Soviet Small Arms Land in Wrong Hands

May 29 -- Picture this: It's a bracing spring morning in eastern Siberia, Russia, and a resident of one of the remote villages near the Russia-China border leaves his home for a hunt in the vast marshlands surrounding an abandoned Soviet air base.

This is fair hunting terrain and the man, a resident of the remote Jewish Autonomous Region (JAR) in eastern Russia, has every reason to believe his hunter's luck will not let him down.

What he does not expect though, is the booty he finally stumbles upon in the marshland: five 30mm cannons from a Sukhoi (Su-27) fighter jet, five large-caliber artillery shells, a self-propelled missile, and a dummy air bomb — a veritable small arms haul.

An exceptionally crazy day in Russia? Not really.

With the formal setting up of the NATO-Russia Council on Tuesday, under which Russia was permitted to join NATO's decision-making process, the international community has heralded a new era in post-Cold War history. But even as world leaders gathered at an airbase outside Rome on Tuesday celebrated the all-new cooperation between once-adversarial blocs, Russia — and the world — is still reeling from the fallout from more than half a century of superpower military buildup.

In the chaos following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shrinking of the mammoth Soviet military apparatus resulted in a massive surplus of arsenal in many states, including the former Soviet republics. But while international attention has been focused on the stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in the region, an issue that tends to get overlooked is the cascade of small arms — automatic rifles, grenades, submachine guns, pistols — emerging from the region that are often a breeze to buy, sell and fire.

In some parts of Russia, incidents of locals stumbling upon caches of small arms are not isolated, with local news services carrying reports of economically strapped residents of regions such as Siberia selling abandoned military hardware to scrap yards for much-needed extra cash.

Arms Tales From Around the World

While reports of hunters ending up with caches of small arms and scrap yard merchants brokering surface-to-air missiles are certainly ignominious, they are the just the tip of an iceberg of the global proliferation of small arms created in part by corruption, economic pressure and often a lack of political will.