Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (UK: /kəˈlæʃnɪkɒf/, US: /kəˈlɑːʃnɪkɒf/; Russian: Михаил Тимофеевич Калашников, IPA: ; 10 November 1919 – 23 December 2013) was a Soviet and Russian lieutenant general, inventor, military engineer, writer, and small arms designer.
Kalashnikov was, according to himself, a self-taught tinkerer who combined innate mechanical skills with the study of weaponry to design arms that achieved battlefield ubiquity. Even though Kalashnikov felt sorrow at the weapons' uncontrolled distribution, he took pride in his inventions and in their reputation for reliability, emphasizing that his rifle is "a weapon of defense" and "not a weapon for offense".
Kalashnikov was born in the village of Kurya, in present-day Altai Krai, Russia, as the seventeenth child of the 19 children of Aleksandra Frolovna Kalashnikova (née Kaverina) and Timofey Aleksandrovich Kalashnikov, who were peasants. In his youth, Mikhail suffered from various illnesses and was on the verge of death at age six. He was attracted to all kinds of machinery, but also wrote poetry, dreaming of becoming a poet. He later went on to write six books and continued to write poetry all of his life. In 1930, his father and most of his family had their properties confiscated and were deported as kulaks to the village of Nizhnyaya Mokhovaya, Tomsk Oblast. After deportation, his family had to combine farming with hunting, and thus Mikhail frequently used his father's rifle in his teens. Kalashnikov continued hunting into his 90s.
After completing seventh grade, Mikhail, with his stepfather's permission, left his family and returned to Kurya, hiking for nearly 1,000 km. In Kurya, he found a job in mechanics at a tractor station. A party organizer embedded within the factory noticed the man's dexterity and issued him a directive (napravlenie) to work at a nearby weapons design bureau, where he was employed as a tester of fitted stocks in rifles. In 1938, he was conscripted into the Red Army. Because of his small size and engineering skills he was assigned as a tank mechanic, and later became a tank commander. While training, he made his first inventions, which concerned not only tanks, but also small weapons, and was personally awarded a wrist watch by Georgy Zhukov. Kalashnikov served on the T-34s of the 24th Tank Regiment, 108th Tank Division stationed in Stryi before the regiment retreated after the Battle of Brody in June 1941. He was wounded in combat in the Battle of Bryansk in October 1941 and hospitalised until April 1942. In the last few months of being in hospital, he overheard some fellow soldiers bemoaning their current rifles, which were plagued with reliability issues, such as jamming. As he continued to overhear the complaints that the Soviet soldiers had, as soon as he was discharged, he went to work on what would become the famous AK-47 assault rifle.
The SMG predecessor of the Kalashnikov rifle
Seeing the drawbacks of the standard infantry weapons at the time, he decided to construct a new rifle for the Soviet military. During this time Kalashnikov began designing a submachine gun. Although his first submachine gun design was not accepted into service, his talent as a designer was noticed. From 1942 onwards, Kalashnikov was assigned to the Central Scientific-developmental Firing Range for Rifle Firearms of the Chief Artillery Directorate of the Red Army.
In 1944, he designed a gas-operated carbine for the new 7.62×39mmcartridge. This weapon, influenced by the Garand rifle design, lost out to the new Simonov carbine which would be eventually adopted as the SKS; but it became a basis for his entry in an assault rifle competition in 1946. His winning entry, the "Mikhtim" (so named by taking the first letters of his name and patronymic, Mikhail Timofeyevich) became the prototype for the development of a family of prototype rifles.
A Type 2 AK-47, the first machined receiver variation
This process culminated in 1947, when he designed the AK-47 (standing for Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947). In 1949, the AK became the standard issue assault rifle of the Soviet Army and went on to become Kalashnikov's most famous invention.
While developing his first assault rifles, Kalashnikov competed with two much more experienced weapon designers, Vasily Degtyaryov and Georgy Shpagin, who both accepted the superiority of the AK-47 design. Kalashnikov named Alexandr Zaitsev and Vladimir Deikin as his major collaborators during those years.
Over the course of his career, he evolved the basic design into a weapons family. The AKM (Russian: Автомат Кала́шникова Модернизированный, lit. 'Kalashnikov modernized assault rifle'), first brought into service in 1959, was lighter and cheaper to manufacture, owing to the use of a stamped steel receiver (in place of the AK-47's milled steel receiver) and contained detail improvements such as a re-shaped stock and muzzle compensator. From the AKM, he developed a squad automatic weapon variant, known as the RPK (Russian: Ручной пулемет Кала́шникова, lit. 'Kalashnikov light machine gun').
Kalashnikov (right) and Eugene Stoner (left) hold the rifles they designed, taken May 1990.
He also developed the general-purpose PK machine gun (Russian: Пулемет Кала́шникова, lit. 'Kalashnikov machine gun'), which used the more powerful 7.62×54mmR cartridge of the Mosin–Nagant rifle. It is cartridge belt-fed, not magazine-fed, as it is intended to provide heavy sustained fire from a tripod mount, or be used as a light, bipod-mounted weapon. The common characteristics of all these weapons are simple design, ruggedness and ease of maintenance in all operating conditions.
Approximately 100 million AK-47 assault rifles had been produced by 2009, and about half of them are counterfeit, manufactured at a rate of about a million per year. Izhmash, the official manufacturer of AK-47 in Russia, did not patent the weapon until 1997, and in 2006 accounted for only 10% of the world's production.
Kalashnikov himself claimed he was always motivated by service to his country rather than money.
Kalashnikov's grandson, Igor, ran a German company called Marken Marketing International. The company revamps trademarks and produces merchandise carrying the Kalashnikov name, such as vodka, umbrellas and knives. One of the items is a knife named for the AK-74.
During a visit to the United States in the early 2000s, Kalashnikov was invited to tour a Virginia holding site for the forthcoming American Wartime Museum. Kalashnikov, a former tank commander, became visibly moved at the sight of his old tank in action, painted with his name in Cyrillic.
Death
After a prolonged illness, Kalashnikov was hospitalized on 17 November 2013, in an Udmurtian medical facility in Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia and where he lived. He died 23 December 2013, at age 94 from gastric hemorrhage. In January 2014, a letter that Kalashnikov wrote six months before his death to the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, was published by the Russian daily newspaper Izvestia. In the letter, he stated that he was suffering "spiritual pain" about whether he was responsible for the deaths caused by the weapons he created. Translated from the published letter he states, "I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I... a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?".
The patriarch wrote back, thanked Kalashnikov, and said that he "was an example of patriotism and a correct attitude toward the country". Kirill added about the design responsibility for the deaths by the rifle, "the church has a well-defined position when the weapon is defense of the Motherland, the Church supports its creators and the military, which use it."
Kalashnikov's father, Timofey Aleksandrovich Kalashnikov (1883–1930), was a peasant. He completed two grades of parochial school and could read and write. In 1901, he married Aleksandra Frolovna Kaverina (1884–1957), who was illiterate throughout her life. They had 19 children, but only eight survived to adult age; Kalashnikov was born 17th, and was close to death at age six.
In 1930, the government labeled Timofey Aleksandrovich a kulak, confiscated his property, and deported him to Siberia, along with most of the family. The eldest three siblings, daughters Agasha (b. 1905) and Anna and son Victor, were already married by 1930, and remained in Kuriya. After her husband's death in 1930, Aleksandra Frolovna married Efrem Kosach, a widower who had three children of his own.
Mikhail Kalashnikov married twice, the first time to Ekaterina Danilovna Astakhova of Altai Krai. He married the second time to Ekaterina Viktorovna Moiseyeva (1921–1977). She was an engineer and did much technical drawing work for her husband. They had four children: daughters Nelli (b. 1942), Elena (b. 1948) and Natalya (1953–1983), and a son Victor (1942–2018). Victor also became a prominent small arms designer.
The title to the AK-47 trademark belonged to Mikhail Kalashnikov's family until 4 April 2016, when the Kalashnikov Concern won a lawsuit to invalidate the registration of the trademark.
Weapon designs
During his career, Kalashnikov designed about 150 models of small weapons. The most famous of them are:
On his 90th birthday on 10 November 2009, Kalashnikov was named a "Hero of the Russian Federation" and presented with a medal by PresidentDmitry Medvedev who lauded him for creating "the brand every Russian is proud of"
In 2012, Izhevsk State Technical University was named after Kalashnikov
On 19 September 2017 a 9 metres (30 ft) monument of Kalashnikov was unveiled in Garden Ring, central Moscow. An activist who sought to disrupt the ceremony by displaying a sign reading "a creator of weapons is a creator of death" was subsequently arrested.
the home of Mikhail Kalashnikov in the village he set Courier lifetime bronze bust (1980)
the name of the designer named projected prospect in Izhevsk (1994)
"Honorary Citizen of the Altai Territory" (1997)
Ministry of Economy of Russia award – The sign "of small arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov" (1997)
Union of scientific and engineering organizations and the Government of Udmurtia established an award named after Mikhail Kalashnikov (1999)
Diamond company "Alrosa" extracted 29 December 1995 gem diamonds weighing 50.74 carats given the name "designer Mikhail Kalashnikov" (14.5 x 15, 0h15, 5 mm, quality Stones Black) (1999)
Mikhail Kalashnikov Cadet School in Votkinsk (2002)
Award in his name at the School of Weapon Skills of Izhevsk (2002)
Izhevsk State Cultural Institution "Museum of Mikhail Kalashnikov"
"Honorary Engineer of Kazakhstan" (Kazakhstan; 2004)
Gift from President Hugo Chávez, the highest award of the Republic – a copy of the famous sword of Simon Bolivar, which is a relic of Venezuela and the copy is equal to the highest award of the country (2009)
The name of Mikhail Kalashnikov was given to the military department of the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg (2009)
Izhevsk State Technical University was awarded the name of Mikhail Kalashnikov (2012)
German knife company Boker has dedicated a series to him (2013)
The companies that make Kalashnikov rifles, Izhmash and Izhevsk Mechanical Plant were merged and formally renamed Kalashnikov Concern. (2013)
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