Send us your own comments about this object.

Title:	RIFLE, ASSAULT -  RUSSIAN ASSAULT RIFLE AK47 7.62MM SN# AA3286K
Maker/Manufacturer:	KALASHNIKOV, MIKHAIL
Date of Manufacture:	C 1954
Eminent Figure:
Catalog Number:	SPAR 772
Measurements:	OL: 86.9CM 34 1/2" BL: 39.3CM 15 1/2" 9 1/2 lbs.

Object Description:

RUSSIAN ASSAULT RIFLE AK47 7.62MM SN# AA3286K
Manufactured by Tula Arsenal, Tula, Russia - Standard AK47 Russian assault rifle. Gas-operated, turning bolt, select-fire weapon. 4-groove rifling; right hand twist. Tangent leaf rear sight graduated to 875 yards. Muzzle velocity 2230 fps with M43 ball cartridges. Cyclic rate of fire 750 rpm. Wooden stock pistol grips and forearm. Weapon weighs approximately 9 1/2 lbs. Complete with 30-round detachable box magazine and sling. Cartridge: 7.62x39mm.

Markings:
Receiver: Arrow in triangle (Tula mark). AA3286K.

Weapon transferred to the Museum from the Aberdeen Proving Ground on 2 December 1960. At that time weapon was appraised at $250.00.

Web site photo showing the daughter of the famous inventor of the AK-47, Elena Kalashnikova. Ms. Kalashnikova, pictured here with NPS Superintendent Douglas Cuillard, visited the Springfield Armory in July, 2004. She was very happy to see that one of her father's AK-47s is prominently displayed here.

Exhibit labels: "AK47 - During the summer of 1962 one thousand AR15 rifles were sent to the Vietnamese who liked them better than the larger and heavier M1s and B.A.R.s. A 'system analysis' of the AR15 and M14, based on their use in Vietnam, made extravagant claims for the AR15 and resulted in an evaluation of the two American rifles and the Soviet AK47."

Notes: "Why the U.S. Loses ‘Small Wars’
By Larry Kahaner
Mr. Kahaner is the author of AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War, Wiley & Sons, November, 2006.
If history is any gauge, the US will lose the current conflict in Iraq. Since the end of World War II, major US use of force against substantially weaker enemies – Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, for example – have ended poorly. The last remaining superpower is not alone in this phenomenon of strong armies losing to lesser foes: the American colonists beat the British, the Vietnamese forced France to leave Indochina and Afghanistan’s Mujahadeen drove the Soviets from their country.
Why do powerful armies lose against decidedly weaker enemies, and what does it say about the US involvement in Iraq?
The answer lies in the study of “small wars.” At its simplest, a small war is one in which the relationship between the combatants is decidedly unbalanced. One side is not only militarily superior in size but its weapons are state of the art. Some call this Asymmetric Warfare or Fourth Generation Warfare, or the more familiar guerrilla warfare, from the Spanish for ‘small war.’
While the larger force relies on high-tech weaponry and sophisticated air power, contemporary small forces use simple, durable and easy-to-use and obtain weapons, mainly the venerable AK-47 rifle backed up by Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs) and Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Despite reports of dramatic explosions, the ubiquitous and cheap AK-47 still kills more people in Iraq than any other weapon.
While trying to understand how to win in Iraq, US military scholars are turning to the classics, and one of the hottest books making the rounds is, surprisingly, over a century old. Small Wars was written in 1896 by C.E. Callwell, a colonel in the British army, for British officers posted to Africa and India. It draws on his own experience in the Second Afghan and Boer Wars and claims that a powerful force can easily lose, if it doesn’t fully understand the enemy, fails to describe clear objectives or, worst of all, pursues military objectives that do not contribute to the conflict's political goal.
He notes that the primary object in a small war is to force insurgents to fight on the regular force’s terms by drawing them into conflicts in which their superior firepower and discipline could prevail. Unfortunately, the history of small wars has shown that insurgents play hit and run – striking boldy and then retreating quickly, and rarely engaging the larger force head on.
The other, and much bigger obstacle to winning small wars, brings a moral dilemma. According to Callwell, to win small wars, mere victory isn’t enough, the enSmall wars are also lost because of the larger army’s lack of national commitment which ends in inadequate or misspent funds and deployment of too few troops. For insurgents fighting for their own soil, the commitment is 100 percent. If they lose the war they lose everything. Without ‘skin in the game’ national commitment by the larger force’s country usually wanes.
If Callwell got military scholars to think more clearly about small wars, a group of Marine Corps officers in the 1930s took it to the next level with production of the Small Wars Manual based on US experiences in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. While building on Callwell’s work, this landmark book published in 1940, points to what some say is one of the most important aspects of winning small wars - understanding the role of indigenous religion, ideology and tribal relationships. The manual not only talks about the military aspects of winning small wars – and yes, they can be brutal - but of more importance is a deep understanding of a society’s language, culture, religion, history, economic structures and mores. The manual is a hot seller from a much-clicked website, The Small Wars Center of Excellence, run by the Marine Corps, which advocates the use of simpler weapons and more complex soldiers in small wars – the opposite of current conventional wisdom. This is not the only take-away message from the manual, but it is a vital one.
Unfortunately the Department of Defense’s upper echelon are heading in the wrong direction. The proposed $200 billion Future Combat Systems is a mélange of expensive and complex high tech weapons that will be less effective in winning future small wars than thousands more soldiers with language skills, armed with durable rifles, who understand history, foreign culture, religion local customs and guerilla warfare.
The soldiers in Iraq understand this. Now it’s time for Pentagon planners to read and heed the classics. It’s not too late to win the ‘small war’ in Iraq, but the lessons of history must not be ignored." - http://hnn.us/articles/31296.html

"SHOULDER ARMS: Our resident military hardware historian picks the Top 10 battle-shaping longarms - AK47 - A few years ago I spent an afternoon in his dacha with Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK47. He's a voluble, affable grandfatherly little fellow who like his vodka - hardly the sort one would credit with coming up with one of history's most effective killing machines. The AK47 is a true assault rifle - it can be fired either semi or full auto. Chambering the attenuated 7.62x39 round (ballistically similar to the .30-30), the AK47 was easy to use, easy to fieldstrip and service and rugged in the extreme. Initially adopted and produced indigenously by the Soviets, the guns was also made in Yugoslavia, Red China, Romania, East Germany, North Korea, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary. The Finnish M60 and M62 and Israeli Galil are also based on the AK design. Americans have come up against it time and again in such places as Vietnam, Africa and, most recently, the Middle East. It might not be as accurate as the M16, but, man does it work. The AK can really spray lead from its 30-round magazine and is particularly adaptable to being held over one's head and fired from behind the carcass of a burned-out automobile. The little sucker is everywhere, and it will be with us for a long, long time." - Gary James, GUNS & AMMO, July, 2005

The New York Times International, Thursday, November 11, 2004 - "Izhevsk Journal. Russia Salutes Father of the Rifle Fired Round the World, By C.J. Chivers. ISHEVSK, Russia, Nov. 10 - Russia's most famous general arrived promptEveryone in the chamber stood. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, the creator of the world's most widely distributed firearm, turned 85 on Wednesday, and here, in the once secretive Soviet city in the western Ural Mountains when he spend decades helping to refine and mass produce his product line, there was an extended pause to reflect.
In this aging man, the city seemed to say, is a glimpse of what we once were.
Ishevsk is Kalashnikov country, and the heart of Russia's gun culture. Deep within the country's vast forest of pine and white birch, in theory beyond the reach of any invading foe, it has been an arms complex since the days of yore, having once produced rifles for the czars. During World War II its laborers worked around the clock, helping to halt the advancing Nazis, and then turn them back.
(One weapons executive remarked here this week that at peak production in World War II, the city's plants churned out 12,000 rifles a day, consuming 50 tons of steel every 24 hours.)
Then came the automatic Kalashnikov, the most prolific of all. First mass produced here in 1949, it was a weapon that gradually overtook the world, giving firepower first to socialists and the international revolutionaries they supported, and later to almost anyone who sought an inexpensive and reliable gun. All the while it kept generations of Soviet laborers housed, clothed and fed.
This was then. Ishevsk today is city of creeping poverty, cramped quarters and worry.
The post-Soviet era has not been kind to isolated places manufacturing old products, and for the several hundred thousand people who live here, mostly in slowly crumbling Soviet housing towers, wages are low (typically about $250 a month), pensions are lower and service are dwindling. There is scant hope that many of Izhevsk's great factories will rumble at full capacity anytime soon.
Enter Mikhail Kalashnikov, embodiment of better times.
General Kalashnikov's weapons - automatic rifles with distinctive banana-shaped clips and reliability in combat conditions that no other combat weapon has ever matched - were Ishevsk's last great success.
It is an idiosyncratic form of pride: in Russia, stung by political and military failures and the decline in stature that accompanied them, wearied by the upheavals of remaking itself after state socialism's collapse, the automatic Kalashnikov carries a special meaning. It is a product that actually works.
The birthday celebration for General Kalashnikov, who at 85 seems as durable as his weapon himself, offered a chance to feel nostalgia's warm glow.
'It is the story of our city, it is the story of our republic, it is the story of our country,' said Viktor V. Balakin, Izhevsk's mayor, as he gave of the countless testimonials today, and showered General Kalashnikov with bouquets and gifts.
The story that surrounds General Kalashnikov reads like Soviet legend, the tale of the archetypical proletarian man. He was the uneducated son of peasants who became a sergeant assigned to a tank, was injured in World War II in battle against the Nazis and then labored through countless nights - first in his hospital bed, later in secret institutes - to create weapons for the masses.
In 1947, one of his prototypes won a state competition and was selected for mass production. It was give a mundane designation: AK-47, an abbreviation for 'automatic by Kalashnikov,' followed by the year of its selection. The abbreviation would in time enter martial lexicon.
Like the city he helped put on the map, General Kalashnikov still flashes fondness for much of the socialist ideal. As he worked the crowd this week, he used the word tovarich, or 'comrade,' not with bitter irony of some post-Soviet Russians but with casual sincerity.
He wore a medal bearing Lenin's intense, jaw-forward gaze. He spoke of the value of labor, not just to state but to self. 'Work - and only workBy then celebrations had been rolling for almost a week.
On Nov. 4., a museum was open in the general's honor, featuring displays of his weapons and multimedia presentations of their creation, manufacture and spread throughout the world. One video reel shows in quick succession, a young Fidel Castro admiring a Kalashnikov while reclining in a jeep, a young Yasir Arafat with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and Vietnamese guerrillas, younger still, using Kalasnikovs to down an enemy plane.
The general's latest memoir, written with Elena Kalashnikova, one of his daughters, was released this week. A scientific and technical conference was held, as were dinners and banquets and uncountable toasts.
Officially, all of this was dedicated to the general and the boost he gave to his city and nation. Broader themes - how the Kalashnikov ran away from its creator to become a symbol not just of Russian success, but of crime, terror and jihad, how it is carried by Osma bin Laden and Sahmil Basayev, Russia's most wanted man and the architect of the school siege in Beslan - largely passed without comment.
But if most everyone else steered clear of such party-dampening talk, on Wednesday, in the presidential chamber, the general did not. Sitting beside Aleksandr Volkov, the president of the Udmurt Republic, he said his weapon 'was created to defend the fatherland,' adding, ' It is a pity it was used in other inadmissible conflicts.'
He was more direct on state television, which dedicated a segment Wednesday to the general pickling cucumbers, at which he noted that these days he spends much of his time writing. 'A book,' he said, 'is more important than a weapon.'

"Assault rifles are short, compact, selective-fire weapon that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between a submachine gun and rifle cartridge. Assault rifles have mild recoil characteristics and, because of this, are capable of delivering effective full automatic fire at ranges up to 300 meters." - Harold E. Johnson.

"Kalashnikov - The Kalashnikov has become one of the world's most popular weapons, serving not only regular forces with pro-Communist learnings but also countless terrorist groups from South America to the Far East. Production is said to have exceeded 70 million guns, and has been undertaken in many former Soviet bloc countries. Modified guns have even emanated from Finland, Israel and South Africa.
However, the great political changes in Europe in the 1990s have thrown the future of the whole Kalashnikov genre into question. The former Soviet manufacturing facilities were largely confined to Russia, and it will be interesting to see what weapons the armed forces of the newly independent states (e.g., Latvia or the Ukraine) procure over the next decade. Even in modern Russia (q.v.), the current generation of universal rifles derived from the 5.45mm AK-74M are under threat from the Nikonov prototypes.
The Kalashnikov action taps propellant gas at the mid-point of the bore to strike a piston attached to the bolt carrier. This drives the piston/bolt carrier assembly backward and rotates the bolt out of engagement. Widely criticized for its clumsiness, low muzzle velocity and a poor-performing cartridge (from the purely technical standpoint, validly), the Kalashnikov is simple, solid, reliable, and surprisingly effective when firing automatically." - John Walter

"The Russian AK47 is easily the hands-down favorite arm of terrorists and revolutionaries everywhere. Aside from rugged quality and stopping power, the Kalashnikov is also readily available at bargain-basement prices, sometimes passed out free of charge by Moscow's missionaries at the KGB. In Vietnam the AK47 functioned under field conditions that produced no end of problems for the M16. Since then, it has been variously used by Palestinian guerillas infiltrating Israel, Black September terrorists in Munich, and the IRA in Belfast. In Africa and Southeast Asia, terrorists are free to choose between the offerings of Moscow and their C
"Mikhail Kalashnikov was a railroad clerk who was conscripted into the Soviet Army in 1938 and became a tank driver. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941 he was a sergeant tank commander, and in September of that year he was badly wounded in battle near Bryansk. After his discharge from the hospital he was given six months convalescent leave and spent his time designing a sub-machine gun which he submitted to the army. They were impressed, but since it offered no particular advantage over the existing models, turned it down. Nevertheless, there was sufficient evidence of Kalashnikov's talent for him t0 be sent as a technician to a weapons test establishments, instead of reporting back to the front when his leave expired. Here, he worked for a while on improvements to machine guns, until one day in early 1944 he was given a handful of the new M1943 cartridges and invited to design an assault rifle around them. The rest, as they say, is history.
Kalashnikov's initial design for an assault rifle was submitted in 1946, and what little we know of it suggests that it was a good deal different in appearance from the rifle which finally bore his name. In any event, three years of development followed before, some time in 1949, the Avtomat Kalashnikov was approved for service as the AK47, and it was not until some time in 1950 that serious production got under way. Since then there have probably been few days in which the Kalashnikov rifle, in one form or another, has not been in production somewhere in the world.
For Kalashnikov did not merely invent a rifle, he invented a system upon which all sorts of weapons could be constructed - rifles, sub-machine guns, machine guns. They could all be made to work by modifying the basic building blocks of the AK47 rifle. Kalashnikov was not the first man with this idea, nor will he be the last, but he has certainly been the most successful, largely because he had a monolithic dictatorship behind him, a government which simply said 'Do this' and it was done. Once the AK47 had been approved for service, Kalashnikov joined the ranks of the successful designers and his idea carried weight, and when he proposed his system people listened, and when they agreed the job was done.
The first move was to standardize the AK47 in all Communist Bloc countries - East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, China, North Korea... the only exception was Czechoslovakia, which had a thriving arms industry and preferred to use its own design of rifle, though even so it eventually had to standardize on the 7.62-mm M1943 cartridge. After this, the rifle was supplied to any and every nationalist group anxious to rise against its rulers, and to any country anxious to provide its armed forces with modern weapons at a low price. So that, one way or another, the Kalashnikov spread across the world." - Ian Hogg

"Since its debut in 1947, some thirty to fifty million Kalashnikov AK assault rifles have been manufactured by the Soviets and their allies. Like the Maxim, the Kalashnikov is more than a weapon; it has become a symbol. The former represented the of the imperial armies, while the AK has become an icon for many of the anti-establishment insurgent, freedom fighter, and terrorist organizations that exist today. The effectiveness of these weapons as symbols comes from their efficiency as machines of death. And it should be noted that most of the colonial regimes in Africa and Asia ceased to exist when the indigenous population 'got' the machine gun in numbers sufficient to overwhelm, or threaten to overwhelm, the power of the imperial state. Mao Tse Tung correctly noted that 'power comes from the muzzle of the gun.' Neither Hiram Maxim nor Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov would argue with that tenet." - Edward C. Ezell

"One of the consequences of this concurrence of (Soviet) manufacturing capacity and development capability is the almost ubiquitous nature of Kalashnikov's weapons. As It should be no wonder then that Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov is a social and economic hero in his native land. In a land that honors its technological elite, Kalashnikov stands out because his family of successful weapons have given reliable firepower to his nation's infantrymen, and full employment to his weapons factory's employees. And beyond that the name Kalashnikov is known world-wide. In backwater regions, where a Russian has never been seen, men and women equipped with AKs know that Russians make good reliable weapons. It was once noted only semi-in-jest that Americans export Coke, the Japanese export Sonys, and the Soviets export Kalashnikovs.
Look where you like in the trouble spots of the world today and you will see the Kalashnikov rifle. It will never win prizes for grace, beauty or elegant engineering, but it certainly wins them for reliability, toughness and simplicity." - Bishop

"Vodka Shots? Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the famed AK-47 rifle, is lending his name to a new brand of vodka. According to Newsweek International, Kalashnikov, who makes no money from what has become the most-produced military-style rifle in the world, has branded a host of products, including watches, umbrellas, golf tees, and a previous Russian vodka. The new vodka will be available in the United States and Europe this year." - American Rifleman, February, 2005


References:
Bishop, Chris Ed. GUNS IN COMBAT. Chartwell Books, Inc. Edison, N.J. 1998.
Ellis, John. THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE MACHINE GUN. John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, Md. 1986.
Hogg, Ian. THE STORY OF THE GUN. St. Martin's Press. N.Y., N.Y. 1986.
Hogg, Ian. SMALL ARMS: PISTOLS AND RIFLES. Stackpole Books. Mechanicsburg, Pa. 2001.
Johnson, Harold E. DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: SMALL ARMS IDENTIFICATION AND OPERATION GUIDE - EURASIAN COMMUNIST COUNTRIES. Army Material Command. Washington, D.C. 1973.
Newton, Michael. ARMED AND DANGEROUS: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO WEAPONS. Writer's Digest Books. Cincinnati, Ohio. 1990.
Philip, Craig. THE WORLD'S GREAT SMALL ARMS. Barnes & Noble Books. N.Y., N.Y. 1995.
Walter, John. RIFLES OF THE WORLD. 2nd Ed. Krause Publications. Iola, Wi. 1998.

References Center List - List Compiled from Intelligence Reports - Soviet 7.62 Automatic Rifle "AK" GU 4072 ID 25246.