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Mikhail Timofeevich
Kalashnikov |
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Mikhail Timofeevich
Kalashnikov |
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Mikhail Kalashnikov was born to a family of peasants
in the village of Kurya (now the Altai district) in 1919.
He entered a ten year school at age 7 in 1926. When he completed his schooling he went on to find work in Alma-Alta as a clerk at the Turkestan-Siberia railway. In the fall of 1938 he was drafted into the Red Army where he was to become a tank driver. While he was there he developed a device to measure the power of tank engines. Because of this he was sent to Leningrad in late 1939 to oversee the production of these gauges. When the Germans invaded in 1941 he returned to soldiering as a tank commander. His tank career did not last long. In October of that year Sr. Sergeant Kalashnikov was severely wounded in combat near Bryansk. |
His wounds were severe and he was evacuated to a safer area for treatment. Kalashnikov would spend six months in the hospital followed by a long recovery leave in Alma-Alta. It was during this time that he began designing weapons.
In 1942 he completed the designs for his first submachine gun. Chambered in 7.62x25mm it allowed for both full and semi-automatic fire. The weapon also featured an under folding metal stock, a 30 round magazine, and was sighted out to a range of 500 meters. He then asked permission from the Kazakh Communist Party Central Committee to work in the machine shops of the Moscow Aviation Institute (which had by that time been moved to Alma-Alta). With the help of the head of the weapons department, A.I. Kazakov, Kalashnikov completed his weapon. It was then sent to the Felix E. Dzerzhinsky Artillery Academy for testing and inspection. The weapon was said to offer to few advantages over the PPS submachine gun developed by Sudaev to justify bringing it into full production. Despite this he was still encouraged to continue his work.
Kalashnikov then began to study weapon design principles and history. Books by Fedorov (the designer of the first assault rifle) and Blagonravov (the leading Soviet small arms design specialist) gave him numerous insights. He also began studying various foreign weapon designs to gain a wider understanding of what already existed.
| Over the next few years Kalashnikov worked at the Kovrov machine gun factory and continued to design prototype submachine guns in a variety of calibers. Of all these it would be the prototype assault rifle of 1946 chambering the M-43 intermediate cartridge that would bring him lasting fame. The design required many hours of hard work, as well as advice from experts like Degtyarev, Simonov, Sudaev and others. |
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The rifle soon became known to the world as the AK-47. It entered production in 1948 and was formally adopted the following year. He would go on to develop a whole family of weapons based on this design. Then in the 1970's he was instructed to craft a new version of his rifle to chamber a reduced caliber round of high velocity - the M-74 cartridge. Initially he protested claiming that it would not offer enough improvement over the existing model to justify the time and effort required to do so. Kalashnikov lost the argument in the end and went on to create the AK-74.
Kalashnikov has received many awards for his contributions to the Soviet military. He has been made a Hero of Socialist Labor twice and received both the Lenin and State prize Laureates. Over his career he also received three Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, the Order of Friendship of the People's, and an Order of the Red Star. As of 1995 he held a position as Technical-Colonel in the reserves. In addition to this he also served as a member of the Supreme Soviet on several occasions. In the 1990's he still worked at the Izhevsk Industrial Company that is the primary manufacturer of his rifles.
