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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 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.
From 1949, Mikhail Kalashnikov lived and worked in Izhevsk, Udmurtia. He held a degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences (1971) and was a member of 16 academies.
Over the course of his career, he evolved the basic design into a weapons family. The AKM in Russian Автомат Кала́шникова Модернизированный, (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, in Russian Ручной пулемет Кала́шникова (Kalashnikov light machine gun).
He also developed the general-purpose PK machine gun, in Russian Пулемет Кала́шникова, (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 their 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 stated that his motivation was always to serve his country, not to earn 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.
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.
He became one of the first people buried in the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery.
More information: The Engineer
is not because of the designer,
but because of politics.
Mikhail Kalashnikov
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