Have gun, will travel.

• Author: Overy, Richard
• Position: C. J. Chivers' The Gun - Critical essay

3. J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 496 pp., $28.00.

It is not always easy to understand what makes a particular weapon iconic, or whether such an icon is really something worth having. The twentieth century has few obvious contenders. The Spitfire is perhaps the most famous because so much hung on achieving victory in the Battle of Britain. The surviving myth of the Allied David pitted against the German Goliath has an enduring, if sentimental, attraction. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is perhaps a modern-day equivalent, its awesome power and menace balanced by the aesthetic fascination of seeing the broad, black batwing fighter in flight.

Aircraft, of course, are fortunate. For more than a century, the evolution of modern planes, from flimsy wood and canvas biplanes to the modern fighter-bomber, has generated a persistent fascination with the air weapon; it is easy to understand why famous aircraft images are often instantly recognizable. But ask the average citizen to tell you the name of some piece of artillery or an armored car and you will get nowhere. Cans of poison gas or antipersonnel mines are not likely to end up as iconic images, and it needs little perception to understand why. The only other category of modern weapon that can match the appeal of the air is the handheld firearm. The Colt .45, the famous German Luger, the Bren gun and the Lee-Enfield rifle are not quite household names, but certainly close to the Spitfire in terms of recognition. Yet of all the handheld weapons across the world, from the age of industrial warfare on, there is one that stands out above the rest: the AK-47 assault rifle, better known as the eponymous "Kalashnikov."

The explanation for why this simple and effective automatic weapon should end up on national flags and postage stamps is the subject of an absorbing and beautifully written new study by the American New York Times journalist and former-Marine Corps officer C. J. Chivers in a volume simply called The Gun. The book is a biography of the AK-47--in itself an acknowledgement that key weapons become effectively personified--but it is also much more. Chivers has no intention of mythologizing this rifle; the development of the gun and its subsequent worldwide use is tellingly set in a longer and wider historical context. The narrative is a critical and intelligent interrogation of a story shrouded in Soviet doublespeak. And the history of this particular weapon becomes, in an important sense, the story of the violence at the heart of the more than sixty years since the gun was first introduced.

The tale of the AK-47's origins is a classic Stalinist myth. The gun, so it is claimed, was invented almost spontaneously in 1947 by a genuine proletarian, the young Senior Sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov, an unschooled wounded veteran of the Great Patriotic War. His invention won him the coveted Hero of Socialist Labor award, and he became a model for the postwar generation of Soviet citizens educated in the sanctification of Soviet overachievers. Like the biologist Trofim Lysenko, the director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics who rejected Gregor Mendel's theories of inheritance, Kalashnikov became a classic example of how the very ordinary Russian could rise to the heights of technical and scientific success without a whole clutch of bourgeois doctorates and diplomas. But unlike Lysenko's wayward hostility to genetics, Kalashnikov did actually help to develop something that the Soviet state found of great and prolonged use. Whatever the deliberate aggrandizement of his reputation, the legend shrouded in half-truths, there was no doubt about the exceptional...