Internationally-renown small arms designer, Internationally-Russian military hero and inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov has died at 94 in his rifle’s home town of Izhevsk. His passage follows several years of heart trouble.
Kalashnikov’s
most famous invention, the AK-47 rifle and the many guns that duplicate
the design, is to-date the most successful firearm of all time, and
likely will continue to be for many decades to come.
In
that way he has achieved a little bit of immortality, joining the likes
of Sam Colt, John Browning, Eugene Stoner, Hiram Maxim, John Garand,
Richard Gatling, Benjamin Henry and the Mauser brothers.
While
Kalashnikov has been given every ounce of credit due for his eponymous
rifle, the design didn’t spring up in a single flash of genius. It took
years of struggle and effort to invent the AK-47.
Kalashnikov
was born in Kurya on Nov. 10, 1919, the 17th child of Timofel and
Alexandra Kalashnikov, both well-to-do peasants. While from an early age
he showed a predisposition towards machines and mechanics, he grew up
hoping to be a poet and has in fact published half a dozen books of
poetry later in his life. He never finished high school.
At the age of 11 Kalashnikov’s family was deported to Siberia and their property was confiscated by Stalin’s Dekulakization regime,
where they lived in Nizhnyaya Mokhovaya on the Western Siberian Plain.
There he and his father took up hunting to put food on the table.
(Kalashnikov was from then on an active hunter into his 90s.)
After
just a few years in Siberia Kalashnikov asked to leave his family in
order to get a better education, hitchhiking 600 miles back to Kurya,
his first home. There he worked to become a mechanic for a the
Turkestan–Siberian Railway, where he would hone his engineering skills,
until 1938 when he was drafted.
Given his aptitudes and smaller size, Kalashnikov was made a tanker and never stopped tinkering.
In just three years he made a name for himself in the Red Army, having
invented a Tokarev-TT stabilizer for shooting through tank slits, a tank
engine runtime calculator and an inertia-driven tank shell counter to
let tankers know how many shots they had remaining.
These inventions were so popular that the Russian forces would make them standard on all tanks. Not bad for a poet.
In
June of 1941 he was called to Leningrad to complete and standardize his
tank modifications for implementation military-wide. On his way to
Leningrad he was hit by a shell during the October Battle of Bryansk,
which tore through his shoulder.
From
his hospital bed Kalashnikov continued to contribute to the Great
Patriotic War, by working on plans for a new submachine gun after
hearing so many wounded soldiers complain about the quality of their
small arms.
When
he was released from the hospital in April of 1942 he was immediately
granted a six-month sick leave to continue his recovery. It was in that
span that he traveled to the Matai depot to develop and prototype his
submachine gun.
And
it was a failure. The design was not accepted into service but his
talent would not go unnoticed. His largely self-taught body of
experience led him to build an entirely original sub-machine gun and it
was his unorthodox approach to building small arms that got the
attention of the Main Ordnance Directorate.
It
was there in 1944 that Kalashnikov turned his efforts to the
increasingly-popular and proven effective self-loading rifle. Chambered
for the new 7.62x39mm cartridge, Kalashnikov developed a simplified
version of the M1 Garand and submitted the rifle to the Red Army for
evaluation.
It,
too was rejected in favor of the Simonov Carbine, or SKS, which would
become the standard infantry rifle for the Soviet Army.
Over
the course of three more years Kalashnikov continued to toil over new
designs that could be made easily, used easily and cost less than
traditional machined steel firearms. In the end he wound up with a plan
that cherry-picked many proven mechanisms and traits from existing,
battle-proven designs and spun them into something altogether new.
In
1947 his plans for a new type of assault rifle were accepted and put
into manufacturing. The simplicity of the design, the low cost of
manufacturing, the stamped-steel construction and impressive overall
reliability propelled the AK-47 into the winner’s circle and it would
officially enter service in 1949.
Unofficially,
the AK-47 was still a failure. It would be years before it would see
use in numbers and for nearly the next decade the SKS remained the
actual standard infantry rifle.
It
wasn’t until 1956 that engineers at Izhevsk were able to develop the
technology to reliably weld together an AK-47 rifle as designed. In its
first seven years of manufacture, the AK-47 had a tremendous rejection
rate. They cost too much to make in numbers, and the interim solution,
using a milled receiver, while reliable, was also expensive.
While
the AK-47 may be the most successful design in the world, the truth is
that there weren’t a lot of actual AK-47s made. The design went through
three revisions, stamped and milled, before Kalashnikov unveiled the
AKM, which is what we really think of when we hear “AK-47.” It would be
this rifle that would make Kalashnikov a household name.
Whatever
they’re called, they’re Kalashnikov rifles. And even as the sun sets on
the original and improved designs by Kalashnikov and the Russian
Military gears for the adoption of the AK-12 — a new Russian rifle that
for the first time in over 60 years, departs from the fundamental AK
pattern — Kalashnikov will remain a cherished, household name, as the
Russian Ministry of Defense has renamed their small arms manufacturers
the Kalashnikov Concern.
Kalashnikov was one of the most decorated inventors of all time. He served his country for over 70 years.
