He's the guy who designed the AK-47 and, perforce, all its subsequent iterations.
The Kalashnikov design has only eight moving parts, and I only need 30 seconds to teach you how to field strip it, after which you will be able to do it in 15 seconds with heavy gloves on in the dead of winter. Throw it in sand, pick it up, shake it out, the rifle will fire.
Feed it dirty ammo, it will fire and cycle. Submerge it in water, take it out, the rifle will fire. Don't want to take it out of the water first?
That's fine too. Did
your lunch somehow get caught up in the receiver? No worries, the AK's cool with that.
Ready-made for the post-Cold-War shift from open-field, marksmanship-based warfare to close-in, urbanized combat, the AK is still the standard for reliability that other rifles are compared to. No other weapon system used during the 20th century killed more people than the AK. None even came close.
The political landscape of the world today would be much, much different if not for Kalashnikov. Whether it was for the better or the worse is for a bunch of pussy fat-bellied civilians to bloviate about, but the fact remains that his life changed the course of history.