About Mikhail Kalashnikov
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov (10 November 1919 – 23 December 2013) was a Soviet and Russian lieutenant general, inventor, military engineer, writer, and small arms designer. He is most famous for developing the AK-47 assault rifle and its improvements, the AKM and AK-74, as well as the RPK light machine gun and PK machine gun. Kalashnikov was, according to himself, a self-taught tinkerer who combined innate mechanical skills with the study of weaponry to design arms that achieved battlefield ubiquity. Even though Kalashnikov felt sorrow at the weapons' uncontrolled distribution, he took pride in his inventions and in their reputation for reliability, emphasizing that his rifle is "a weapon of defense" and "not a weapon for offense". == Life and career == === Early life === Kalashnikov was born in the village of Kurya, in present-day Altai Krai, Russia, as the seventeenth child of the 19 children of Aleksandra Frolovna Kalashnikova (née Kaverina) and Timofey Aleksandrovich Kalashnikov, who were peasants. In his youth, Mikhail suffered from various illnesses and was on the verge of death at age six. He was attracted to all kinds of machinery, but also wrote poetry, dreaming of becoming a poet. He later went on to write six books and continued to write poetry all of his life. In 1930, his father and most of his family had their properties confiscated and were deported as kulaks to the village of Nizhnyaya Mokhovaya, Tomsk Oblast. After deportation, his family had to combine farming with hunting, and thus Mikhail frequently used his father's rifle in his teens.
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