marketing a line of Kalashnikov pocketknives, snowboards, thermoses, sunglasses, and umbrellas. Brochures with the products were abundant at trade shows. Sales appeared negligible. By 2004, Mikhail Kalashnikov expected no turnabout. “For now I haven’t experienced any financial benefit,” he said. “There aren’t yet any results.” The ventures all suffered in part from their organizers’ misunderstanding of the meaning of the Kalashnikov line. They insisted that the word
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The museum, which struggled for years to raise money for its construction, provides a series of stories within a story. Kalashnikov derided the men who dismantled the Soviet Union and profited from the looting of state assets afterward. The museum in Izhevsk that is dedicated to him was built with donations from Anatoly B. Chubais, one of the main architects of the privatization of state assets, who profited handsomely in the process. The ironies only get richer. Chubais was nearly assassinated in 2005 by at least two men who ambushed his armored BMW on a road outside Moscow, spraying it with Kalashnikov fire.
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The Pentagon’s distribution of automatic weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan was performed for years with scant controls. The situation improved after several years of war, but only after outcry, investigation, and scandal. Many of the weapons by then were lost from custody, and in the hands of insurgents, criminals, and sellers in bazaars.
