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Sheer numbers, Mao believed, could win against any army no matter how sophisticated its weaponry. Even though the Soviet Union and Communist China chose different military tactics, they both benefited from the AK’s characteristics. China’s tactics were put into practice in Korea when U.S. and UN-sanctioned forces faced hordes of Chinese soldiers in many battles, leaving both sides with massive casualties. In 1953, after three years of brutal fighting and millions of dead, the hostilities ceased with a shaky armistice on the 38th parallel that continues today.
     
    In 1956, events in Eastern Europe forced the Soviet Union to unveil the AK in public. The tumult began on October 23 with a peaceful demonstration by students in Budapest, Hungary, who demanded an end to Soviet occupation and the implementation of “true socialism.” The police made some arrests and tried to disperse the demonstrators with tear gas, but the crowds grew larger and more vocal. When the students attempted to free people who had been arrested, the police opened fire on the crowd. Within days, soldiers, government workers, and even police officials had joined the students.
     
    Nikita Khrushchev, now leader of the Soviet Union, grew increasingly concerned about the situation and dispatched the Red Army to Hungary. They rode in tanks and in trucks, carrying their AKs. The demonstrators fought with whatever weaponry they could find, including Russian submachine guns, carbines, single-shot rifles, and grenades, much of it taken from liberated military depots. This was the Soviets’ first large-scale use of the AK, and it performed flawlessly in an urban environment where tanks became bogged down in narrow streets against crowds wielding Molotov cocktails. The revolt was squelched, with as many as fifty thousand Hungarians and about seven thousand Soviet soldiers killed.
     
    According to U.S. Army archives, American intelligence officers took note of the AK but appeared not to be concerned. When the Springfield Armory, the U.S. military’s weapons maker since 1794, tested the Soviet weapon that year, they too appeared indifferent. It would not be until a decade later during the Vietnam War that American GIs would face the AK in action for the first time. These soldiers would pay dearly for their government’s abject failure to recognize the far-reaching significance of Kalashnikov’s simple weapon.
     

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    A REPUTATION BORN IN THE RICE PADDIES
     
    BY THE LATE 1950s, the Soviet Union was employing the AK as a key component of its strategy to spread Communism throughout the world. In these early years of the cold war, both the Soviet Union and the United States tried to curry favor with undeveloped and uncommitted countries through sales and gifts of arms. Compared to the United States’ offerings of the M1 and later the M-14, the AK proved vastly superior.
     
    Because of the AK’s ruggedness, it was well suited to severe environmental conditions and the lack of local gun repair facilities in poorer countries. In addition, because the AK was designed with a lot of play and looser tolerances—in the piston head, for example—it could fire ammunition with wide variations, including cheap knockoff cartridges produced locally or ammunition that had deteriorated in humid, jungle-like conditions, without misfiring or jamming.
     
    The AK quickly became the weapon of choice among ragtag Communist-inspired rebel groups, especially in Africa and East Asia, where a backdoor route often was used. These groups were supplied by Soviet bloc countries instead of the Soviet Union to avoid direct confrontation between the world’s superpowers. The weapons also were affordable enough for money-strapped third world nations who could save face by paying for the arms themselves.
     
    To further distribute the rifle, the Soviets offered technical expertise to build the AK as a so-called Gift to Fraternal Countries. These “fraternal countries” included