Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of AK-47, Dies at 94
By C. J. CHIVERS

Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the arms designer credited by the Soviet Union with creating the AK-47, the first in a series of rifles and machine guns that would indelibly associate his name with modern war and become the most abundant firearms ever made, died on Monday in Izhevsk, the capital of the Russian republic of Udmurtia, where he lived. He was 94.

Viktor Chulkov, a spokesman for the republic’s president, confirmed the death, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

Born a peasant on the southern Siberian steppe, General Kalashnikov had little formal education and claimed to be a self-taught tinkerer who combined innate mechanical skills with the study of weapons to conceive of a rifle that achieved battlefield ubiquity.

His role in the rifle’s creation, and the attention showered on him by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, carried him from conscription in the Red Army to senior positions in the Soviet arms-manufacturing bureaucracy and ultimately to six terms on the Supreme Soviet, the Soviet Union’s legislative body.

Tens of millions of Kalashnikov rifles have been manufactured. Their short barrels, steep front-sight posts and curved magazines made them a marker of conflict that has endured for decades. The weapons also became both Soviet and revolutionary symbols and widespread instruments of terrorism, child-soldiering and crime.

The general, who sometimes lamented the weapons’ unchecked distribution but took pride in having invented them and in their reputation for reliability, weathered the collapse of the Soviet Union to assume a public role as a folk hero and unequivocal Russian patriot.

A Soviet nostalgist, he also served as the unofficial arms ambassador of the revived Russian state. He used public appearances to try to cast the AK-47’s checkered legacy in a positive way and to complain that knockoffs were being manufactured illegally by former Soviet allies and cutting into Russian sales.

The weapon, he said, was designed to protect his motherland, not to be used by terrorists or thugs. “This is a weapon of defense,” he said. “It is not a weapon for offense.”

General Kalashnikov’s public life resulted from a secret competition to develop the Soviet infantry rifle for the Cold War. The result was the AK-47 — an abbreviation for “the automatic by Kalashnikov” followed by the year the competition ended.

General Kalashnikov, a senior sergeant at the time who had been injured in battle against German tanks, was credited with leading the design bureau that produced the AK-47 prototype. The Soviet Union began issuing a mass-produced version in 1949.

The true AK-47 was short-lived. It was followed in the 1950s by a modernized version, the A.K.M., which retained its predecessor’s underlying design while reducing its weight and manufacturing time.

Shorter than traditional infantry rifles and firing a cartridge midway between the power of a pistol and the standard rifle cartridges of the day, the Kalashnikov line was initially dismissed by American ordnance experts as a weapon of small consequence. It was not particularly accurate or well made, they said, and it lacked range and stopping power.

It cemented its place in martial history in the 1960s in Vietnam. There, a new American rifle, the M-16, experienced problems with corrosion and jamming in the jungles, while Kalashnikovs, carried by Vietcong guerrillas and North Vietnamese soldiers, worked almost flawlessly.

By this time, in an effort to standardize infantry weapons among potential allies, the Soviet Union had exported the rifle’s specifications and its manufacturing technology to China, Egypt, North Korea and Warsaw Pact nations. Communist engineers would eventually share the manufacturing technology with other countries, including Iraq.

The design was incorporated into arms manufactured in Finland, Israel, South Africa and other nations. The result was a long line of derivatives and copies.

Because Kalashnikov rifles were principally made by secretive governments and often changed hands in nontransparent transfers, it is not known how many have been manufactured. Common estimates put production at 70 million to 100 million; either number would dwarf the production of any other gun.

The rifles eventually filled armories throughout Eastern Europe and Asia and spread from war to war, passing to Soviet allies and proxies, and to terrorists and criminals, aided by intelligence agencies and gray- and black-market sales. The United States became an active purchaser, arming anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s and indigenous Afghan and Iraqi forces in recent years.

General Kalashnikov’s bureau also used the A.K.M. design to develop machine guns for infantry squads, helicopter crews and vehicles. By the 1970s, the rifle’s design had become the basis for a new Soviet rifle, known as the AK-74, that fired a smaller and faster cartridge similar to that of the M-16. That rifle remains the standard weapon of the Russian Army.

The general often claimed that he never realized any profit from his work. But in his last years he urged interviewers not to portray him as poor, noting that he had a sizable apartment, a good car and a comfortable dacha on a lake near the factory where he had worked for decades.

Work and loyalty to country, he often suggested, were their own rewards. “I am told sometimes, ‘If you had lived in the West you would have been a multimillionaire long ago,’ ” he said. “There are other values.”

How essential the general was to creation of the Kalashnikov line has been subject to dispute. A post-Soviet account in the newspaper Pravda challenged his central role, asserting that two supervisors modified his weapon during field trials.

An amiable personality with a biography ideal for proletarian fable, he was given credit for their work, the newspaper claimed. The general disputed suggestions that the design was guided by others, but also said the rifle was the result of the collective that labored beside him.

The Kremlin embraced his version, although a careful reading of the official histories and General Kalashnikov’s many statements and memoirs shows that his accounts of his life, combat service and work repeatedly changed, raising questions about the veracity of the conventional accounts.

Mikhail Timofeyovich Kalashnikov was born in Kurya on Nov. 10, 1919. He was married twice, the second time to Ekaterina Kalashnikova, a technician in his design bureau. He is survived by a son from his first marriage, Viktor Kalashnikov, who is also an arms designer; a daughter from his second marriage, Elena Krasnovskaya; a stepdaughter, Nelya; and several grandchildren.

Later in life, he disapproved of anyone who he thought had hastened the Soviet Union’s downfall, or who had been unable to control the political and economic turbulence that followed. In memoirs and interviews, he was harshly critical of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin.

To the end he was loyal to what he called Socialist ideals and the leaders who gave them shape, and seemed untroubled by the hardships endured by his family during the early years of Soviet rule. His family’s land and home had been seized during collectivization, and when he was a child the family was deported into the Siberian wilderness. His father died during their first Siberian winter, and one of his brothers labored for seven years as a prisoner digging the White Sea canal.

Still, General Kalashnikov spoke of his great respect for Lenin and Stalin alike. “I never knew him personally,” he said of Stalin, “and I regret this.”

殺人最多的武器 AK-47之父病逝

設計AK-47步槍的卡拉希尼科夫廿三日病逝，享壽九十四歲。以他的名字命名的AK-47暢銷全球，是全世界生產最多的槍械，估計有一億支，受到游擊隊、恐怖分子和軍人的喜愛，殺的人也最多。

卡拉希尼科夫在俄羅斯烏德穆爾特共和國首府伊熱夫斯克市去世。俄國總統普亭向這位「傑出設計家」的家人致哀。

被譽為「AK-47之父」的卡拉希尼科夫1919年出生在西伯利亞的農民家庭，排行十七。他沒受什麼正式教育，靠自學成為修補匠，原本想製造農具。二次大戰納粹占領大半蘇聯，改變了他的人生方向。1941年在對抗納粹部隊時受傷療養半年，開始構思設計一支像納粹使用的自動步槍，至1947年設計出AK-47的原型，1949年開始量產。

蘇聯的宣傳機器大力吹捧他發明AK-47的豐功偉業，使他從紅軍徵召的小兵，一路升到中將，在兵工部擔任要職，最後在蘇聯立法機構最高蘇維埃當了六任代表。

蘇聯解體後，卡拉希尼科夫仍扮演民族英雄和愛國者角色。他懷念舊蘇聯，也在現今的俄國擔任非正式的武器大使，利用公開場合為AK-47洗刷汙名，抱怨山寨版的AK-47是前蘇聯盟邦非法製造，搶了俄國生意。俄國當年為了推廣使用，沒有申請版權，各國皆可生產。

AK-47成為殺人的同義詞，卡拉希尼科夫辯白說，這支槍是為了保衛祖國設計的，不是給恐怖分子或刺客使用的。「這是防衛武器，不是攻擊武器。我睡得很安穩，要怪該怪政客訴諸暴力。」

這位將軍常說他從未因此致富，但到了晚年，他要求訪問者不要把他說成窮人，強調他有一間大公寓、一部好車，湖邊還有別墅。

他說，工作和報效國家本身就是獎賞。「別人常對我說，若在西方，你早就是百萬富翁了，但我們有不同價值觀。」

卡拉希尼科夫在發明過程中扮演多重要角色仍有爭論。後蘇聯時期的真理報一篇報導指出，在測試時，兩名長官改良了他的設計。

報導說，他的無產階級背景和隨和個性，是當局創造無產階級神話的理想人選，因此把發明的功勞給了他。他駁斥此說，但也表示這支槍是集體努力的成果。

卡拉希尼科夫獲獎無數，包括蘇聯時期的列寧獎、史達林獎、社會主義勞工英雄獎；俄國2009年頒給他「俄國英雄獎」，是俄國最高榮譽。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/24/world/europe/mikhail-kalashnikov-creator-of-soviet-era-ak-47-weapon-is-dead-at-age-94.html

Video：The AK-47 at 60 (July 13, 2007)
http://nyti.ms/18IqMV8

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/obits/20131224/c24kalashnikov/zh-hant/

2013-12-25．聯合報．A16．國際．編譯田思怡