Inventor of most deadly weapon in history dies at 94

[Doc]

Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47, Dies at 94
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: December 23, 2013

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.
Enlarge This Image
Dima Korotayev/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47, holding a prototype of his famous assault rifle in 2007.
World Twitter Logo.
Connect With Us on Twitter

Viktor Chulkov, a spokesman for the republic’s president, confirmed the death, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

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 rifle’s creation, and the attention showered on him by the Kremlin’s 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.

Tens of millions of Kalashnikov rifles have been manufactured. Their short barrels, steep front-sight posts and curved magazines made them a marker of conflict that has endured for decades. The weapons also became both Soviet and revolutionary symbols and widespread instruments of terrorism, child-soldiering and crime.

The general, who sometimes lamented the weapons’ unchecked distribution but took pride in having invented them and in their reputation for reliability, weathered the collapse of the Soviet Union to assume a public role as a folk hero and unequivocal Russian patriot.

A Soviet nostalgist, he also served as the unofficial arms ambassador of the revived Russian state. He used public appearances to try to cast the AK-47’s checkered legacy in a positive way and to complain that knockoffs were being manufactured illegally by former Soviet allies and cutting into Russian sales.

The weapon, he said, was designed to protect his motherland, not to be used by terrorists or thugs. “This is a weapon of defense,” he said. “It is not a weapon for offense.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/world ... ge-94.html

[YMix]

Duplicate thread deleted.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.


" I sleep well.
It's the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence. "


he has a valid case


.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.


“ My soul ache is unbearable and has one irresolvable question: if my rifle took lives, does it mean that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, aged 93, a peasant woman’s son, an Orthodox Christian in faith, is guilty of those people’s deaths, even if they were enemies ? ”

.

“Good and evil coexist side by side, fighting and, worst of all, they resign themselves to each other in the hearts of people - that is what I have come to at the end of this earthly life. It’s similar to the kind of perpetual motion I wanted to invent in my younger years,” he wrote

The daily provides photos of the two-page letter. It’s printed rather than hand-written and has two photos of the weapons designer himself, as well as a decorative border and a signature. It also carries a date mark “09.06.2012”, similar to those used by archives to sort paperwork, which may contradict the reported date of writing.

Critics of the Russian Orthodox Church were quick to brand the letter as either a fake or an attempt to score publicity points over Kalashnikov’s death.

But Patriarch Kirill’s office confirmed that the letter was authentic. It said that the Orthodox Church does not condemn making weapons for the defense of one’s motherland, or using them against aggressors, Izvestia reports.

Kalashnikov’s daughter Elena, who had recently been acting as his personal assistant, said the letter was not sent through her and was probably penned by her father together with the prior of a cathedral in Izhevsk.

The church, which was demolished in 1937 and rebuilt in the mid-2000s, is mentioned in the letter as a place of great spiritual importance for the inventor. Kalashnikov wrote that he was glad that he rejected the idea of building a museum dedicated to him in the place where the church was located, because otherwise it might not have been reconstructed.

It’s not uncommon for inventors of instruments of death to take drastic steps in their later years to change their legacy. One of the most famous examples is Alfred Nobel, whose wealth was founded on dynamite. He was disturbed to read his premature obituary published erroneously in a newspaper, which branded him a “merchant of death”. It inspired him to allocate a greater portion of his fortune to establish the Nobel Prizes.

Another famous weapons designer, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was overwhelmed by the destructive power of the nuclear weapons he helped to create under the Manhattan Project. He became a vocal proponent of nuclear nonproliferation, a position which eventually cost him his security clearance and political influence.

.

.