Mikhail Kalashnikov, the former Red Army sergeant behind one of the world's most omnipresent weapons — the AK-47 and its variants and copies, used by national armies, terrorists, drug gangs, bank robbers, revolutionaries and jihadists — died Dec. 23 at a hospital in Izhevsk, Russia. He was 94.
He lived in Izhevsk, the capital of the Russian republic of Udmurtia. Viktor Chulkov, a spokesman for the republic's president, confirmed the death to news sources but did not give a cause of death. Kalashnikov had been hospitalized for the past month with unspecified health problems.
Kalashnikov began life as a sickly child in a peasant family and would have seemed an unlikely candidate for the international fame he achieved. He became a folk hero in his native land and a celebrity abroad. Despite having little technical training, he rose to the top of the Soviet armaments industry and traveled throughout the world, including the United States, as the face of Russian weaponry, an advertisement for a Soviet product that actually worked.