Kalashnikov Launches Vodka

Had Lieutenant General Mikail T. Kalashnikov lived in a country that understood intellectual property rights, branding and residuals, the inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle would be a billionaire. But as a servant of the Soviet Union, he got far less. To make up for the short fall in his twilight years, the 82-year-old inventor has created a new vodka. Made from the waters of Lake Ladoga and Russian-grown grain, these shots promise to be more peaceful than the others for which he is responsible.

Vodka has gone through a burst of popularity in the US and parts of Europe, to the point where one can buy a French vodka made from grapes and distilled five times. It is mixed with all sorts of foul pollutants (cranberry juice springs to mind), and all sorts of trendy mixtures featuring vodka are all the rage among the 20-somethings who populate the bar scene from Manhattan to Telegraph Hill. Rarely does one see it consumed Russian style, in small glasses, neat, with food.

General Kalashnikov’s other great invention never went out of style. The AK-47 was designed by a young engineer during the Great Patriotic War (more familiarly to westerners, WWII) but it didn’t go into production until 1947. The base model was produced in many of the slave states of the USSR, but in 1959, there was a major modernization of Soviet weaponry which lasted into 1961. The result was the RPK light machine gun, the PKS heavy machine gun, the PKB armored carrier machine gun, and the PKT tank machine gun. In 1990, the Red Army (as it then was) got the AK-74M. Although the USSR is out of business, the general remains a hero of the country that succeeded it.

How does the general feel about the weapons that bear his name? He told Reuters recently, "I did not create the gun for international conflicts, I created it to protect the borders of my country. It is not my fault that it has been spread all over the world. It is its reliability and its simplicity that have taken it all over the world." Or as Isaac Asimov once observed, it’s a poor gun that won’t point both ways.

Only the most militant tee-totaler could complain of his new venture. And why at the age of 82 does he need something new to occupy himself? He explained "I've always wanted to improve and expand on the good name of my weapon by doing good things. So we decided to create a vodka under my name. And we wanted that vodka to be better than anything made, up until now, in both Russia and England." This journal warns the mixing of automatic weapons and alcohol is not healthy – it can make one shoot at totalitarians and miss.


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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