Postage stamp issued in 2014 honouring Russian Kalashnikov. Photo from Wikipedia.
The man is on the right. The Order of St Andrew he was awarded is on the left. The weapon is behind him.
Problem
You finish a job and are immensely proud of it. Then some expert comes along and points out that you've made a basic mistake. What do you do?
The statue of Russia's hero, icon, designer and commercial success story, Kalashnikov, shows the designer of the gun holding the correct gun, unveiled to great fanfare. However, within a week an expert has looked at it and declared that the weapon shown on the base of the statue is credited to another designer from another country, Germany.
Answer
This story has an important lesson for those of us who travel. First, try to get everything checked in advance of a project or journey.
Check the name of the destination and ticket. Every now and then somebody flies to Paris, Texas instead of Paris, France, or makes a similar mistake with two similar sounding airport or city names.
Luckily the mistake about the statue was found early. What a pity it wasn't found before. But never mind. The mistaken part has been removed and will be replaced by the correct one.
As a writer I know what it's like to make a boo-boo. I once listed the wrong city as the capital of the country (New Zealand or Australia). It was the largest city but not the capital.
If you make one mistake, people doubt your ability to get anything right. But you may be getting only one thing wrong over thousands of correct ones.
Nonetheless, the error on the statue is not a fatal mistake, I hope.
Sailing the Titanic into an iceberg was a fatal mistake. A lot of people died. Of those who survived, some were widowed or orphaned. Others had their reputations ruined.
Another fatal error was involved in a story I heard about an architectural mistake with an unhappy end which makes me sad. An architect in Scotland designed a hotel which when it was opened at a grand event was found to have been built with no staircase to the upper floor. The architect was so distressed that he committed suicide.
I wish I could have been there to tell him jto cheer up; it's not a tragedy. It's a lovely hotel and will stand for centuries.
Yes, it's the history one of the grand historic hotels.
But regarding the Kalashnikove error, compared to the Titanic, and the building whose upper stories could not be reached, not serious problem happened when a wrong gun was shown on a statue. If it could not have been replaced, it could have been covered by a piece of fancy stonework. Or a plaque pretending that the error was delibberate, saying that the other gun was a copy or development inspired by the orignal Kalashnikov.
The error is a mistake which has cost some money and time to change. However, it has been changed.
Perhaps a more serious worry to those sensitive about reputations is the suggestion in some media that the original gun was not invented by the person who was said to have invented it.
I am beyond getting bothered about who said what or invented what nowadays. A long time ago I was a sub-editor on a Marshall Cavendish partwork. I was adapting a partwork., (A partwork is a series of magazines on a subject, in alphabetical order, which formed an encyclopaedia gathered into a series of lever arch files.)
I discovered how successful inventions are developed. The cars which we drive nowadays are not the same as those of the original inventors. Nor are the typewriters and sewing machines. Or the smart phones.
The inventor, Kalashnikov, got the kudos. He admitted that he had not made money out of his design. He said he was have been better off if he had designed a lawnmower.
Maybe you need to design many items to eventually make a profit. American Edison was an example of a man who did design lots of things and got the kudos. The light bulb is the one we remember, although he designed many other essentials.
Kalashnikov is the man whose name is remembered. So he won his immortality. And now he has a statue.
During his lifetime he received many honours. How did he feel about his invention?
Wikipedia has numerous quotes at the end of the article on him, which is unusual. Often one has a link to other pages.
Quotes[edit]
- "I was in the hospital, and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men, when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier, and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov—AK—and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947." [41]
- "Blame the Nazi Germans for making me become a gun designer ... I always wanted to construct agriculture machinery."[12]
- "When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed' ... So this has been my lifetime motto – I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable."[18]
- "I'm proud of my invention, but I'm sad that it is used by terrorists ... I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example a lawn mower."[11][19]
- "I created a weapon to defend the borders of my motherland. It's not my fault that it's being used where it shouldn't be. The politicians are more to blame for this."[7][8][9][16][19]
- "I sleep well. It's the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence."[42]
References
More On The Kalashnikov Statue
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-41367394 (Kalashnikov statue updated.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kalashnikov
To plan a trip, check the National Tourist Board for Russia:
https://www.visitrussia.org.uk
More information from:
https://wikitravel.org/en/Moscow
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer, and photographer. See my previous posts on statues in Moscow, and learning the Russian language. Please share links to your favourite posts.
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