The AK-47, (arguably more important) AK-74, and their clones were the backbones of the revolutions of the 20th century.
Along with the Belgian FAL, the AK series revolutionized modern arms production, infantry doctrine, squad tactics, and almost war as a whole.
Sadly Mikhail became a god fearing liberal in his later days, but to a degree it is understandable when all you wanted to do was design tractors, but instead you develop a weapon of war that has claimed the lives of millions of people.
It’s exactly what Red Army had been wanting even before WWII, a single family of automated rifle to replace almost all former rifles and submachine guns.
They tried it back in late 1930s, but turn out AVS was problematic, and SVT got manufacturing and maintenance issue that they never got resolved before the Great Patriotic War.
(Imagine what could have been if the Red Army was fully equipped with self-loading rifles when Nazi German invaded in 1941.)
Interestingly, the American ran into several of the same problem that the Soviet had with AVS when they adopted M14 battle rifle into service. While the American did have intermediate cartridge in service, they did not adopted an equivalent rifles into service for at least a decade.
As close as you could get to a Soviet equivalent to Oppenheimer, I suppose.
Great guy. Anyone interested should read the book, ‘the gun’, which gets into the superiority of the collaborative soviet production model over the privatized isolated capitalist one.
Absolute legend ofc
May he rest in peace
I don’t know much about his believe to judge him. I only know that he’s capable gun designer. Slightly overrated, but still among the greatest. [Then again, I’m more of Sudayev fan, so I’m slightly bias]
Gigachad
