Poems to Kalashnikov

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This past Tuesday, on his 90th birthday, Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, went to the Kremlin where President Dmitry Medvedev awarded him the Hero of Russia Star, the highest decoration in the land. As ITAR-TASS reports:

Russian famed arms designer Mikhail Kalashnikov is receiving gifts and greetings from all parts of the globe and even from astronauts in orbit on the day of his 90th birthday. . . Kalashnikov has received presents not only from colleagues but also from his home region, the Altai Territory. Izhevsk children marked Kalashnikov’s birthday with poems. Russian governors and politicians and foreign officials sent their greetings. . .Lt. Gen. Kalashnikov, twice Hero of Socialist Labor, winner of the Stalin and Lenin awards and holder of the Order of Andrew the First Called, thinks that his best creation, the Kalashnikov submachine gun, won the worldwide recognition thanks to the domestic arms industry.

Get that — school kids from his home region wrote poems about him. I wonder if Hartford, CT, elementary school kids would ever write poems about Samuel Colt, and if they’d be suspended under a zero-tolerance policy for mentioning guns, if they did? (Colt was born in Hartford, and the Colt company is now based there.)

Kalashnikov is the living embodiment of Soviet-cum-Russian power against the West, and, perhaps, against the world — from mass-manufacturing to a rifle-squad level of antagonism — and that’s why he’s had another award heaped upon him, timed nicely with the big 9-0. He does look very fit for his age. 

This award also strikes me as symbolic of the generally tough Russian attitude, that of a country that happily celebrates a singular arms maker that put millions of arms in the hands of the Soviet and Russian military. Can you picture a U.S. President so decorating any American arms maker this way now — the Medal of Freedom for the designer of the M-4? And yet Kalashnikov should by western standards be a multi-billionaire but, ha-ha, because he designed this gun under the Soviet regime, his fortunes were already spoken for. (He does, however, live quite comfortably.)

In a fine ironic twist, the AK is wildly popular in this country mostly because of its retail advantage of being much less expensive than other effective military carbines, namely the AR-15 (about $600 versus $1,000, on average). That is, a Soviet-era firearm, one favored by combatants as various as the Viet Cong and the Taliban, low-balls its way through the American market, appealing to gun buyers who have much lightened wallets these days.

This calls for a Haiku:

Kalashnikov, out-

Selling Samuel Colt, where did

All your rubles go? 

via ITAR-TASS.