MARINA - Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia - page 85

He sure should. The gun he invented is used by armies, child soldiers, criminals, terror-
ists. And it's available everywhere. According to C. J. Chivers of the New York Times , who
wrote a book about the Kalashnikov called The Gun , so many of the guns have been pro-
duced that there is one for every seventy humans on earth. “The Kalashnikov is the most
common weapon you will see,” he told my colleague Terry Gross on NPR's program Fresh
Air , suggesting that if you find yourself anywhere in the world that's unstable or unsafe,
chances are these weapons are not far away. The AK-47 “gets used in those places in the
commissions of crimes, in the commission of human-rights violations. It is often used by
governments as a tool of repression. It's the weapon of the crackdown and has been for
more than half a century.” But the market has become so flooded with the guns that orders
are beginning to fall off—and that's bad for Izhevsk, Chivers said in another NPR inter-
view.
This is, in the simplest sense, a struggling factory town that's looking for more or-
ders so it can keep more people at work. There's also sort of something psycholo-
gical at work here. The Kalashnikov is, in many ways, Russia's Coca-Cola. It's
their brand. It's the one thing that they made that we all know of and that has had
global saturation. You know, we don't buy Russian pacemakers, or Russian
watches, or Russian perfumes, or Russian automobiles in any significant numbers.
But the Kalashnikov is the thing.
There's something melancholy about this—not exactly the fact that gun orders are
down, which is a good thing, but that Russia is so desperate for its brand to be respected
again. There was a time when Russian citizens felt an enormous sense of pride—like when
the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.
“America could not do that, okay?” Yuri Karash once told me. The Russian commentat-
or often writes about the space industry. “Western Europe could not do it. No other country
in the world could do it. But the Soviet state could.”
That was then. Today, there's far less pride—even at moments when there should be
more. When the U.S. Space Shuttle program ended, NASA began paying Russia to carry
Americans into space for an undetermined period of years. Like many Russians I spoke
with, Karash was less than impressed. He described the moment as similar to a Mercedes
breaking down in the middle of the desert. “So you suddenly see a Bedouin riding a camel
on the shoulder and you ask him, 'Hey, guy, do me a favor, give me a lift to someplace?'
And he says, 'No problem. Pay me $63 million and I'll take you there.' Does it mean camel
is better than Mercedes?”
For a country whose people are already prone to fatalism, you can imagine a loss of
pride only piling on.