The AK brand did succeed in invading the United States, but through popular culture, where it symbolizes a kind of rebellious cool. Sylvester Stallone carried one in the “Rambo” movies, as did Nicolas Cage, Warren Beatty and hundreds of actors in other films. Rapper Lil Wayne scored a hit with his song “AK-47,” and Tupac Shakur had one of the guns tattooed on his stomach. Many video games, such as “Grand Theft Auto,” feature AKs.
At a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the rifle, Mr. Kalashnikov paid tribute to the team that helped him create the AK. “I was not by myself, sitting at a desk,” he said. “It was a thousand-strong collective working at different factories.”
But the weapon bears his name.
A design born in battle
Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov was born Nov. 10, 1919, in Kurya, a village in south-central Russia. He was the eighth of 18 children, only eight of whom survived to adulthood.
When Joseph Stalin launched his campaign to collectivize farms into government-operated units, the Kalashnikovs were viewed as obstacles to the plan. They were labeled kulaks, or rich peasants, and exiled in 1930 to Tomsk Oblast ins Siberia.
Mikhail Kalashnikov’s father died a year later, and Mikhail’s mother soon married a widower with three children of his own. At 16, Mikhail Kalashnikov left his unguarded home in exile and fled to neighboring Kazakhstan, where he got a job in a rail yard of the Turkistan-Siberian Railway.