Russian inventor unleashes deadly ‘genie’
An old man in Russia today laments how his invention has been
used over six decades.
”
I developed it to defend my country when the Germans were
sweeping us before them. I never conceived how many millions of
lives it would take.
”
Russian inventor unleashes deadly ‘genie’
An old man in Russia today laments how his invention has been used over six decades.
“I developed it to defend my country when the Germans were sweeping us before them. I never conceived how many millions of lives it would take.”
Mikhail Kalashnikov, 86, was considering a statement to the UN conference on small arms control that convened last month at which his invention, the AK-47 assault rifle, was chief among its topics. “It distresses me to see it in the hands of gangsters and terrorists,” Kalashnikov said. “It’s especially heart-rending to see it carried by boy soldiers in Libya and Iraq on the news.”
Kalashnikov was born in November 1919 just after the October Revolution. He grew up on a farm in Siberia where his large family had been banished because of his father’s political ideology. Young Mikhail was good with a sickle but also good with his mind. He devised a small wooden mill to grind wheat into flour and sought other ways to make his family’s life better.
In 1938 Kalashnikov got a job at a railroad depot and learned a lot about mechanics. He was drafted into the army and assigned to a tank crew. In October of 1941 while fighting German troops who had invaded Russia, he was severely wounded when an enemy shell hit his tank.
Recuperating in a hospital he brooded on how his comrades were defending the motherland with bolt-action, single-shot rifles against automatic firepower. One night he sketched a plan for an automatic rifle that could easily be manufactured and maintained. After release from the hospital he was assigned to a military agency where a few superiors saw merit in his plan. They allowed him resources to develop it but Soviet bureaucracy stood in his way.
When the war ended in 1945, Kalashnikov refined his plans and the following year devised a working model. In 1947, the “Automatic Kalashnikov 1947” – or AK-47 – was born.
He gave his brainchild to Russia and a few years later it became its standard military firearm. At the height of the Cold War Russia provided millions of them to her allies and to insurgents they favored. In the 1960s it became the standard assault rifle in Indo China, Africa and South American countries. Its eight moving parts were simple to reproduce and could withstand desert sand and rice paddy mud. It also fired 600 rounds per minute.
Most of the 3 million combat deaths of the 1990s have been attributed to it. China, Egypt and Poland manufacture it and some Pakistan villages have made it a cottage industry. Later improvements have made it even more popular, and it is pictured on Mozambique’s flag.
The United States armed its Iraqi allies with thousands, and Venezuela ordered 100,000 last year.
“It never was used to defend Russia,” Kalashnikov lamented. “It is like a genie that got out of the bottle and walked in directions I never intended.”
