Kalashnikov inventor dies aged 94

The Daily Telegraph ^ | December 23, 2013 | Harriet Alexander

[OldPossum]

To this day I regret my missing meeting Mr. Kalashnikov by a matter of a half hour one time. I was a volunteer interpreter at a Civil War national park monument and when I got there he had just left some 30 minutes before. Darn!

But I have an AK-47, nevertheless. One can really rock ‘n roll with that gun.

[Hugin]

German Sturmgewehr 44

[cunning_fish]

Indeed, AK-47 has more in common with Garand and earlier Soviet automatic rifles than it has in common with Sturmgewehr.
Learn about AVS-36, SVT-38, SVT-40. SVTs were nice rifles (low recoil combined with powerful cartridge - a lot of these rifles are available in Canada) of their time but proved to be too gentle to operate with peasant and worker’s army.
Germans captured a handful early in the war from Soviets and that was probably the first automatic rifles Germans used.

[MasterGunner01]

The concept of the assault rifle was not invented by M.T. Kalashnikov or S.G. Siminov or the Germans in WW2. Rather it was invented in 1915 by one Vladimir Grigoryevich Federov who designed a magazine-fed, selective fire rifle in 6.5x50SR Japanese Arisaka caliber. Some 3,200 of these rifles were produced. The weapon saw token combat in World War I, but was used more substantially in the Russian Civil War and in the 1939–1940 Soviet-Finnish war. The Federov Avtomat [automatic rifle] became obsolete in 1945. Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federov_Avtomat

[N. Theknow]

To the press it is an assault rifle.

To the military it is small arms.