PK Machine Gun

Origins

In the 1950s the infantry of the Soviet Union used several different machine guns. The squad had the light RPD Machine Gun, firing the short 7.62x39mm cartridge. Companies and battalions had belt-fed guns in the full-power 7.62x54mmR rifle caliber, chiefly the Goryunov, a heavy weapon that needed a wheeled or tripod mount. The Soviet army wanted one gun that could do both jobs, light enough to carry forward with a bipod and steady enough for sustained fire from a tripod. This was the general-purpose machine gun idea that Germany had introduced with the MG 34 and the MG 42.

A design by Grigory Nikitin and Yuri Sokolov at Tula was the early favorite. Mikhail Kalashnikov's design bureau at Izhevsk entered the contest late, at the end of the 1950s. After comparative trials Kalashnikov's gun was judged the more reliable, and in 1961 it was adopted as the PK, for Pulemyot Kalashnikova, "Kalashnikov's machine gun". Versions followed for tripods (PKS), for tanks (PKT) and for armored personnel carriers.

Design & Construction

The PK uses the same basic mechanism as the AK-47, a long-stroke gas piston driving a rotating bolt, but turned upside down so that the piston lies under the barrel and the belt feeds across the top. It fires from an open bolt, which helps cooling between bursts.

Its cartridge dates from 1891 and was first made for the Mosin-Nagant M1891. The case has a projecting rim, so a round cannot simply be pushed forward through its belt link. Instead the mechanism grips each cartridge, pulls it backward out of the belt, drops it into line with the chamber and then rams it home. Kalashnikov's team made this two-stage feed work dependably. The steel belt does not break up into separate links and is normally carried in a box of 100 rounds that clips beneath the gun, or in larger boxes of 200 or 250 rounds. The gun feeds from the right.

The barrel can be changed in a few seconds when it overheats. The butt is a skeleton frame, and a folding bipod is fixed to the gas tube. The rate of fire is about 650 rounds a minute, and the gun is effective to roughly 1,000 meters. The PK weighs about 9 kg. In 1969 it was succeeded in production by the PKM, which has a lighter, plain barrel and more stamped parts and weighs about 7.5 kg. A belt-fed gun in a full rifle caliber at that weight is unusually easy for one man to carry and fire.

Combat Use

The PK became the standard company machine gun of the Soviet army and its Warsaw Pact allies, and was exported to dozens of states in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Copies and variants were made in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia and China, among others.

Soviet troops relied on it heavily in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, where its range was valued in mountain fighting, and captured guns were turned against them. The same weapons later armed Afghan factions and insurgents. In Operation Red Wings in June 2005, the fighters who ambushed a four-man American reconnaissance team in Kunar Province are reported to have used a PK-type machine gun along with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Coalition troops in Afghanistan and Iraq regularly faced PKM fire, and often used captured guns to arm and train local forces.

Somalia had been supplied with Soviet arms in the 1970s, and Soviet-pattern weapons were common among the militias that fought United Nations and American troops in Mogadishu in 1993. PK guns have since been used in the wars in Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, Syria and Ukraine, by regular armies and irregulars alike.

Legacy

The PKM is still made and is still the main infantry machine gun of Russia and many other countries, more than sixty years after the original was adopted. Russia introduced a derivative, the PKP Pecheneg, in the early 2000s, with a heavier fixed barrel intended to make barrel changes unnecessary.

The gun is usually compared with its Western counterparts, the FN MAG and the M60 Machine Gun. It is lighter than either and has a strong reputation for reliability in dust, mud and cold. Its use of a nineteenth-century rimmed cartridge, which most designers would have avoided, shows how well the feed system was worked out. After the Kalashnikov rifle it is probably the most widely used of all the weapons that bear the designer's name.