Kalashnikov Born: Designer of the World's Deadliest Rifle

Mikhail Kalashnikov designed the AK-47 assault rifle while recovering from World War II wounds, creating a weapon so reliable and simple that it became the most widely used firearm in history. Born in Kurya, Altai Krai, in 1919, the seventeenth of nineteen children in a peasant family, he was conscripted into the Red Army in 1938 and served as a tank commander before being seriously wounded at the Battle of Bryansk in 1941. During his hospital recovery, he overheard fellow soldiers complaining about the unreliability of their weapons and resolved to design something better. He had no formal engineering education. He taught himself firearms design through trial and error, entering military competitions and progressively refining his prototypes. The AK-47, adopted by the Soviet Army in 1949, was designed for mass production by unskilled labor and for use by soldiers with minimal training. Its loose tolerances meant that sand, mud, and ice would not jam the mechanism. Its stamped-metal construction was cheaper to manufacture than the machined-steel rifles used by Western armies. The Soviet Union distributed AK-47s and manufacturing licenses to allied nations, revolutionary movements, and liberation armies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, turning the weapon into the universal symbol of armed resistance. An estimated 100 million AK-47s and their variants have been produced, making it the most manufactured firearm in history. The rifle appears on the flags of Mozambique and Hezbollah and the coat of arms of East Timor. Kalashnikov himself expressed ambivalence in his later years, reportedly writing to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church asking whether he bore moral responsibility for the millions killed by his invention. He died on December 23, 2013, at ninety-four.