A lot of the encomiums and obituaries on Mikhail Kalashnikov have missed the ironies of a man who once designed and built a lawnmower for his own use when mass-produced mowers weren’t available in the Soviet Union. But, his sole claim to fame is as the designer of the world’s most widely used assault rifle, Kalashnikov. Long before he died at the age of 94, Mikhail Kalashnikov became a living symbol of the state and political system that ruined his family.
As president Putin brings back some of the Soviet era’s key features—such as state domination of the economy, censorship and the exile of dissidents—the Russian army is preparing to take on the fifth-generation Kalashnikov rifle, the AK-12. The designer himself might have preferred to be famous for something other than the world’s deadliest gun. He blamed “the Germans” for making him a weapons designer, and once told reporters: “If it had not been for World War II, I probably would have designed machinery to ease the hard peasant labour.”
Einstein, too, regretted playing a part in the production of nuclear weapons and blamed the Germans for his foray into such a field. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb”, he later said, “I would have never lifted a finger”. As a gun that is believed to have killed more people than any other of its type, the AK can vie with the atomic bomb as a weapon which the mankind could have done without. Since there are an estimated 100 million AKs in the world, it has found no difficulty in finding its way into the Guinness book of world records as the most common weapon. Yet, its creator did not profit from his invention since no patents can be obtained in a communist country. Till the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, Kalashnikov was simply a government employee.