Kalashnikov: The Rifle That Changed Everything

He was wounded on a Soviet battlefield in 1941, spent months in a hospital bed sketching weapon designs, and produced a rifle that ended up on national flags. This is the full story of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the AK-47, and the hundred million rifles that followed. Chapters: 0:00 Birth and Early Life 0:22 Stalin's Dekulakization — Family Exiled to Siberia 0:31 Escape to Kazakhstan 0:52 Military Training and Conscription 1:03 Battle of Bryansk — September 1941 1:18 Hospital Recovery — Weapon Designs Begin 1:44 Soviet Competitive Arms Development 2:39 The 1946 Design Competition 3:21 AK-47 Officially Selected 3:33 The Authorship Dispute 3:44 Hugo Schmeisser at Izhevsk 5:04 How the AK-47 Actually Works 5:58 The AKM and AK-74 Variants 6:34 Global Proliferation — Given, Not Sold 8:01 Afghanistan, the CIA, and Pakistan 8:35 The AK-47 as National Symbol 9:00 The Death Toll 10:02 Kalashnikov vs Stoner — Cold War Rivalry 11:02 No Royalties, Legal Battles, Bankruptcy 12:11 State Honours 12:54 The Letter to Patriarch Kirill For further reading: — C.J. Chivers, The Gun (Simon & Schuster, 2010) — Small Arms Survey Annual Reports, smallarmssurvey.org — Jens Wehner, research on Hugo Schmeisser and the AK-47 origin dispute, Saxon State Archives — Anthony G. Williams and Emmanuel Gustin, Flying Guns: The Modern Era (Airlife, 2004) If you enjoyed this video, subscribe so you'll never miss another episode.