The Soviet regimes had a manic need to display the country’s excellence to the world and especially for their own sovoks, whether the reason was the Slavic inferiority complex or whatever, for the civilized world their efforts were tragicomical, in
reality it was a mere developing country with a nuclear
weapon (due to the help of Western commies) and today's successor, Putinstan is basically unchanged with the same mindset.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it."
Mikhail Kalashnikov also began to believe in this Soviet myth about himself as a creator of the
AK 47, the quote is allegedly from Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of
Propaganda in the Third Reich.
Immediately after the
war, the Soviets began hunting experts in various fields from Germany for forced labor into the Soviet Union, among these thousands was also a
weapon designer Hugo Schmeisser and his
15-member team and 500 other
German gunsmiths, metallurgists and scientists. HS had developed the world's first usable assault rifle, the Strumgevehr 44. Kalashnikov denied having met Schmeisser ever (in the town of Izhmash), but at least once in a weak moment in an interview in 2009 he said he had "collaborated" with him - this is the good ol' Homo Sovieticus' hero-making method; talents develop a product, but the glory goes to the own peasant. Schmeisser was allowed to return to the "liberated" part of Germany in 1952 only to
die the following year.
When the pompous
Mikhail Kalashnikov statue was unveiled in Moscow
2017, at the same time, in a way, the real designer of the
AK 47 was also unveiled, but only for a moment... The sculptor had blundered by depicting Schmeisser's designed StG 44 and its parts on the pedestal of the statue - an angle grinder was found and soon this embarrassing reminder of honest historiography was removed.
