Late Great Engineers: Mikhail Kalashnikov - the man behind the gun

There’s a startling contradiction in the way Mikhail Kalashnikov has been portrayed by the media since his death less than a decade ago. On the one hand, according to the Associated Press, the inventor of the AK-47 automatic rifle apparently lost no sleep due to ‘the havoc wrought with his invention.’ On the other, Reuters says Kalashnikov decried and objected to the ‘criminal use of his rifles.’ The BBC claims that towards the end of his life, the Russian military engineer feared he ‘was to blame’ for, and was suffering ‘spiritual pain’ over, the deaths his Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947 (hence AK-47) had caused, while news agency AFP ran a story on how he had found peace in his nineties and had died a ‘happy man’.

Kalashnikov’s attitude to his creation changed constantly. His was the rifle that would become the most widely used on the planet, his name becoming a by-word for assault weaponry. His was the gun that killed more people than all the WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) combined. He was the man who brought 100 million rifles – one for every 77 inhabitants – into the world. With the weight of such facts on his shoulders, it’s hardly surprising that he alternated between pride in having engineered a defence of his motherland, and shock at the devastation his invention inflicted. On reflection, he would have rather invented, “a machine that would help farmers with their work: for example a lawnmower.”