Two of our guests achieved some
recognition as well, in accordance with
their respective environment, of course
You, Sir Hiram, the ex-American, were
knighted by Queen Victoria in 1901
and you Michail Tifomojewitsch, received
the equivalent in RED, the Stalin-Award,
although you were born in a family which
fell victim to Stalins forced
collectivism. Your family was taken to
Siberia.
So, it would be of great interest to
understand the drive that made you a
weapon-fan.
The
Germans were the reason why I became an
inventor of weapons. If there would not
have been the war, I may have invented
appliances for civil use. In 1941 I was
admitted to a military hospital because
of an injury afflicted by a German
carbine. That was the moment when I vowed
to invent a really excellent carbine for
the soldiers of the Red Army.
Could it be that the weapon you
were wounded with had been the German
Sturmgewehr 44?
In 1941 it was known by another
name, but it was the same type; the
superior fire power and the enormous
flexibility of this new German automatic
weapon did guide my own efforts.
The name Hugo Schmeisser, does
it ring a bell? Born in Jena in 1884,
died in Erfurt in 1953?
Sure, he was a weapon-inventor as
his father had been in the other
camp. In 1943, ten thousand pieces of his
new invention were ready to be
distributed to the German front. But, in
a strange move, Hitler forbade further
development and production. Only in 1944,
when experiments within the German troops
proved the power of the weapon,
mass-production was allowed. The carbine
was at first called MP44 to
be renamed in spring 1944 as Sturmgewehr
44.
On 3rd April
1945 American soldiers took the
German town of Suhl in Thuringia and
immediately stopped all production of
weapons. Hugo Schmeisser and his brother
Hans were interrogated by
weapon-specialists of the American and
the Bristish Secret Service.
Then, based on territorial agreements of
the Allied High Command, the Americans
left in August 1945 Thuringia; the Red
Army occupied the weapon-factory.
In the same month, fifty pieces of the
Sturmgewehr 44 were assembled
from existing parts and transferred by
the Red Army to the Soviet Union for
further exploration, together with almost
eleven thousand sheets of technical
sketches with regard to the production of
war weapons. In October 1945, Hugo
Schmeisser was enlisted to co-operate
with a technical commission of the Red
Army. Such commissions were tasked to
investigate the latest development of
German weapon techniques in order to make
it available to further developments in
the Soviet Union.
A year later, Hugo Schmeisser was forced
to work as a weapon specialist for a
couple of years within the Soviet Union.
His fate was joined by several other
experts from the Suhl-factory. All of
them were taken on 24th October 1946 by a
special train to Ischewsk in Southern
Ural.
Details of the work by Hugo Schmeisser
between 1946 and 1952 in Ischewsk are not
known. But how important his work may
have been for the Soviet Union shows the
fact that all other German specialists
were allowed to return in 1952. His stay
was delayed at short notice by half a
year; he returned to Germany only on 9th
June 1952.
Similarities in
appearance and
construction of the AK-47 and
the German Sturmgewehr 44 did
lead to the opinion of some experts,
Michail Tifomojewitsch, you simply copied
the German invention?
Well, we had of course examples
taken as booty during the war. One has to
accept that unavoidable rules and
traditions of weapon-building force some
optical similarities; and you have not to
re-invent time and again basic features
in the production of weapons.
But with the
AK-47 we had
introduced a number of new features which
make the weapon unpretentious, reliable
and practically indestructible no
matter whether being used in the tundra
or in the desert, in the jungle or in a
mega-city. You can dig in the carbine in
mud or in sand, you can drop it on stony
ground it will continue to
function with a rather high rate of
likelihood.
The lock which I invented does almost
never get stuck because it receives a
higher portion of energy from the
igniting cartridges. This, of course,
meant also a stronger recoil of the
weapon. The locks mechanism does
not touch as a whole its casing like a
piston in a cylinder but moves on kind of
rails. Whereas locks of other weapons get
easily blocked by dirt, the empty space
provided within the lock of the AK47
takes all the dirt whilst still allowing
the lock to move. My weapon may be less
precise but it is much more practical.
You see, the American competing product,
the M16, did, at the
beginning, come without devices to clean
it; the GIs got it during the Vietnam-War
together with the information it would be
the first weapon that cleans itself,
which was a mistake revealed later
through investigation of a
Congress-commission in the United States.
The system led quite often to jamming and
to deadly accidents during efforts to
clean the weapon. Reports during the
Vietnam-War that American soldiers looked
for the AK47 as booty in
order to use it instead of the M16
made the rounds, but were never
acknowledged by officials.
Comrade Trotsky did mention
already that your invention came too late
to help the Red Army during World War II,
but later it became a success-story
worldwide. How could this happen?
Right at the beginning the
order was no one should know that we had
developed the AK-47. Soldiers
had to carry the carbine wrapped in
covers. Then, our leaders discovered that
the Kalashnikov would be the ideal weapon
to pursue the world revolution.
The AK-47
turned into the biggest export-hit of the
Soviet Union: in Vietnam the Americans
were defeated by the Kalashnikov.
Nineteen countries bought from the Soviet
Union licences to produce the weapon. It
is suggested that more than seventy
million Kalashnikovs are existing
worldwide. It is even widely disseminated
within the U.S.A., used especially by
drug-dealers and gangs.
You
know, even people who have
something illegal on their mind want to
use something they can rely on. One can
understand it because they want to
survive. But I am unhappy that my weapon
is being used by criminals. I regret that
it was never used for the purpose I had
invented it, for the defence of my home
country.
Inventors and constructors cannot be held
liable for the illegal use of their
product. Politicians are the ones who
fail to reach peaceful solutions.
You received a medal, you were
promoted to a general and to a member of
parliament, but as a private person you
havent earned a single cent for
your invention because no one in the
Soviet Union could register a patent in
his name.
Indeed,
I had no business experience at all and
I am just beginning to learn. It is so
different from everything what I was used
to
but I have seen so many changes
in the world
Five years ago, in 2002, a company
contacted me and wanted to find out
whether I would be prepared to give my
name for a Vodka-brand
I think, we
always had on us a little vodka during
the war. It was cold in winter-times and
a sip of vodka would mobilize the senses
and keep you warm from inside!
Nastorowje and
congratulation! Whether on the flag of
Mozambique, in the heraldic symbols of
the states of East Timor or Zimbabwe
or on a battery of vodka-bottles,
the Kalashnikov-carbine remains
attractive from the battle to the
bottle, so to speak.
Michail Tifomojewitsch, our advice: you
should immediately get a copyright
regarding the use of Kalashnikov-images
and allow us to demonstrate how
you as an ex-military person could even
become a star in entertainment-business
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