Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47, Dies at 94

[Valin]

NY Times:

C. J. CHIVERS

December 23, 2013

 

Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov holding a model of AK-47 assault rifle in 1997.

 

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 Udmurtia republic, where he lived. He was 94.

 

(Snip)

 

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 rifles creation, and the attention showered on him by the Kremlins 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.

 

 

(Snip)

 

____________________________________________________________________________