The History of PKM, the Most Common Machine Gun in the World (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about the beginning of the Kalashnikov machine gun story. In this chapter, I will get into details of how Kalashnikov managed to go through with his design against all odds.

After a month of hard work, the first prototype of PK was ready. By that time, the rival machine gun designed by Nikitin and Sokolov completed technical trials and had a few non-critical issues that design engineers had to fix.

Kalashnikov’s machinegun wasn’t even officially tested by the factory, so he didn’t really have any chance to win in this trial, since the competitor, Nikitin GPMG, was so ahead of him.

Kalashnikov decided to once again get assistance from his old friend Vladimir Deikin, a high-ranking officer who initially put the idea of a new belt-fed machine gun in his mind. Colonel Deikin arrived in Izhevsk, inspected the machine gun, and looked at the test results.

Kalashnikov and his team fired over 5000 rounds with the PK prototype and even at that stage, the team started testing the gun in adverse conditions, removing all the lube to increase friction. Kalashnikov knew that the Soviet military was obsessed with reliability and made sure even early prototypes worked regardless of the environmental conditions.

Kalashnikov took Deikin to the improvised shooting range, blasted through a few more belts of ammunition, and discovered some minor issues with the dust cover.

According to engineers from the Kalashnikov team, Deikin promised he would help, but did not seem very hopeful. At that moment, Kalashnikov’s main rival was not the other machinegun, but the entire bureaucracy of the Ministry of Arms Industry, which was a separate entity from the actual military.

The Ministry of Arms Industry was in charge of the machinegun design project, money was already spent, promises made, palms greased, and the bureaucrats had no intention of letting someone else in the competition.

The Unexpected Call

According to a member of the engineering team, someone ratted out Kalashnikov to the Ministry of Arms Industry and the design engineer received a furious call.

• Enough with this circus, Kalashnikov! We never asked you to design a machine gun. Who allowed you to embezzle the money allocated to other projects?
• I was hoping that if our project is good, you will allocate some money later.
• There isn’t any hope for you. Money is already spent on the first batch of already-approved machine guns. Don’t you dare to get involved!
• But the Ministry of Defense asked me to start this work. I must listen to our main customer…
• Don’t you forget, you work for us, not for the military. You obey our orders. We don’t need your machine gun.

One thing that people don’t understand about Kalashnikov is that he knew how to deal with bureaucracy and always managed to find the right people to get things done.

Many years before this PK story, a young Kalashnikov got drunk at a party, stuck his Tokarev pistol through the open window, and fired a few shots. The next day, the pistol was taken from him by military police and put into evidence.

A few days later, the military police had to return the pistol - Kalashnikov complained to his boss that he was testing new tracer ammo he developed and now, without a pistol, he could not proceed with this innovative ammunition design project. Needless to say, there was no tracer ammo development going on, but Kalashnikov managed to get his pistol back.

Jumping through the hoops

As years went by, Kalashnikov learned that there is always a solution, even when bureaucrats give you no hope. To get ahead with his machine gun project, he went to the CEO of Izhmash and convinced him that the machine gun was worth risking a fight with some bureaucrats.

The CEO of the factory called none other than the Minister of Defense and persuaded him to approve Kalashnikov’s idea of building his own GPMG and also simultaneously stop testing and trials of the other machine gun.

Now Kalashnikov and his PK finally had a fighting chance against the rivals. He had just a month to make the first batch of machine guns. In addition to all the manufacturing problems, Kalashnikov had to test the machine gun with the ground-mount tripod. However, the Izhmash factory did not manufacture machine guns and had no tripods lying around.

Kalashnikov asked the Ministry of Arms Industry for a single tripod and was denied. But he did not give up, and through some friendly connections, he managed to obtain a machinegun tripod from the museum that belonged to the Ministry of Defense.

Kalashnikov improved the tripod, the Ministry of Arms tried to stop him, claiming he had no right to get involved in someone else's project, but the original tripod designer sided with Kalashnikov and said that the improved tripod was indeed much better.