Michael Hodges's breezy history describes how a Soviet antique became the world's favourite gun. The A stands for "automatic", the K for "Kalashnikov", and the 47 for the year of its invention. Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in 1919, the second son of a family of Siberian kulaks who were persecuted under Stalin's first Five Year Plan. During the German invasion of Russia in 1941, he was a tank sergeant, wounded in a battle with Panzers. The next winter he began work on a prototype, and five years later won a national competition for a new automatic rifle.