Monument to AK47’s inventor features Nazi gun
: Workers in Moscow have erased the illustration of a gun from a freshly inaugurated monument of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle, after it was found that the drawing was of a Nazi weapon.
“We have checked the information about a mistake. It is confirmed. The sculptor, Salavat Shtsherbakoff, has acknowledged his mistake,” the state-supported Russian Military History Society, which backed the monument, told TASS news agency.
The erroneous drawing was of an StG44 — for Sturmgewehr (Storm Rifle), a name reputedly conferred by Adolf Hitler himself. It became the Nazis’ frontline weapon on the bloody Eastern Front in World War 2.
Kalashnikov was elevated to hero status in the Soviet Union for inventing a simple, rugged, reliable and easy-tomanufacture automatic weapon for the Red Army.
It entered service after World War II — the AK-47 comes from the Russian “Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947” — to became a standard weapon for Soviet forces and revolutionary movements around the world.
Acclaim of Kalashnikov continued after the fall of the Soviet Union, culminating with a project to erect a statue in his honour after he died in 2013.
The seven metre statue, located in a central thoroughfare, was unveiled to great pomp on Tuesday.
The statue itself accurately features Kalashnikov clutching his invention. The StG44 was featured in an engineer’s drawing. AFP
MOSCOW