No firearm in history has enjoyed the fame or popularity of the assault rifle known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. Created by a Soviet weapons designer at the dawn of the Cold War, it was mass-produced and distributed worldwide in the millions, leading to its canonization in the revolutionary Third World of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, far beyond its utility, the AK-47 became a Cold War icon, appearing on revolutionary flags, in songs and poems, and in televised insurgencies as proof of communist fervor and supposed martial superiority. And it continues to play a major role in warfare today, most visibly in guerrilla conflicts in Africa and the Middle East.

The AK-47 has succeeded so wildly because it is almost an ideal realization of the personal firearm: where most weapons have had to contend with tradeoffs between accuracy, lethality, speed of fire, reliability, cost of production, and ease of carrying and use, the AK-47 managed to find a sweet spot maximizing these traits. In fact, the weapon is so reliable, effective, and easy to use by untrained operators that its advent made it widely possible for just about any group, even with little money, modern technology, or formal military training, to mount significant, deadly assaults against a much larger and more advanced force — a fact that has transformed the face of warfare and created a revolutionary romance that still surrounds the weapon.

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Kalashnikov takes great trouble to note that the AK-47 grew out of an effort to protect his homeland from a repeat of the sort of barbaric invasion that Hitler unleashed, adding that he did not profit, at least in Western style, from the sales of some 100 million weapons that bear his name (including variants on the AK-47). And yet Kalashnikov seems almost longingly to note the millions of dollars in profits that came to Eugene Stoner from his M16, even as he ostensibly prefers the public acclaim in Russia that was never accorded to Stoner in the United States. That same paradox characterizes Kalashnikov’s occasional regret that his invention became the signature weapon among terrorists and bandits — many of them now deadly enemies of Russia itself — juxtaposed with his pride in the astounding success of a supposedly defensive AK-47. Speaking at a ceremony honoring the sixtieth anniversary of the weapon, he claimed, “I sleep well. It’s the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence.”

So what in the end are we to make of the AK-47, given that people ultimately kill one another and design weapons that do it so effectively? A perfect storm of events explains the gun’s lethal role in eroding civilization over the last six decades. The impoverished post-colonial world was eager for the sort of advanced weapons that had characterized a near-century of endemic warfare in the more advanced West, and the Soviet Union was eager to fan liberationist movements against the West. It took the postwar glamour of international communism, the industrial muscle of the Soviet Union, and a Russian genius with no higher education but great practical savvy to at last provide millions with such parity, meeting the requirements of a new arms lethality at very little cost. The result was the tragedy of a global assault rifle that has been crucial to self-described liberationists in furthering so often the cause of tyranny.