To the AK-47! The Soviets being impressed with the German Sturmgewehr 44 held a design competition to develop their own version of an assault rifle. Enter Mikahail Kalasknikov who was going through rehab in a military hospital, he joined the competition and began working on his own design. Initially he lost the competition, the soviets chose the Simonov design (scaled down PTRS-41), or also known as the SKS. The Soviet army was also interested in producing a true assault rifle with a shortened M1943 round, this first weapon was the Sudayev- but, they determined it to be too heavy, so two years later they held another competition. Kalashnikov entered another design. It was a gas-operated rifle which had a breech-block mechanism similar to his 1944 carbine, and a curved 30-round magazine.
It proved to be reliable, and was passing all field test, but one of Kalashnikovs assistants asked for a major design change, Kalashnikov first reluctant, agreed . The new rifle was produced and subjected to a second round of test firing under extreme conditions. This new design proved to be more simple and more reliable then the first rifle...so therefore on July 6, 1947 production began and was adapted by the Soviets in 1949 as the "7.62mm Kalashnikov assault rifle (AK) " and the rest is history.......
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