Kalashnikov accusations of plagiarism became part of the ideological war
According to the author of the monument - the national artist of Russia Salavat Shcherbakov, the automatic machine was not originally envisaged in the concept of the monument, but then it was decided that the designer would hold his creation - AK-47. To immediately be clear to whom the monument. “This is a feat not a one-time, but a feat of a lifelong, and this is a feat of intelligence. This is a colossal tension of thought to reach such an ideal product, ”Shcherbakova quoted TASS.
As if in mockery of this, the Web has intensified discussions that the original AK-47 version was not invented by Kalashnikov, but was converted from German designs, in particular, by the famous design bureau of the Third Reich Hugo Schmeisser.
However, such disputes have been going on since the days of the perestroika press, and now they have just turned up a convenient excuse. And you need to understand that almost all versions of the lack of independence of the work of Kalashnikov come from Anglo-Saxon specialists and are based on the external similarity of AK-47 with two other samples from approximately the same time - German SIG-44 of the famous designer Hugo Schmeisser and Czech ZH-29 Vaclav Holek. Allegedly, the captured German designers from the Schmeisser Bureau, who worked at the plant in Izhevsk at the end of the 40, played almost the key role.
At the same time, it turns out that AK-47 was developed at another plant - in Kovrov. Hugo Schmeisser and Mikhail Kalashnikov were located 1000 kilometers from each other and never met - the German designer returned to Germany in 1952 and died the following year.
Clement Efremovich against
The main propagandists of the version about the German origin of AK-47 were two Gordon - Texas gunsmith Gordon Rottman and the Scottish historian, an expert on the Third Reich Gordon Williamson. Walter Harold Black Smith, a prominent figure of the American Rifle Association, is advocating for “Czech origin”.
Subsequently, these versions are overgrown with fun details. In particular, long borrowing chains for some nodes were “established”. For example, the following: the Soviet designer Simonov invented the 1920s invented the trigger mechanism, Vaclav Holek copied it from him, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Schmeisser stole the idea, and Kalashnikov already stole it from Schmeisser. At some point, the Tula designer Bulkin, who invented the machine TBC-415, who also looks like Kalash, was added to this chain, but you can walk to the first tweeters as well.
The main problem is that engineering and design ideas in the production of small arms exhausted themselves just in time for the beginning of the Second World War. Within the framework of a common impasse, the same ideas literally were in the air. They were sometimes developed in parallel in several countries and even within the same country, simply in different design offices. Sometimes direct borrowing took place, but it was always limited by local peculiarities of industry.
In the USSR, for example, weapons were never created simply “for the love of art”. There were technical assignments tailored to a specific application, and without their approval it was impossible to use the efforts of the whole bureau. At the same time, the terms were often not put at all or defined in general terms, since testing of new samples required collecting several numerous commissions, each of which revealed deficiencies and required improvement, and it was often unrealistic to collect all these very respected people in one place. .
The Soviet Union lagged behind Western countries in the development and production of submachine guns (machine guns) and for other subjective reasons. The People's Commissariat of Defense, with Marshal Voroshilov at the head, simply did not believe in this weapon and considered it meaningless, and because of that it slowed down promising developments in this area. The "cavalry faction" won the final victory after the "Tukhachevsky group" was shot, because it was Tukhachevsky who promoted the rearmament program.
Slightly rectified the situation of the Winter War. Some Soviet units from among those who are now called special forces (at that time there was no such thing as independent units with specific tasks and weapons), switched to captured Finnish Suomi automata, strikingly resembling in parallel and in a number of devices parallel samples from bureau all the same Schmeisser. Suomi was at that time so effective and unpretentious that some of his remarks are still used in armed conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. And the Swedish equivalent of the same time, “Karl Gustav M / 45” under the brand name “Port Said”, was last lit this year during an attack by Palestinian militants of the Temple Mount. With the light hand of the South European arms dealers in Palestine, he received the nickname "Carlo".
Killer puzzle
Lovers of small arms and his stories - this is a whole subculture. People spend all their free time on the analysis of certain units and details of the firing mechanisms and are very jealous of everything connected with it. In 90, this closed world quite sincerely became interested in “investigating” the origin of, say, the shock mechanism and the AK-47 stem bindings, skipping past consciousness that Kalashnikov’s discredit was, among other things, a spiral of information warfare. And the Russian state at that time almost lost even the Kovrovsky mechanical plant, and it was not up to the defense of a recognizable brand.
In those years, whole detective investigations were written, during which movements in the space of Kalashnikov, Schmeisser and other interested parties were studied. But over time, the discussion turned into the category of “yellow” and everyone began to fade. We even agreed that the “real” Kalashnikov burned down in tank near Bryansk, and the world was presented with a “frontman” who only plays the role of a designer.
The most innocuous of the “yellow” versions was the authorship of the above-mentioned designer Sergey Simonov, who was promoted by Tukhachevsky, but after the death of the latter against the background of Voroshilov’s dislike of the machine guns, he simply transferred the authorship to Kalashnikov, remaining something of a nameless contractor.
An attempt to "close the topic" and "reconcile all" was the theory of "selection of options", voiced by the famous intellectual Anatoly Wasserman. He reasonably suggested that each new weapon model is not created in a vacuum and not from scratch - in the process of designing and further engineering processing many existing samples are taken into account, with many details subsequently being finalized for a specific technical task. That is, modern design of small arms is something like a puzzle, collecting which designer or bureau strives to achieve the best location and use of mechanisms taking into account many factors, including, for example, production capabilities.
In addition, the creation of mass serial weapons is the collective work of large groups of people, some of whom may never intersect live, such as the creators of high-strength alloys for the barrel and workers in the chemical industry who conjure powder. In the process of creating a machine gun or a pistol, they simply don’t need each other, but individually, their work is critically important.
By the way, patent law in this area works poorly. Kalashnikov did not have a patent for the whole machine as an invention, which surprised those who were simply worried about Mikhail Timofeevich as a person who lived in retirement. He owned Soviet patents for some of the mechanisms and parts of AK-47, which are far from being recognized by everyone on the planet. At this point - the lack of a patent for the entire product - and seized the Wasserman. But if you think about it, just a retrospective view from the modern world - in the USSR, the patent on AK-47 could not be given, because they could (for reasons of secrecy or without any clear considerations). Nobody asks why the Queen did not have a patent for the Voskhod rocket, and Gagarin did not brand the phrase “Let's go!”.
Ultimately, all these discussions were and are being conducted in two little intersecting universes. In the first, people in-depth in the subject “piece of iron” are measured with cogs, trying to prove that mankind has already produced one mechanism or another before Kalashnikov or vice versa - that it was the Soviet designer who is a full-fledged author. At the same time, voluminous tables of arguments for and against are published, from which an uninterested person will not extract anything important for himself, besides dozens of special terms.
In another, for many decades, there was the usual propaganda discrediting of the entire Soviet. Kalashnikov was a “fake”, all were invented by German engineers forcibly transported to the USSR, and the Soviet generals were completely imbeciles and communist fanatics who, under Stalin’s orders, were driving over Mozha talented designers and intelligent people. In the 90s, this was a common place, and many readers of the perestroika press still have porridge in their heads for such “sensations” and “discoveries”.
In the same series were hundreds of publications on intelligence work, according to which almost all the military-technical achievements of the Soviet era were stolen in the West. However, not without that, intelligence worked, the SCST issued technical specifications, and the Americans, in turn, chased after promising Soviet developments. However, to turn this part of the truth into a fetish to discredit the entire Soviet period of life is ugly.
It is difficult to say how much in that campaign was (and is) from competing firms and the American Rifle Association. In the end, dozens of countries without any patents and permits rivet their AK-47 replicas, differing only in design and materials.
So, the Romanian izvod, popular in local conflicts, has an extra short handle attached to the forearm, from which many have concluded that the Romanians have three hands. The Hungarians, who have a wood problem, replaced with plastic in the AK-47 design everything they could. And the Chinese still rivet their “Kalash” from what they consider to be steel - you can throw the barrel through 800 shots, but in some countries of black Africa this happens enough.
Over time, conversations about the origin of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s design and copyright ideas, of course, will subside - and will be revived again only for some reason. But you need to be clearly aware that the technical details are one story, and the ideological informational pressure is completely different. Just sometimes they are combined.
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