To wage a guerrilla war, you're going to need weaponry. As the saying goes, beggars can't be choosers and guerrillas have never been particularly uniform in the weapons they've wielded as long as the weapons function, that they have ammunition for it and that it actually hits the target. Small arms have an interesting way of finding itself in places you'd never expect to show up and even in the last 30 years, we have seen surplus weaponry from WWII show up in the hands of insurgents in places you'd least expect it. It is very interesting to note that some of the most famous cases of guerrilla warfare in history, such as the Cuban revolution, was not carried out with Soviet weaponry but instead with American WWII-vintage M1 Garands and the like.

But the story of Soviet small arms in the hands of insurgents is not the story of several different weapons but instead of just a family of weapons: The AK-47. For those who aren't familiar with the background of the AK-47 or why it's so popular, let me run it by you. The AK-47, or the Avtomat Kalashnikova is an assault rifle which was invented by Mikhail Kalashnikov and adopted by the Soviet Armed Forces in 1948. Following Soviet tradition, it's not a particularly elegant or beautiful weapon but it's almost brute simplicity and ability to withstand almost anything in terms of both weather conditions and physical conditions has made it incredibly long-lasting. Its simplicity makes it easy to take it apart, to clean, to put back together and to fire. It's low recoil also makes it a more comfortable weapon to use. It was designed to be used by Soviet conscripts, an army filled with men of different ethnicities, speaking different languages and from different cultures. It's a weapon that is supposed to be easy to learn how to use and to teach other soldiers how to use it - even if you may not be able to speak with each other. To quote the movie Lord of War: "It's so easy, even a child can use it; and they do."

So, the AK-47. Durable, easy to use even for the most illiterate insurgent and powerful enough to make some damage - but how did it end up in the hands of the insurgents to begin with?

The Soviet Union was very willing to provide weapons to insurgents and countries the world over who faced the forces of the United States and their allies, but this only spread the weapon so far. Some countries bought the rights to produce their own versions of the AK-47 while others simply reversed-engineered it and began their own production. AK-47s (and all their different variations and Kalashnikov-series of assault rifles) were traded, bought, smuggled and spread over the entire world through these means and not all of them were of Soviet origin. For example both the People's Army of Vietnam (NVA) and the People's Liberation Armed Forces in Vietnam (VC) used the Chinese AK-47 copy, the Type 56. The spread of the weapon is thus not only the responsibility of the Soviet Union but also other countries involved in either wars or in proxy wars who themselves used the AK-47 or provided it to a particular side in a conflict. Sometimes, two sides can face each other wielding two different variations of the AK-47, such as the case of the MPLA (armed by the Soviet Union) and UNITA (armed by China) facing off in the Angolan Civil War.

Perhaps it simply isn't much of a surprise that a weapon so simple and useful as the AK-47 ended up in the hands of those who needed it the most and from there spread, in both legal and illegal forms, to the rest of the world. However, as I pointed out before, insurgents were never and are never just restricted to small arms with Soviet origins. I've mentioned the reasons to why the AK-47 is so sought after but a guerrilla will use what they have access to and in some cases, that might very well be a copy of a British breech-loading Martini-Henry rifle made by a local gunsmith in the Khyber Pass.