AVTOMAT KALASHNIKOVA

The AK-47 is short for the Russian “Avtomat Kalashnikova”, which means “Kalashnivov’s automatic”, and 47 refers to the year in which it was selected as the official weapon of the Soviet Union. The AK47 is noted as a weapon that is very easy to use, with very high firepower. Their strength is in their size: neither so small as to lack sufficient firepower, like revolvers, nor so big as to become unwieldy or have too much recoil. They are so simple to clean and assemble that in the former Soviet Union the military trained schoolboys to do it in an average of two minutes. Mikhail Kalashnikov is the inventor of this high-powered weapon. Little did he anticipate what his resulting firearm would become, when he set out to design a weapon of value for the Soviet Army that he served in for many years. Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov was born in 1919, and is now a well-preserved old man, who still gets invited all over the place as a movable icon to the most famous assault rifle in the world. Before retiring from the armed services of the Soviet Union, he received a general’s stipend of 500 rubles, which is more or less $500 a month. If he had been able to patent his weapon in the West, he would undoubtedly be one of the richest men in the world. There are approximately more than 150 million Kalashnikovs of varying models that have been produced over the years. Even if he only earned one dollar for each weapon, he would be swimming in money.“I did not invent that weapon to make money, but only and exclusively to defend the Motherland in a moment in which she needed it. If I had to go back and do it all over again, I would do exactly the same things and live my life just as I have. I have worked all my life, and my life is my work”. Interesting, as there is nothing in the world which has produced more deaths than the AK-47. It has killed more than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than the bubonic plague, more than malaria, more than all the attacks of the Islamic fundamentalists.Yet there are those who consider its inventor, and the gun itself, to be an icon.