July 27, 2002	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 16,1423

SUHL (Germany): A proud and smiling Mikhail T. Kalashnikov opened an exhibit in Germany on Friday devoted to his life’s work, admitting it saddens him that his guns have caused such grief in what he calls “literally the wrong hands”.

Saying it is humbling to be a living legend, the 82-year-old one- time Soviet weaponry expert posed uncertainly for photographers and shook hands with dignitaries at the display opening in Suhl in former East Germany, home to half a million Soviet troops at the height of the Cold War.

Walking among the array of AK-47 guns, most a relic of the Soviet army’s stint in former East Germany, Kalashnikov pointed with the sort of nostalgic pride usually associated with a father looking at pictures of his grandchildren.

“You know, my heart fills with pride when I think that the AK-47 has never been topped,” he admitted in an aside. Then, sighing, “I know how that sounds. So much suffering has been caused when it has fallen into literally the wrong hands. And that breaks my heart.”

It was all a fluke, he says quietly. He never intended to revolutionize infantry weaponry. It just happened.

The young sergeant was an early casualty of the Great Patriotic War as the Nazi hordes raced eastward. Badly wounded and suffering from shell-shock, he was out of action by October 1941.

“I’d seen that all the German infantrymen were equipped with machineguns,” he recalled. “I couldn’t help but see that. I was in a tank on the front lines. I stared down their gun barrels,” he said with a shake of his head.

What the Soviet army needed, and needed fast, was a light-weight automatic rifle which was easy to use and maintain, had flexible applications and was operable in climatic extremes, from summer heat to the icy cold of a Russian winter.

“So I set about tinkering something together,” he said.

Within weeks he had a prototype which was immediately sent to military command in Moscow — actually to Alma-Ata, to where the military command had retreated in the face of the German advance.

By June 1942 a second, improved model of his gun was being tested. Honed and refined over the next four years, the final Kalashnikov AK- 47 was ready in 1946 and was finally issued into the hands of Soviet troops in 1950.

Mikhail Timofeevitch, the self-taught tinkerer-inventor, worked his way up to general designer of small arms in the Soviet Army. He has lived and worked in Izhevsk for the past 50 years, collecting a breast full of medals and ribbons along the way.

Some 70 million AK-47s have been manufactured.

“Just think: If I’d had a rouble for every one, I’d be a rich man today,” he said at Friday’s ceremony.

But it never occurred to him to pursue a patent.

“We were at war and in those days it was considered gauche to file a patent,” he said with a shrug. “So I never saw a cent from the idea or its production. Not one kopek.”—dpa