Taking Down the AK-47

Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov is an impressive name for a Russian peasant who never went beyond the 9th grade. After leaving school, he went to work for the Turkistan-Siberian railway. After being drafted into the Red Army in 1938, he completed the Tank Mechanical School near Kiev. Combined with Kalasnikov's innate intelligence, the experience he gained there enabled him to devise several improvements for armored warfare. These included a counter for the number of rounds fired from a tank's main battery as well as a meter that recorded a tank's running time. His inventiveness caught the attention of C.I.C. General Georgi H. Zhukov, and Kalashnikov was ordered to Leningrad where his inventions were put into practice.

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