That’s fair. Pulling off what they did with a rimmed cartridge was good work.
I conceded it was revolutionary for the Russians, though the French and Germans had already pioneered the technology.
I cite the Garant and STG-43 as revolutionary because they were the pioneers (yes, there were semi-auto rifles before the Garand, but none were reliable enough for widespread deployment). The STG-43, of course, was the first assault rifle.
Depends an awful lot on how you define that term *assault rifle.*
Initially Fedorov wanted to call the class of weapons to which his new gun belonged ручное ружьё-пулемет (lit. "handheld light-machine-gun", i.e. a lighter class than ружьё-пулемет which denoted light machine guns like the Madsen), which reflected his tactical thinking behind the development of the weapon. This designation appeared in a September 1916 article in the journal of the Artillery Commission. Fedorov's superior, General N.M. Filatov (Н.М. Филатов), is credited for introducing the much shorter term "avtomat" for the gun—a neologism derived from the Greek word 'automaton' and synonymous with the English word "automatic", this is the one that stuck. Written records of this new term being applied to the gun date to 1919.
In contemporary Russian terminology, the word "avtomat" denotes assault rifle, although historically the term has had a broader meaning.