It's a masterpiece of minimalist engineering – simple, powerful and ultra-reliable. Seventy years after it was first invented, there may be as many as 75 million of these devices in circulation. Yesterday a 30-foot statue of its designer was unveiled in Moscow, sprinkled with holy water by an Orthodox priest.
Yes: Mikhail Kalashnikov certainly made his mark on history. His iconic AK-47 accounts for around 20 per cent of the small arms in the world today. It's not very accurate and doesn't have a very long range, but it's extremely good at killing people – millions of them so far. It's the weapon of choice not just for the Russian military but for terrorists, gangsters and murderous militias the world over.
Kalashnikov was 94 when he died in 2013 and lived to regret what he had done. A year before his death he wrote a letter to the Russian Orthodox Church's Patriarch Kirill, saying: 'I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I... a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?'
He continued: 'The longer I live, the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man to have the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.' His signature describes himself as 'a slave of God, the designer Mikhail Kalashnikov'.
His doubts have been ignored by the ROC. Father Konstantin, who blessed the monument, said: 'He created this weapon to defend his motherland,' while the controversial Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin described the gun on Facebook as a 'holy weapon'.
However, it doesn't take much perceptiveness to notice the irony of the Kalashnikov monument's erection at just the same time as, all over the American South, memorials to Confederate generals are being quietly dismantled. It has taken a long time, but communities there are discovering that celebrating people who fought courageously to keep black people enslaved isn't quite morally straightforward. Neither, in the UK, are all those statues to our empire-builders and colonial warriors. That doesn't mean they should automatically be removed or demolished, in a misguided attempt to rewrite history, but they should be part of an attempt to understand it better, and to repent – as far as that's possible or appropriate – of our connivance with the sins of our ancestors. And yes, sometimes – though not always – that does require the bulldozer and the wrecking ball.
The Church has a part to play in this reassessment of the past, because – though in practice it's painfully time-bound and culturally conditioned – in theory at least, it can look at these things from an eternal perspective, and with a biblically-based understanding of human nature. The truth is that there are very few unsullied heroes. In Parliament Square there are statues to Gandhi and Churchill, both of whom said and did bad things as well as good. There are other statues – plenty of them, in fact, on both sides of the Atlantic – which, with the benefit of hindsight, are just embarrassing.
The point is that we have learned to be critical. These monuments are an attempt to set reputations in stone. It no longer works, if it ever did. We are too aware of the messiness of history, of good intentions gone wrong, of the fact that brave people fought for indefensible causes. Violence involves sin, always; the only conceivable defence for it is that non-violence sometimes involves greater sin. So the Church should be very discriminating about blessing those whose claim to fame is that they were better at it than our enemies.
Has the ROC done this in the case of the Kalashnikov monument? The Church is an enthusiastic and largely uncritical supporter of Putin's Russian nationalist regime. Kalashnikov was a Russian patriot. His invention is regarded with pride in Russia – you can buy Kalashnikov watches, knives and vodka bottles, and last year Kalashnikov even opened a store at Moscow's largest airport – the souvenirs and replica weapons would pose 'no security threat', the company said.
But his legacy is dreadful, as he saw clearly himself – and one of its most pernicious aspects is the normalisation of extreme violence. Mozambique has the Kalashnikov as an emblem on its flag. Revolutionary groups like Hezbollah use it as an emblem too. It is, in this way, an icon of death, a sign that talking has stopped and killing is the only solution.
The West has not yet finished rexamining its conscience over its historical memorials. Russia has barely even started.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
