The creator of the world's most dangerous weapon, the AK-47: The life story of Mikhail Kalashnikov
The infantry rifle Kalashnikov designed while in the ranks of the Red Army of the Soviet Union fighting against Hitler's fascism in the Second World War brought fame and high rank to Kalashnikov.
Kalashnikov was born on November 10, 1919 in the village of Kurya in the Altai region, one of 18 children in a farming family. Only 6 of the children survived.
After his high school education, he started to work as a technical secretary in the railways. He enlisted in the Red Army in 1938 and was trained as a weapons specialist. II. He was seriously wounded in the Battle of Bryank (September 1941), where he participated as a tank specialist in World War II.
As he began to recover, he set to work on the AK-47 at the Aviation Research Department in Moscow.
The German army was busy developing an assault weapon that combined the accuracy of a conventional rifle with the firing power of a submachine gun.
The weapons in the hands of the Soviet army were inferior to the German ones.
While Kalashnikov was lying in the hospital, a soldier approached and asked why the Soviet army had not developed a weapon equivalent to that of the Germans.
"So I designed a machine gun for the soldier," said Kalashnikov.
When the deficiencies in the first designs were finally fixed in 1947, the model we know today as the AK-47 emerged.
The Soviet army began using the new weapon in 1949. For this product, Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov was awarded the Stalin Prize, three Orders of Lenin and Hero of Socialist Labor awards.
The city of Izhevsk, where he lived after 1949, declared Kalashnikov an honorary citizen in 1987. On his 75th birthday, former President Boris Yeltsin promoted him to major general.
However, since the simplicity of the AK-47 weapon he designed made it easy to copy, Kalashnikov did not gain a great financial benefit from this work.
At the age of 83, a German company bought the name Kalashnikov for 30 percent of its shares to use in a number of products.
Still, Kalashnikov's name will continue to be associated with the AK-47. Kalashnikov explained that he did not accept responsibility for the large number of people who died with this weapon:
"My aim was to produce a weapon that would protect the borders of my country. It is not my fault that Kalashnikovs were used in many troubled areas. The blame lies not with the designer, but with the policies implemented in these countries."
Kalashnikov died in 2013 at the age of 94.