Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the arms designer credited by the
Soviet Union with creating the AK-47, the first in a series of rifles
and machine guns that would indelibly associate his name with modern war
and become the most abundant firearms ever made, died on Monday in
Izhevsk, the capital of the Russian republic of Udmurtia, where he
lived. He was 94.
Viktor Chulkov, a spokesman for the republic’s president, confirmed the death, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.
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, the
Soviet Union’s legislative body.
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’s public life resulted from a secret competition to
develop the Soviet infantry rifle for the Cold War. The result was the
AK-47 — an abbreviation for “the automatic by Kalashnikov” followed by
the year the competition ended.
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 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.
The design was incorporated into arms manufactured in Finland, Israel,
South Africa and other nations. The result was a long line of
derivatives and copies.
Because Kalashnikov rifles were principally made by secretive
governments and often changed hands in nontransparent transfers, it is
not known how many have been manufactured. Common estimates put
production at 70 million to 100 million; either number would dwarf the
production of any other gun.
The rifles eventually filled armories throughout Eastern Europe and Asia
and spread from war to war, passing to Soviet allies and proxies, and
to terrorists and criminals, aided by intelligence agencies and gray-
and black-market sales. The United States became an active purchaser,
arming anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s and indigenous
Afghan and Iraqi forces in recent years.
General Kalashnikov’s bureau also used the A.K.M. design to develop
machine guns for infantry squads, helicopter crews and vehicles. By the
1970s, the rifle’s design had become the basis for a new Soviet rifle,
known as the AK-74, that fired a smaller and faster cartridge similar to
that of the M-16. That rifle remains the standard weapon of the Russian
Army.
The general often claimed that he never realized any profit from his
work. But in his last years he urged interviewers not to portray him as
poor, noting that he had a sizable apartment, a good car and a
comfortable dacha on a lake near the factory where he had worked for
decades.
Work and loyalty to country, he often suggested, were their own rewards.
“I am told sometimes, ‘If you had lived in the West you would have been
a multimillionaire long ago,’ ” he said. “There are other values.”
How essential the general was to creation of the Kalashnikov line has
been subject to dispute. A post-Soviet account in the newspaper Pravda
challenged his central role, asserting that two supervisors modified his
weapon during field trials.
An amiable personality with a biography ideal for proletarian fable, he
was given credit for their work, the newspaper claimed. The general
disputed suggestions that the design was guided by others, but also said
the rifle was the result of the collective that labored beside him.
The Kremlin embraced his version, although a careful reading of the
official histories and General Kalashnikov’s many statements and memoirs
shows that his accounts of his life, combat service and work repeatedly
changed, raising questions about the veracity of the conventional
accounts.
Mikhail Timofeyovich Kalashnikov was born in Kurya on Nov. 10, 1919. He
was married twice, the second time to Ekaterina Kalashnikova, a
technician in his design bureau. He is survived by a son from his first
marriage, Viktor Kalashnikov, who is also an arms designer; a daughter
from his second marriage, Elena Krasnovskaya; a stepdaughter, Nelya; and
several grandchildren.
Later in life, he disapproved of anyone who he thought had hastened the
Soviet Union’s downfall, or who had been unable to control the political
and economic turbulence that followed. In memoirs and interviews, he
was harshly critical of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin.
To the end he was loyal to what he called Socialist ideals and the
leaders who gave them shape, and seemed untroubled by the hardships
endured by his family during the early years of Soviet rule. His
family’s land and home had been seized during collectivization,
and when he was a child the family was deported into the Siberian
wilderness. His father died during their first Siberian winter, and one
of his brothers labored for seven years as a prisoner digging the White
Sea canal.
Still, General Kalashnikov spoke of his great respect for Lenin and
Stalin alike. “I never knew him personally,” he said of Stalin, “and I
regret this.”
Source: NYTIMES
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