AK47 assault rifle inventor Kalashnikov dies at 94

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25497013

by yawz • 13 years ago

253 279 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

brudgers2• 13 years ago

In the abstract, the Kalshnikov is interesting as a design which scaled well and that provided the right set of design trade-offs to remain a viable choice among small arms for more than half a century.

dingaling• 13 years ago

Indeed! By accounts Korobov's 1946 rival ( the TKB-408 ) was technically more sophisticated with more potential, but that ensnared it during testing and the AK passed. Excellence vs good enough.

Ten years later Korobov tried again with the 517 rifle, but again Kalashnikov prevailed with the AKM because of its commonality with the vast installed-base of AKs.

walshemj2• 13 years ago

STUG 44 was the inspiration for the AK though

varjag• 13 years ago

By accounts Korobov's 1946 rival ( the TKB-408 ) was technically more sophisticated with more potential, but that ensnared it during testing and the AK passed. Excellence vs good enough.

TKB was prone to jams and had worse accuracy than the AK prototype. It also looked ugly. So the better design won, although it sounds dull ;)

mavhc• 13 years ago

If only more people created more efficient weapons the world would be a better place

GFischer• 13 years ago

I want more efficient nonlethal weapons.. why is it such a small fraction of weapons research?

steauengeglase• 13 years ago

Napoleon changed war with interchangeable people. Eli Whitney changed war with interchangeable parts. Kalashnikov changed war with interchangeable nations.

mpg332• 13 years ago

Title is slightly misleading...he invented the widely used AK-47. The first assault rifle was the Sturmgewehr 44 (StG 44) invented by the Germans during WW2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StG_44#Legacy

chops2• 13 years ago

So he's an assault rifle inventor, not the assault rifle inventor. The title isn't necessarily misleading so much as ambiguous.

goldenkey• 13 years ago

It's neither. AK47 assault rifle + inventor. What's not to get?

fwr• 13 years ago

"AK47 assault rifle inventor Kalashnikov dies at 94"

mpg332• 13 years ago

looks like op edited title to include "AK47" now

Uchikoma• 13 years ago

The StG 44 was the first "modern" assault rifle, there were several similar automatic weapons earlier.

mynameishere• 13 years ago

Pretty much. Submachine guns had been around for years, and WWII saw millions of them, but it apparently never occurred to anyone to scale them up to use rifle cartridges. There were 4.5 million of this weird thing,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten

In street fighting, I can't imagine it being much worse than an AK 47 (at least in close contact)...and they cost 1/8th of an M1 Garand, so presumably a lot cheaper than what an assault rifle would cost.

inanov• 13 years ago

may he rest in peace

waterlesscloud• 13 years ago

He's holding like the Cadillac of AK-47s in that pic.

cynwoody• 13 years ago

Is that an AK-74? Bin Laden's favorite weapon?

bhousel• 13 years ago

Wow, one of 18 children?

johansch2• 13 years ago

I wonder how many were killed by this thing? BS guess: 200 million? (2 per produced rifle according to wikipedia)

larrik• 13 years ago

My own BS guess: 2 per produced rifle seems extremely high to me. I think .2 per produced rifle would still be high.

mtdewcmu• 13 years ago

I agree, that number does sound kind of high. The number of deaths per rifle would likely follow a heavy-tail distribution: a few rifles would have extremely high numbers, and most would be have extremely low numbers. So the average would be a lot higher than the median. That doesn't rule out 2/rifle on average as a possibility. But the average is a misleading statistic if you're talking about the common case.

bsamuels• 13 years ago

I think you're drastically overestimating how much action weapons see. Consider the amount of rifles belonging to collectors, military, how many are used in training, how many are in weapons stockpile.

Maybe 1 in 5 rifles have even been used in action. Probably 1 in 5 of those rifles have ever hit someone. It's going to be a number several orders of magnitude lower than 200 million that's for sure.

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

Even 2 million people is a loss of life hard for me to comprehend. The only way I can come to terms with that number is by thinking of it like: If I meet one new person each day, then I'll meet about 1000 people every three years. If I die 30 years from now, then I'll have met 10k people. In that circumstance, 2 million people is 200x more souls than I'll meet in the rest of my life. I'd have to meet two hundred new people each and every day for 30 years.

Kind of strange trying to wrap my head around such numbers. Maybe nonsensical looking at it that way, but it's the only way to look at it that hits me how each of these people who died were people with hopes and dreams and fears and loves. Some of those people were vicious wild animals; others may have been poets caught in a bad situation.

tlear2• 13 years ago

Would probably be easier to estimate the number from getting number of killed in all wars in last 60 years. Separating by type of war and then applying fraction killed by small arms

aaronem49• 13 years ago

Zero; a firearm has neither agency nor volition. The question, in order to be sensible, would have to be one of how many people were killed, by other people, who used a firearm of Gospodin Kalashnikov's design to do so.

enscr• 13 years ago

There we go again... Chicken or egg might be easier to resolve than guns vs people

codex• 13 years ago

A large boulder has no agency or volition, but landslides still kill people. Cause of death need not be singleton, either.

yawz4• 13 years ago

So, in absolute, nothing is good or bad, until you decide how to use it. So nothing should be banned, illegal, etc. until somebody does something wrong it it. Then we can catch and charge that person. This doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

You're not going to use a fire-arm to water your plants. You know its purpose when you see/buy/own one. Fair enough, one doesn't need a fire-arm to kill someone but making the killing much easier with a fire-arm cannot be considered innocent or neutral.

nether• 13 years ago

We settle by duel: you bring a person, I'll bring a gun.

thenmar3• 13 years ago

Oh come on, pull your head out of the sand. Guns are a complicated issue, and pretending it's this simple makes you sound like a caricature of an American conservative.

rwissmann• 13 years ago

You are wrong. It is not even a question of perspective or moral position. For something to kill me that something does not need to have agency or volition, it simply has to cause my death. A volcano or an asteroid certainly have neither, and yet they are quite capable of killing. 'To be killed by something' can imply a relation of causality just as much (or more) than one of moral responsibility.

Stop trying to distort the meaning of natural language to suit your specific political agenda.

mikecsh• 13 years ago

That's such a BS comment that gets trotted out every time something like this is discussed. It's meaningless. The invention of the AK47 and its ease of manufacture led to its proliferation which led to more people being able to kill than would otherwise have been possible. Don't wilfully ignore the underlying message by using bullshit quips.

migrantgeek• 13 years ago

Sounds like a BS way to change the argument. I don't think the parent poster was suggesting that these guns somehow rose up and chased down another person to have them killed. We all understand people were the root cause. Guns don't cause violence but they definitely help.

I've spent time in Iraq as a soldier and a contractor. I've personally used a blade and a firearm against another human being. As a civilian I own an assault rifle and a pistol because I am very confident in their abilities over knives and my hand to hand skills.

dclowd99014• 13 years ago

I get you're being rhetorical, but your point deserves challenge, so I'll mutate it by raising the point that, for the question to be sensible, we must ask how many of those killed would not have been were it not for the robust, cheap, easily mass-produceable nature of the gun.

We can assume these individuals would still have wanted to kill each other one way or another, but the availability of such a gun made it "more" feasible.

mikeash13• 13 years ago

Approximately nobody who reads "killed by an AK-47" understands this to mean anything besides "killed by a person firing an AK-47".

And clearly you know what it means, as you proposed that exact interpretation in your comment.

What's the point in arguing about it? It's an idiomatic phrasing that everybody understands.

oijaf888• 13 years ago

If a stack of AK47's fell on someone and killed them, would you attribute that death to the AK47s?

IgorPartola4• 13 years ago

I cannot downvote you enough. This is a bullshit line of thought that detracts from the actual discussion. "Guns don't kill people... Toast toasts toast..." Please. Stop.

We can discuss whether guns as a concept have a place in our society, but you spun up a discussion on semantics when none is warranted.

curun1r• 13 years ago

If we presume that the AK-47 is a very well-designed firearm, and 50+ years of its use would seem to indicate that it is, then your response incorrectly presumes that the person who acted with volition would have been equally successful when using a firearm of an inferior design. A death that occurred solely because the weapon allowed a kill by an otherwise insufficiently-skilled marksman can be attributed to the gun rather than its firer.

The number of deaths attributable to the AK-47 would then be the number of total people killed by people using AK-47s minus the number of people who would still have been killed with the best available alternative weapon. It's a much smaller number, but it's a positive number none the less.

xorgar8314• 13 years ago

Just like napalm, mustard gas and nuclear weapons, yep, no volition there either. Just can't figure out why people misuses weapons to harm others... such a mystery.

brohee• 13 years ago

Very much bullshit, adding all war victims since WW2 don't ever come close to that number. And I doubt her are more than one or two millions murder victims since 1947, and that's already an enormous number....

maxerickson• 13 years ago

The world is a bigger more violent place than that. There are presently hundreds of thousands murders each year.

So something like 2 million people have been murdered the last 5 or 6 years.

(but still all those acts aren't being done with 1 single type of rifle)

morsch• 13 years ago

The definition of war victim is debatable, but I'm pretty sure any sensible definition will result in casualties much higher than 2 million since 1945. The number of soldiers of the North Vietnamese forces who died seems to be around 1 million, for example. If you include civilian casualties -- and why wouldn't you -- it seems that the Vietnam War alone cost almost 2 million people their lives.

The number of murders seems to be around 450000 per year, world wide, with, I assume, lower numbers in the past due to a lower overall population. Still, easily more than 2 million since 1947.

I'm not saying that in either of those figures the AK47 (or, in fact, any small arms) were significantly involved, but that wasn't the question.

vacri8• 13 years ago

Over the past decade, the US has had between 11-18k murders per year. Back-of-the-enveloping it to a bit less than 10k/year for 66 years gives us around half a million murders in the US. The US has a depressingly world-average rate of murder, and is only 5% of world population.

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

As a scale for the guess: 65 million people live in the UK. Around 313 million people live in the United States. Between 60 and 85 million people, including civilian casualties, were killed in World War 2.

johansch2• 13 years ago

Seems like around 200M people were killed in wars during the 20th century:

http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/massacre.html

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_people_died_in_war_since_...

http://www.cissm.umd.edu/papers/files/deathswarsconflictsjun...

I'm revising my BS guess to 1/5th of this; 40 million.

gkop• 13 years ago

There's no way to know the answer to this, of course. But something important to recognize about the AK is the high number of civilians killed by its fire. It was designed for street fighting. At least 4 out of 5 infantrymen bearing AKs don't even bother to aim the rifle. Probably 90% of deaths by AK are civilian.

yawz4• 13 years ago

We live in a strange world. I guess because we are a strange species. Humans have been good at killing (each other) since the dawn of time (well... since we were able push, hit, bite, etc. each other). So I don't doubt that if it wasn't for AK-47 then something else would have taken its place but it is, nonetheless, a very creepy thing to have your name becoming popular thanks to the one of the most popular killing tools/machines out there.

smokinjoe• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Mr. Gatling, although I don't think Mr. Kalashnikov thought his invention would bring about World Peace.

saraid2164• 13 years ago

According to TallGuyShort's comment, he thought it could be used for defensive violence and was pained at the thought it was being used for offensive violence.

_delirium2• 13 years ago

He did mention in an interview once that he wished he had become famous for inventing an agricultural machine instead: "Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer. I always wanted to construct agricultural machinery."

Quoted in this artice: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/12/23/mikhail_kalashn...

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

The BBC article I read on this mentioned something similar although it was more along the lines of he said didn't make any money from the gun, he would have been better off (made more money) by designing a lawn mower.

tlear2• 13 years ago

AK47 is a masterpiece of design, I bet it will still be in wide use when all of the people reading this are long dead.

qwerta• 13 years ago

I would not call it masterpiece. It is cheap and easy to make. But otherwise it was "good enough" weapon even for soviets.

mikeash13• 13 years ago

Being cheap and easy to make while still being an effective weapon of war is what makes it a masterpiece.

TallGuyShort• 13 years ago

I'm biased by being a gun enthusiast and AK-variant owner myself, but I quite admire him as an engineer. It is an excellent design: simple, robust, time-proven, and easy to manufacture. Always a shame when great engineering is shadowed by violence, however. He has said that it should have been a weapon of defense, not offense. "It is painful for me to see when criminal elements of all kinds fire from my weapon".

dharmach• 13 years ago

How a gun as a weapon of defense differs from a one used as a weapon of offense, from design perspective? Or there are no differences in design?

lmm• 13 years ago

At a civilian level, AIUI law enforcement and the like tend to prefer shorter-range, more accurate weapons than the AK47. In a war situation I'm not sure how much difference there is.

yogo• 13 years ago

Whether you are defending or attacking a gun's function is to fire rounds and kill or injure the target. With the exception of certain scenarios like riots, it gets that job done, and that's why armed forces, swat teams, and gangbangers all use them.

chrissnell• 13 years ago

A defensive weapon is typically designed to provide suppressive fire. Suppressive fire is typically high volume (think machine gun) and aimed over a larger area, with the intent of keeping the enemies heads' down (thus not firing), providing covering fire so that friendly forces can maneuver.

hyperbovine2• 13 years ago

Another fine example of how smart people can also be so achingly naive and unworldly. Gee, who would've thought criminals would use a machine gun for offensive purposes.

aaronem49• 13 years ago

At the time Gospodin Kalashnikov designed the weapon which brought his name to the world's attention, his nation had just suffered an invasion of Germans, which was repelled only at the cost of roughly twenty million of his countrymen's lives -- an invasion, moreover, against which Gospodin Kalashnikov himself fought, and was wounded, as part of a T-34 regiment -- and was by no means certain it would not soon suffer an invasion of far more numerous Chinese. In light of that, perhaps it's not so hard to understand how he could have conceived of his weapon as one of defense.

(It is, though, rather difficult to understand how you, or indeed anyone, could with a straight face describe such a man as "naïve and unworldly". Ignorance is the kindest explanation I can devise.)

_random_2• 13 years ago

They were not selling guns to criminals in communist Russia.

bradleyjg2• 13 years ago

He was working for Stalin. The man is on a very short list for worst person of the entire 20th century, and it's a tough competition! The "criminal elements" are pikers in comparison.

_random_2• 13 years ago

Yeah, no criminal ever won a World War and no criminal ever industrialized a country the size of USSR.

Zak2• 13 years ago

His country had just been invaded by Nazis. Not to imply that Stalin was any better, but if Hitler invaded your country, killed a bunch of people and devastated the land, you might feel the urge to design weapons.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

Violence is a key part of the human experience and unsurprisingly we devote tremendous intellectual resources to the task. Much of the history of engineering is devoted to facilitating violence. I never got engineers who tried to distance themselves from that aspect of the profession.

emiliobumachar• 13 years ago

Excuse me if I'm too forward but I find that hard to believe. Do you really not get, i.e., not understant their position, as opposed to merely disagreeing with it?

mertd3• 13 years ago

In what way is prematurely ending a fellow humans life "key" to my experience?

smoyer2• 13 years ago

I designed parts for the cluster-bombs that ultimately were dropped on Libyan beaches and when I saw them "staked" into the ground, my hope was that they'd prove their worth as a deterrent - and that the beaches would remain empty of humans until they had all "gone safe".

moocowduckquack3• 13 years ago

There's still far more engineers out there building bridges than there are who work out how to blow them up. On balance, I think that is a good thing as otherwise there would be a shortage of bridges.

pearjuice• 13 years ago

I wonder what his thoughts were on his rifle being the cause of so many deaths.

danohuiginn• 13 years ago

To be honoured by a 100-million-gun salute?

I'd highly recommend "The Gun", a history of the Kalashnikov by New York Times journalist CJ Chivers. [his blog and articles are also excellent].

Kalashnikov-like guns are maybe comparable to the shipping container: relatively simple mass-produced objects that have transformed the world in all kinds of ways. Kalashnikov the man was only a small part of that (he was more figurehead than sole creator).

dclowd99014• 13 years ago

Interesting comparison, as shipping containers may also be used for nefarious purposes the world over, but it's not a thought that immediately comes to mind unless it's invited by comparing them with a cheaply mass-produced gun.

brudgers2• 13 years ago

The difference between shipping containers and small arms is obvious. The potential for causing grave bodily injury and death is part and parcel of the primary intended use of a Kalashnikov. Other uses are simply byproducts.

The design and intended use of a shipping container stands in exactly the opposite relationship to the means of delivering violence.

sitkack3• 13 years ago

We used shipping containers to kill captured Afghans via asphyxiation in 2001 http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/07/13/the-convoy-of-de...

from the linked newyorktimes article:

    Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 
    that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed
    metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated
    while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when
    guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been
    buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just
    outside Shibarghan.

If I were to do it again, I'd use autonomous drones with buggy firmware, or just change the Rules of Engagement so that it was a free fire zone until I decided it wasn't.

aaronem49• 13 years ago

It would have been kinder just to have shot them once each in the head, don't you think?

greedo• 13 years ago

We? Who is the "we" you're referring to? If you're an afghani, or a relative of Dostum, you can say "we." But this was an afghani atrocity, not one perpetrated by the West. And before you say that the CIA is connected due to their aid to the Northern Alliance, correlation doesn't mean causation.

Ask the hazara how well they were treated by the Taliban. This neck of the woods is full of people who make it a game to kill off their rivals. I wouldn't be surprised if the translation of "compromise" in pashto means "wait til we can kill all of them."

shiven• 13 years ago

Thanks for the book recommendation, read it recently and liked it.

Also, for a more hollywood version (but still worth a watch), go see the "Lord of War" (2005) film. It touches upon a lot of topics in that book and impact of AK's on our world.

Highly recommend both!

rubiquity• 13 years ago

First ClanBase dies and now the inventor of the AK-47? It's like the world is trying to steal my youth of playing Counter-Strike.

uparix• 13 years ago

At least he managed not to die on his own invention.

jotm• 13 years ago

While I respect Kalashnikov and his rifle (very simple, among the best weapons in the world IMHO), the design was taken from the Germans, just like it was with the Makarov pistol.

The MP43 and MP44 saw action right at the end of WW2, when the Russians stormed Berlin. Just like the Walther PP, Russians basically copied and (slightly) improved upon the design.

Gotta give credit where it's due...

tarre• 13 years ago

I am not an expert on this area, but I have got impression, that the German WW2-era assault rifles had quite complex design and they were expensive to manufacture. I think AK47 was exactly the opposite.

magila• 13 years ago

While the two are somewhat similar in external appearance, the STG44 and AK47 are very different rifles internally. Basically the only thing they have in common mechanically is that they both use a long stroke gas piston, along with many other contemporary small arms (Garand, BAR, Bren, DP, etc).

commandar• 13 years ago

Gotta give credit where it's due...

From a mechanical action standpoint, the AK looks more like the American M1 Garand than it does the MP43/44.

Just like the Walther PP, Russians basically copied and (slightly) improved upon the design.

You probably have a stronger case here, though, again, when it comes to the specifics, the Makarov has a parts count nearly half that of the Walther.

Really, firearms design is incredibly iterative. If we're talking service handguns, for example, there are really fewer than a half-dozen designs that nearly every modern, full size service handgun made today derives from in some manner.

dsy• 13 years ago

However, pride in his invention was tempered with sadness at its use by criminals

This makes me wonder if when I am 94, people will look at me, a data scientist, in much the same way: "well of course AK-47 was not only used to defend Russia's border but also by criminals and militant countries to kill a ton of people"

  :s/AK-47/your favorite AI algorithm/

  :s/defend Russia's borders/some harmless ad targeting platform/

  :s/criminals and militant countries/aggressive BigCo/

  :s/kill a ton of people/something really evil/

Clearly, it's a lot easier to see the evil consequences when you design a rifle. And yet, maybe I'm just being blind too.

</technophobic comment. back to work on some convolutional neural network implementation, and back to job hunting at companies that promise "don't be evil", rather than "won't be evil">

Its comparative simplicity made it cheap to manufacture, as well as reliable and easy to maintain

  "ayy

Edit: typos (thanks herge)

herge• 13 years ago

Man, I need to check up on my VIM helptext, I have no idea what 'ML algorithm' does as a regex flag.

Also, vim will accept any character right after the 's' as a regex boundary, so you could rewrite it as

    :s:AK-47:<your favorite AI/ML algorithm:

, and it would work!

mnemonicsloth• 13 years ago

Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it

You aren't blind. Now what are you going to do about it?

aaronem49• 13 years ago

Taking a lot on yourself, there, don't you think?

michalu2• 13 years ago

Of course he created it for defence. Few years before he made the design Russia was invaded out of blue by an army with a goal to enslave whole nation. The plans of Nazis executed in Poland included systematically malnourishing nation to break the spirit and physique of young, giving no education to slavic kids except counting to 500 and learning to serve Nazis like gods. And this was actually executed. (add 16% of your population killed for no reason, gas chambers etc.)

Now experience all this like Kalashnikov did, and I guess you would think differently about the role of guns then most people do now in 2013.

refurb2• 13 years ago

Few years before he made the design Russia was invaded out of blue by an army with a goal to enslave whole nation.

Don't forget that Russia was invaded by the same army they colluded with to split up and enslave the nation of Poland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact

michalu2• 13 years ago

They did, and so Great Britain and France pacted with Nazis to give in Czechoslovakia in "Munich betrayal" Czechoslavakia was an ally with Fr/GB agreeing to defend each other and they were much better prepared for war. In WW2 none of the main actors were innocent.

gdy7• 13 years ago

Don't forget that the West apparently didn't mind Germany expanding eastward a little bit [1].

Also don't forget that the poor little nation of Poland didn't let the Red Army pass through to defend Czechoslovakia (quite reasonable considering that it took a chunk of the USSR territory not a long before that [4]) and it wasn't shy of getting a piece of Czechoslovakia too [2]. Quoting Churchill: "Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State" [3].

In this situation expanding the border westward can be viewed as a preventive war on part of the USSR. If you an American this might remind you of the contemporary Bush Doctrine.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Czechoslov...

[3] http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/10/the-polish-gu...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War_in_19...

iluvuspartacus• 13 years ago

A Kalashnikov only lasted for 94 years? Must be defective. Those babies last forever.

negamax• 13 years ago

2 * 47

lanbird• 13 years ago

94 : 2 =

redthrowaway2• 13 years ago

I think it's telling to look at what the design goals of the AK were when it was first conceived:

1) It was to be the primary weapon of the World Wide Socialist Revolution. That means it had to operate reliably in every environment on Earth, from the Siberian tundra to the jungles of Central America to the deserts of the Middle East. It would have to work flawlessly in a -50C blizzard and a +50C sandstorm, as well as in near 100% humidity while caked in mud.

2) It was to be cheaply produced by the million in not particularly advanced Soviet factories, by people who were not highly trained, then shipped to all corners of the Earth.

3) It was to be used by guerrillas, generally poorly trained peasants, fighting to overthrow professional US-backed armies (see: Cuba). Thus the rifle had to allow untrained fighters to go toe-to-toe with professional warriors, given the constraints of the fight as it was imagined: hit-and-run, ambushes, etc.

When you look at the number of design criteria it had to fulfill that had nothing to do with its merits as a marksman's weapon, it's amazing how well Kalashnikov achieved what he set out to do. The fact that it's still the primary weapon of insurgents, rebels, and terrorists 60+ years later is testament to that. As an engineering feat, it's an absolute marvel.

rplnt• 13 years ago

Its variants are still primary weapons of many countries' armies as well.

gpcz• 13 years ago

Slashdot declared the AK-47 one of the top 10 hacks of all time in 1999 (src: http://slashdot.org/story/8804 ) alongside Perl, Bletchley Park, the SR-71 Blackbird, Apollo 13's recovery, and Future Crew's "Second Reality." It's a little strange to see a PC demo on that list, but I would definitely put the AK-47 on there.

quickpost• 13 years ago

Awesome summary - thanks for sharing. Now I appreciate the beauty of his creation much more, despite the fact it was designed to kill.

agrostis2• 13 years ago

Minor correction: in 1947, when the AK was developed, World Wide Socialist Revolution, as you put it, was not on the agenda for quite some time. The idea of Soviet autarky (“establishing socialism in one particular country”) has been adopted by Stalin as far back as in 1924, the World Revolution slogan has been removed from the USSR Constitution when it was revised in 1936, and by 1943 Stalin has done away with Comintern, the organization which was conceived (by Lenin and Trotsky, originally) with the aim of propagating revolution to capitalist countries.

In 1947, USSR was indeed preparing for a possible World War III against the US and UK, but the general idea of this war, at least in the East, was that of a conflict of nations. That said, guerilla tactics and the involvement of irregular fighting forces had proved to be quite effective during WWII, and so, of course, the new weapon had to be designed with such uses in mind.

walshemj2• 13 years ago

No pre ww2 research had proved in a number of places that a weapon smaller intermediate cartridge around 7mm was better that the traditional bulky long ranged rifle caliber weapons the SMLE for example - especially for non professional army with little training.

The AK was just good implementation of the concept and influenced by the German STG 44 and the use of SMG's like the PPSh-41 by Soviet forces.

the UK post Ww2 tried to move to this with the EM-2 .280 but was stymied by the USA's instance on retaining the macho full power rifle cartridge.

a-nikolaev• 13 years ago

He simply made a good gun, not a weapon of revolution, and not a weapon for guerrilla armies. It was just a new gun for regular USSR army. Kalashnikov was a simple soldier during the WW2, so he knew very well that a new rifle: 1) has to be very reliable, 2) it has to shoot better than your enemies weapons, 3) it should be easily mass-produced in the time of war, when resources (of all kind) are scarce. These are the design goals.

mladenkovacevic• 13 years ago

I think one of my countrymen wrote a perfect song to play at Mr. Kalashnikov's funeral: http://youtu.be/cHfpSx3N-nY

hedgie13• 13 years ago

OK, you win the Internet!

Mr. Kalashnikov might have liked it too.

lomnakkus• 13 years ago

I wonder if this is someone we might consider even worse than Thomas Midgley, Jr. [1]. (In retrospect, of course.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.

mathattack• 13 years ago

Compare his lack of regret with Alfred Nobel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel

xorgar8314• 13 years ago

Exactly.

Also, the impact of the Manhattan Project on Richard Feynman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ah7f-1M2Sg

"I simply didn't think"

ommunist• 13 years ago

We had it studied at secondary school back on the USSR. AK47 was an ecosystem of assault rifle, heavy machine gun and shorty mod. You had to assemble-disassemble it in seconds to get respect at school. This weapon changed the history of humanity, and benefits far outweight losses. It is true weapon of freedom.

rectangletangle• 13 years ago

Simple, and easy to use UI; Robust and reliable; Extensible design; Massively scalable

dnqthao• 13 years ago

It seems that the AK-47 invention is very similar to our open source software: open design (a lot of copy cat and improvement), no royalty pay, work everywhere , etc...

inrev• 13 years ago

Russia Today short documentary on AK-47: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQtFYkvascA

AK47 assault rifle inventor Kalashnikov dies at 94

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