Kissed by God and the Party: in the movie Kalashnikov looks like a propaganda icon

Vyacheslav Kondratyev, a popular weapons specialist in LiveJournal, shared in his publication his impressions of the film about the inventor of the legendary AKM machine gun Mikhail Kalashnikov.

The author first of all drew attention to the very mysteriousness of this person, who owns a single invention, and at the same time, neither the date of his birth (1917 or 1919), nor education (or 4, or 7, or 9 classes), nor the first place are known for certain. work (or he was, as shown in the film, a simple worker of a steam locomotive depot, or the technical secretary of the political department (!) of the Turkestan-Siberian railway)...

All these riddles pull new ones with them, and in the end create such an intricate "vinaigrette" that it is impossible to understand it. True, they did not understand the film, but taking the canonical biography, they rejected all the controversial points.

And it turned out that an illiterate peasant nugget, not versed in drawings, did not study any technical disciplines, but thanks to a genius inspiration, came up with a weapon that put all certified gunsmiths to shame.

Even Vasily Degtyaryov himself, the creator of the DP (Degtyaryov's infantry directing gun - noted by the editor) and DShK machine guns (Soviet easel heavy machine gun cartridge 12.7 × 108 mm), the PPD submachine gun, the anti-tank gun PTRD and many others, which allowed him to be considered the main gunsmith of the USSR, almost burst into tears of fierce envy when he saw the prototype of the AKM, and immediately removed his own machine from the competition - “because of shame".

This is understandable, because Kalashnikov, as one of the characters in the film said, “God kissed the crown of the head” (he would have tried so to speak in Stalin's times!). True, God did not kiss Kalashnikov anymore, since all the other "creations" of the peasant boy, who did not even remotely know either physics or strength of materials, were simple variations on the theme of the first - AK-47.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the film completely bypassed the theme of the co-authors of Kalashnikov, and after all, at first the name of the AK-47 looked like AKZ - "Kalashnikov-Zaitsev assault rifle", since the designer AA was actively involved in its creation. Zaitsev, at least he graduated from a mechanical college. And also engineer V.I. Soloviev, who made mathematical calculations. But all the laurels went to the only "kissed by God on the top of the head" Mikhail Kalashnikov.

Moreover, about the delicate situation when at the Izhevsk Arms Plant, at the stage of fine-tuning and introducing AKM into mass production, there was a large group of German weapons designers (and the famous Hugo Schmeiser among them), who were actually forcibly taken to the USSR in 1946, in the film does not say anything at all. But this fact makes the degree of their participation either in the development or in the fine-tuning of the AK-47 extremely mysterious, if not decisive.

That is, filmmakers, for the sake of creating an iconographic face of their hero, brushed aside everything that could interfere with this task. But they showed Kalashnikov's touching love story for a draftswoman assigned to him personally, since he did not understand anything in the drawings: he offers her a hand and heart, completely forgetting that he left his wife and son in Kazakhstan - not a word about them in this film either. And so on and so forth.

All this taken together has nothing to do with either history or cinema, but is a pseudo-historical agitation, worked out according to rusty Soviet templates. Only the leading role of the party was replaced by God's kisses...