Mikhail Kalashnikov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From 1949, Mikhail Kalashnikov lived and worked in
Izhevsk,
Udmurtia. He held a degree of
Doctor of Technical Sciences (1971)
[1][2] and is a member of 16 academies.
[16]
Over the course of his career he evolved the basic design into a weapons family. The
AKM (
Russian:
Автомат Калашникова Модернизированный – Kalashnikov modernized assault rifle), first appeared in 1963, was lighter and cheaper to manufacture owing to the use of a stamped steel receiver (in place of the AK47's milled steel receiver), and contained detail improvements such as a re-shaped stock and muzzle compensator. From the AKM he developed a
squad automatic weapon variant, known as the
RPK (
Russian:
Ручной пулемет Калашникова – Kalashnikov light machine gun), and the
PK(
Russian:
Пулемет Калашникова – Kalashnikov machine gun), which used the more powerful
7.62×54R cartridge of the
Mosin-Nagant rifle. The PK series is a general-purpose machine gun. It is cartridge belt-fed, not magazine-fed, as it is intended to provide heavy sustained fire from a tripod mount, or be used as a light, bipod-mounted weapon. The common characteristics of all these weapons are simple design, ruggedness and ease of maintenance in all operating conditions.
Approximately 100 million AK-47 assault rifles have been produced by 2009,
[8] and about half of them are counterfeit, manufactured at a rate of about a million per year.
[11][17] Izhmash, the official manufacturer of AK-47 in Russia, has patented the weapon only in 1997, and in 2006 accounted for only 10% of the world's production.
[7] Kalashnikov himself claimed he was always motivated by service to his country rather than money,
[6] and made no direct profit from weapon production.
[18] He did however own 30% of a German company
Marken Marketing International (MMI) run by his grandson Igor.
[19] The company revamps trademarks and produces merchandise carrying the Kalashnikov name, such as
vodka,
[8] umbrellas and knives.
[20][21] One of the items is a knife named for the
AK-74.
[19]
Weapon designs[edit]
During his career, Kalashnikov designed about 150 models of small weapons.
[16] The most famous of them are
Awards[edit]
Incorporates information from the corresponding article in the Russian Wikipedia