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Editorial

Moscow’s Monument to Murder

Credit...Leonardo Santamaria

Like many a statue in the United States that we have struggled over of late, the towering monument to Mikhail Kalashnikov, unveiled in a highly visible spot in Moscow on Tuesday, seems to have been put up for mostly the wrong reasons. The statue was promoted by the Russian culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, a nationalist who spends much of his time glorifying Russian military history and who described the familiar assault weapon General Kalashnikov invented, which is widely known by his name, as “a true cultural brand of Russia.”

It is certainly a universally known brand, whether as a Kalashnikov or as an AK-47. But that is not something General Kalashnikov was necessarily proud of. A self-taught mechanic born to Siberian peasants, he conceived of the weapon while a soldier in World War II as a simple, compact and reliable automatic rifle desperately needed by outgunned Soviet soldiers. What became of his invention deeply troubled him in his later years.

Since its introduction in 1947, the AK-47 evolved, as The Times’s C. J. Chivers recounts in his book of its history, “The Gun,” into the weapon of choice for guerrilla warfare, crime, terrorism and jihad. About 100 million AK-47s have been built worldwide, many of them knockoffs produced in countries around the world. It has been used to kill untold millions of people; so powerful is its symbolism that it figures on the flags of Mozambique and the Islamist movement Hezbollah, as well as the coats of arms of Zimbabwe and East Timor.

At the unveiling ceremony in Moscow, the official focus was in line with President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to appropriate symbols of Russian patriotism and religion. A priest who blessed the statue with holy water declared that General Kalashnikov had “created this weapon to defend his motherland.” That he did, and of that he was proud, but the AK-47’s use by terrorists came to haunt him.

Shortly before his death in 2013 at the age of 94, he laid out his doubts in a letter to the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Kirill. “My spiritual pain is unbearable,” he wrote; if his automatic weapon deprived people of life, he asked, was he not “guilty of people’s deaths, even enemies?” The patriarch responded that weapons used for the defense of the country were approved by the church.

Hopefully, that soothed the old man’s troubled soul, and there is no evidence that his motive for conceiving of the AK-47 was anything other than to provide a better basic weapon to soldiers with whom he had endured the brutality of World War II. Hopefully, too, the statue of General Kalashnikov will lead some viewers past Mr. Putin’s nationalistic intentions and to the painful questions that the inventor of the world’s most abundant weapon wrestled with. That should be his legacy.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Moscow’s Monument to Murder. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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