Table of Contents:
- AK-47 rifle was agriculture’s giant loss?
- War, agriculture, destiny
- What might have been for agriculture? Looking at the life of Mikhail Kalashnikov, father of the AK-47, the question looms large.
What might have been for agriculture? It’s never possible to walk back to the fork in the road, but looking at the life of Mikhail Kalashnikov, father of the AK-47, the temptation to rearrange pieces of history is overwhelming.
Kalashnikov, creator of the AK-47 rifle — often labeled as the gun that’s killed more people than any other in history — died aged 94 in December 2013 in his native Russia. He leaves behind approximately 100 million AK-47s spread out across every war zone and hellhole on Earth. Find conflict and be sure — AK-47s are in use. Mozambique has an AK-47 on its national flag; even the terrorist group Hezbollah features an AK-47 on its banner.
At age 18, Kalashnikov was drafted into the Red Army, trained as a tank driver and was wounded in 1941 by a German shell at the Battle of Bryansk. From The Independent: “A soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier and I created a machine gun for a soldier.”
See related: Nazis and Russians tangled in seed bank history
He did just that, finishing his brilliantly simple design in 1947. The Automatic Kalashnikov-47, with its light weight, durability, minimal parts and ease of operation, was a military masterpiece with no equal. With a somewhat short barrel it lacked long range efficiency, but could wreak havoc at short range or in tight conflicts — capable of semi-automatic or automatic fire. From Bloomberg: “Probably the most important feature of Kalashnikov’s design was the loose fit of the gun’s moving parts. As he described it, ‘all the elements are spaced out, as if they are hanging in air.’ Later, when he demonstrated the weapon, he would sometimes pour sand into the firing mechanism and the AK-47 still would not jam.”
Kalashnikov was born to make something; possessing a mind for design and invention. But if not the AK-47, then what? A day after his death, Bloomberg ran a short piece titled Kalashnikov Should Have Made Farm Tools and the words beg the “What might have been?” question.