Born a peasant on the southern Siberian steppe, General Kalashnikov had little formal education and claimed to be a self-taught tinkerer who combined innate mechanical skills with the study of weapons to conceive of a rifle that achieved battlefield ubiquity.
His role in the rifle’s creation, and the attention showered on him by
the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, carried him from conscription in the
Red Army to senior positions in the Soviet arms-manufacturing
bureaucracy and ultimately to six terms on the Supreme Soviet.
Tens of millions of Kalashnikov rifles have been manufactured. Their
short barrels, steep front-sight posts and curved magazines made them a
marker of conflict that has endured for decades. The weapons also became
both Soviet and revolutionary symbols and widespread instruments of
terrorism, child-soldiering and crime.
The general, who sometimes lamented the weapons’ unchecked distribution
but took pride in having invented them and in their reputation for
reliability, weathered the collapse of the Soviet Union to assume a
public role as a folk hero and unequivocal Russian patriot.
A Soviet nostalgist, he also served as the unofficial arms ambassador of
the revived Russian state. He used public appearances to try to cast
the AK-47’s checkered legacy in a positive way and to complain that
knockoffs were being manufactured illegally by former Soviet allies and
cutting into Russian sales.
The weapon, he said, was designed to protect his motherland, not to be
used by terrorists or thugs. “This is a weapon of defense,” he said. “It
is not a weapon for offense.”
General Kalashnikov, a senior sergeant at the time who had been injured
in battle against German tanks, was credited with leading the design
bureau that produced the AK-47 prototype. The Soviet Union began issuing
a mass-produced version to soldiers in 1949.
The true AK-47 was short-lived. It was followed in the 1950s by a
modernized version, the A.K.M., which retained its predecessor’s
underlying design while reducing its weight and manufacturing time.
Shorter than traditional infantry rifles and firing a cartridge midway
between the power of a pistol and the standard rifle cartridges of the
day, the Kalashnikov line was initially dismissed by American ordnance
experts as a weapon of small consequence. It was not particularly
accurate or well made, they said, and it lacked range and stopping
power.
It cemented its place in martial history in the 1960s in Vietnam. There,
a new American rifle, the M-16, experienced problems with corrosion and
jamming in the jungles, while Kalashnikovs, carried by Vietcong
guerrillas and North Vietnamese soldiers, worked almost flawlessly.
By this time, in an effort to standardize infantry weapons among
potential allies, the Soviet Union had exported the rifle’s
specifications and its manufacturing technology to China, Egypt, North
Korea and Warsaw Pact nations. Communist engineers would eventually
share the manufacturing technology with other countries, including Iraq.
Culled from The New York Times
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