Mikhail Kalashnikov The AK-47’s Inventor Asked God for Forgiveness. This Is the Full Story.

A punished family

1930 · the family is deported

Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in 1919 in Kurya, a village in the Altai region of Siberia. By his own account he was the seventeenth of nineteen children, and only eight of them reached adulthood.

In 1930 the Soviet state labelled his family "kulaks", peasants it treated as class enemies. Their property was taken and they were deported to the Tomsk region, deeper into Siberia. Before the army he worked as a railway clerk.

War

Autumn 1941 · Bryansk

He was called up in 1938 and trained as a tank mechanic, then became a tank commander. He was good with machines and made small improvements to his tanks.

In the autumn of 1941 the German army drove towards Moscow. Near Bryansk a shell hit his tank and he was badly wounded. He spent months in hospital. Later he said that a soldier there asked him why the Germans had automatic weapons while Soviet soldiers had to share rifles. We only have his word for that conversation, but it is how he always explained what came next.

First designs

In hospital and afterwards he began to draw weapons. His first submachine gun, in 1942, was not adopted, but people noticed his talent and moved him into weapons design. In 1944 his carbine lost a competition to Sergei Simonov's design, which became the SKS.

The short round

7.62×39 · the short round

The key idea did not start with him. In 1943 Soviet engineers studied a German rifle captured at the front, the MKb 42(H). It fired a cartridge between a pistol round and a full rifle round: short enough to control in automatic fire, strong enough for real distances. That summer the Soviets began work on their own short cartridge, the 7.62×39. It was adopted after trials at the end of 1943.

A new cartridge needed a new rifle. In 1946 a competition was held. Kalashnikov's entry had a rotating bolt. Late in 1946 his assistant, Aleksandr Zaitsev, proposed a major redesign, and in November 1947 the prototype appeared with a long gas piston above the barrel. The rifle was adopted in 1949 and built at Izhevsk, where Kalashnikov lived for the rest of his life.

A rifle for the world

About 100 million rifles

The AK was simple, cheap to make and kept working in mud, sand and snow. The Soviet Union gave it to its allies and helped them build their own factories. It was used by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against American troops, and it is on the flag of Mozambique. About 100 million Kalashnikov-type rifles have been made, by one widely quoted estimate.

Kalashnikov became a lieutenant general and received the highest Soviet honours. He did not get rich from royalties.

Was it a copy?

The question comes up because of the German StG 44, the assault rifle that followed the MKb 42(H). From the outside the two rifles look alike, and its designer, Hugo Schmeisser, was brought to Izhevsk after the war and worked there from 1946 to 1952.

Inside they are different machines. Both use gas from the barrel to drive a long piston. But the StG 44 locks by tilting its bolt, and the AK locks by rotating it. The AK took its basic layout before Schmeisser could have shaped it, and Soviet archive documents show that German specialists were kept away from secret projects. No document shows that the AK was copied. Some Soviet records are still closed, so the question cannot be closed completely.

Historians such as C. J. Chivers also point out that the AK came out of a whole Soviet system of engineers, trials and factories, not from one man alone. Kalashnikov's own accounts of how it began changed over the years.

The same answer, then a different question

For most of his life he gave the same answer. In July 2007 he said: "I sleep well. It's the politicians who are to blame." But near the end of his life he wrote to Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. "My spiritual pain is unbearable," he wrote, and asked whether he was responsible for the deaths his rifle had caused. Izvestia published the letter in January 2014. When he wrote it is disputed, and his daughter said a priest probably helped him.

He died in Izhevsk in December 2013, aged 94.

What we could not verify

The hospital conversation is his own account. The date of the letter is disputed. The 3D scenes in the documentary are reconstructions, and some inner parts are simplified. And a sentence often quoted on the internet, that he combined "the best features" of the American M1 Garand and the StG 44, could not be traced to a reliable source, so we do not use it.