil in front of everyone. Instead he held up a tiny crystal Kalashnikov full of vodka, the cork fitted into the end of the barrel. Very kitsch. And after his trip, every bar Mariano supplied in
the Aversa Marshes sold Kalashnikov vodka. I was already imagining the crystal reproduction sitting on a shelf behind every barkeeper from Teverola to Mondragone. The video was almost over, and my eyes hurt from squinting—an attempt to correct my nearsightedness. But the final image was truly not to be missed. Two elderly people in slippers standing on their doorstep, still chewing on the last bite of mozzarella, are waving to their young guest. A group of kids had formed around Mariano and me, and they were staring at him as if he were one of the chosen ones, a sort of hero for having met him. Someone who had met Mikhail Kalashnikov. Mariano gave me a look of false complicity, something that had never existed between us. He removed the rubber band from the pack of photographs and flipped through them. After glancing at dozens, he handed me one.