Mikhail Kalashnikov (1919- ), designer of the legendary AK assault rifle
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the legendary designer of the world’s best known weapon, celebrated his 89th birthday on Monday, and has been named The Man of the 20th Century. An honorary member of many Academies around the world, Mr Kalashnikov is a self-effacing man who says “I’m a Doctor of Science who never went to college”.
The inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, which has become the weapon of choice by dozens of armies and guerrillas around the world, was born on 10 November 1919, in the village of Kurya, Altai Krai, to a peasant family, the seventeenth child of Timofei and Aleksandra Kalashnikov. This self-made genius received no technical education and his famous Israeli colleague Uzi Gal once called him the best and most authoritative weapons designer around.
Mikhail Kalashnikov often said that he developed his legendary AK-47 rifle as a weapon of defence, not assault. From the outset of the Great Patriotic War, senior sergeant Mikhail Kalashnikov fought against the Nazi invaders as a tank commander. Wounded in combat in 1941, Kalashnikov started working on his rifle in 1947, driven to work on his design by the Soviet defeats in the early years of World War II at the hands of far better-armed German soldiers. “In October 1941, I was seriously wounded, and while in hospital, I conceived the idea of a sub-machine-gun, a simple one you wouldn’t need a big plant to build. So, I got out my notebook and pencils, and started making drafts of the would-be weapon. Some of the wounded poked fun at me, others encouraged saying, ‘Do it, Misha, give us the tool and we’ll finish the job!’”
In 1947, Kalashnikov’s updated assault rifle displayed high reliability and fire effectiveness during arduous competitive tests and was found the best submission. In 1949, after modifications, the assault rifle, designated “Kalashnikov 7.62mm assault rifle, Model 1947 (AK)”, became operational in the Soviet Army and Mikhail Kalashnikov received the Stalin Prize First Class. The AK-47 ushered the era of automatic weapons and made its maker a household name everywhere. Mikhail Kalashnikov has since developed more than 150 modifications of his famous weapon. More than 100 million Kalashnikovs have already been made and are currently used by 55 armies around the world. In Mozambique and Zimbabwe it adorns the national emblems. The AK-47 quickly became prized for its sturdy reliability in difficult field conditions. Mikhail Kalashnikov said, “In Vietnam, when the M-16 rifle failed to work in the jungle, the Americans would take a Soviet AK-47 off the body of a dead Vietnamese soldier, along with the cartridges of course…”
American military historian Edward Izell, the author of The History of the AK-47, once said that it won’t be before 2025 that the world gets a better and more reliable weapon than the trusty old Kalashnikov. The AK-47 has gone down in the history of small arms and is now on display at the Armoury Chamber of the Moscow Kremlin. Mikhail Kalashnikov now lives and works in Izhevsk, a major arms manufacturing centre of Russia. At 89, he still works as a consultant for the Rosoboronexport Company and has penned several books of memoirs as a member of the Russian Writers’ Union.
11 November 2008
Oleg Nekhai
Voice of Russia World Service
http://www.ruvr.ru/main.php?lng=eng&q=34901&cid=59&p=11.11.2008 (in English)
