Now there is no more famous designer of small arms in the world than Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov. And there is nothing surprising in this. He created back in the mid-forties of the last century, the machine is by far the most common in the world and is in service with several dozen countries.
At the end of 2013, the outstanding Russian weapons designer Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov passed away. He was 94 years old. Over his long life, this man has made an invaluable contribution to improving the defense capability of his country.
The childhood and youth of the great designer
Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov was born in the village of Kurya, Kuryevsky district of the Altai Territory in a large peasant family. He had a seventeenth child with his parents.
When Mikhail turned 11 years old, his family was dispossessed and sent to Kazakhstan. There, after graduating from the 9th grade, he went to work as a student in the railway workshops. And a year later he was transferred to work in Alma-Ata as technical secretary of the Turkestan-Siberian Railway.
Young Kalashnikov’s inventive abilities first appeared in military service in Western Ukraine.
His first army invention was an inertial counter for accounting shots from a tank gun. Then he created a device for the TT pistol, which allows targeted shooting from the viewing slots of the tank. And finally, he invented a tank engine resource meter.
The last invention was not overlooked by the commander of the Southwestern Military District, General Georgy Zhukov, and sent Kalashnikov to the Leningrad Tank Plant to introduce this new mechanical device into production.
Immediately after the outbreak of the war, Mikhail Timofeevich came to the front, where he served as tank commander. In the fall of 1941, his tank was hit, and he was seriously wounded and shell-shocked. The hospital was to receive long-term treatment. It was there that Kalashnikov came up with the idea of creating a fundamentally new submachine gun.
