LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
We somehow discussed Kalashnikov on these forums somewhere, recently, so I thought I'd throw this out there:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060415/en ... 0415185142
MOSCOW (AFP) - His name has entered the languages of the planet and his most famous creation has sold 100 million copies but at 86 Mikhail Kalashnikov, father of the assault rifle that bears his name, is still a busy man.
He travels, he sells, and in the face of criticism he sings the praises of the weapon he created.
Blue eyes, grey hair, sprightly, he lives in the Urals town of Izhevsk and arrived Saturday in Moscow to hit back at criticism in the US press of the sale of 100,000 Kalashnikovs to Venezuela.
"It isn't the first time they have tried to sneer at Russian weapons," he said in response to an article on April 10 in the conservative Washington Times which claimed that Caracas had suspended the contract because Moscow was supplying old weapons.
In any case, he said, the rifle named after him "is extremely simply made for a poorly educated soldier."
"During the Vietnam war US soldiers used to abandon their M-16s and take the Kalashnikovs of the Vietnamese troops they had killed.
"Every day in Baghdad the Americans use my weapons because theirs don't work very well there."
Kalshnikov is an advisor to Rosoboronexport, Russian's main arms export company, and is soon to visit Cuba "for the first time in my life" to have a look at the arms factory opened there during the Soviet era.
He is one of the most internationally known Russians and both before and after the communist era honours were heaped on him.
But his invention has brought him little by way of cash.
Russia may have exported weapons worth more than five billion dollars last year but fights a campaign, so far without much success, to have its rights to the Kalashnikov recognized.
Nine out of every 10 sold worldwide are counterfeits, said Vladimir Grodetsky, director general of the factory at Izhmach in the Urals where the original article is made.
In the Soviet era licenses were issued to some 20 friendly states, among them Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Libya,
Iran and
North Korea, but according to Grodetsky "none of these licenses is valid any more according to the norms of international law on the defence of intellectual property."
Talks "drag on and meantime they continue to manufacture and bid for contracts" at prices lower than those of the Russian producer, according to Dmitry Shugayev of Rosoboronexport.
Kalashnikov's history mirrors that of the Soviet Union.
He was born in November 1919 in a small village in Siberia. His father was regarded as a kulak, a rich peasant, and deported in 1930 when Mikhail was 11. He fought in World War II and was wounded in 1941. He was evacuated to the rear and began designing the assault rifle that in 1947 became the AK-47.
Automatic weapons had been banned for the Red Army shortly before World War II by the deputy defence minister and in the climate of fear imposed by Stalin nobody dared challenge the ban, Kalashnikov wrote in his memoirs.
The prohibition went some way to explaining the defeat of the Red Army in Finland and its huge losses during the German offensive in 1941.
Today he regrets that the gun that bears his name is so often used in inter-ethnic conflicts.
"I created it to defend my country."
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by DDT 
