Martin Antonenko
A Fixture
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Mikhail Kalashnikow
On December 23, 2013 Mikhail Timofejewitsch Kalashnikow, two-time "Hero of Socialist Labor", "Hero of Russia", holder of three orders of Lenin, other high orders and since 1999 honorary lieutenant general, dies in his apartment in Izhevsk.
"Complicated things are bad", that was the motto of the designer Kalashnikow, "and what wants to be good has to be easy."
He claims to have developed the first drafts for his rifle in the sick camp. Kalashnikow was seriously injured in 1941 while working as a tank commander near Bryansk in western Russia. He wanted to go back to the front, the designer later said, but he was not allowed to go because of his injury: "So it was the Germans' fault that I developed my rifle."
Kalashnikov's weapon, the famous AK 47 ...
... was simple, but robust. Neither cold nor heat, neither desert sand, water nor mud can harm it. This has made the Kalashnikov - easy to use and difficult to demolish - the standard instrument of killing in those wars that are not decided with high-tech weapons such as drones.
How many people lost their lives is hard to tell.
The secret of deadly reliability lies in the design. The bolt and housing of the rifle move towards each other as if on rails, dust and dirt are simply pushed out. The shooting precision suffered as a result, but the weapon practically never fails!
For many US soldiers in Vietnam, however, it was fatal that their M16 rifles failed - unlike the Kalashnikows of the Viet Cong fighters ...:
The story that has been rumored over and over again that the AK 47 is a mere copy of the German "Sturmgewehr 44" is wrong, but it cannot be eradicated. The decisive construction details are completely different!
Mikhail Kalashnikov never got rich. Until recently he lived in a modest three-room apartment in a prefabricated building in Izhevsk, a city that has been producing weapons since the time of Tsar Petr I.
He never accepted criticism of his invention. "I have created a weapon to defend the motherland," he used to say, "and if it is used in unjust wars, it is not the designer who is to blame, but the politicians."
He was a staunch communist until the end of his life. "I, the 17th child of a peasant family, could only become a designer in a country that was ruled by communists," he once said.
When a memorial relief for Kalashnikov was unveiled in Moscow in September 2017, there was an embarrassing aftermath:
Where there should actually be an engraved explosion drawing of the AK 47 on the relief, the - in Russia very well-known! - Sculptor Salawat Shcherbakov ...
... accidentally attached one of the German "Sturmgewehr 44" ...:
After a storm of protest across Russia, this detail has since been removed ...:
On December 23, 2013 Mikhail Timofejewitsch Kalashnikow, two-time "Hero of Socialist Labor", "Hero of Russia", holder of three orders of Lenin, other high orders and since 1999 honorary lieutenant general, dies in his apartment in Izhevsk.
"Complicated things are bad", that was the motto of the designer Kalashnikow, "and what wants to be good has to be easy."
He claims to have developed the first drafts for his rifle in the sick camp. Kalashnikow was seriously injured in 1941 while working as a tank commander near Bryansk in western Russia. He wanted to go back to the front, the designer later said, but he was not allowed to go because of his injury: "So it was the Germans' fault that I developed my rifle."
Kalashnikov's weapon, the famous AK 47 ...
... was simple, but robust. Neither cold nor heat, neither desert sand, water nor mud can harm it. This has made the Kalashnikov - easy to use and difficult to demolish - the standard instrument of killing in those wars that are not decided with high-tech weapons such as drones.
How many people lost their lives is hard to tell.
The secret of deadly reliability lies in the design. The bolt and housing of the rifle move towards each other as if on rails, dust and dirt are simply pushed out. The shooting precision suffered as a result, but the weapon practically never fails!
For many US soldiers in Vietnam, however, it was fatal that their M16 rifles failed - unlike the Kalashnikows of the Viet Cong fighters ...:
The story that has been rumored over and over again that the AK 47 is a mere copy of the German "Sturmgewehr 44" is wrong, but it cannot be eradicated. The decisive construction details are completely different!
Mikhail Kalashnikov never got rich. Until recently he lived in a modest three-room apartment in a prefabricated building in Izhevsk, a city that has been producing weapons since the time of Tsar Petr I.
He never accepted criticism of his invention. "I have created a weapon to defend the motherland," he used to say, "and if it is used in unjust wars, it is not the designer who is to blame, but the politicians."
He was a staunch communist until the end of his life. "I, the 17th child of a peasant family, could only become a designer in a country that was ruled by communists," he once said.
When a memorial relief for Kalashnikov was unveiled in Moscow in September 2017, there was an embarrassing aftermath:
Where there should actually be an engraved explosion drawing of the AK 47 on the relief, the - in Russia very well-known! - Sculptor Salawat Shcherbakov ...
... accidentally attached one of the German "Sturmgewehr 44" ...:
After a storm of protest across Russia, this detail has since been removed ...:
