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The Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms

Details

Udmurt Republic
Izhevsk, Borodina st. 19
Phones: +7 (3412) 51-34-52
Web site: http://en.museum-mtk.ru/
The most popular museum of the arms capital of Russia

Expositions

The Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms was founded in 2004. From the day of its foundation it became the main sight of Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurt Republic and the City of Armourers with a 200-year history.

The museum was rightly named after Mikhail Kalashnikov. It was in Izhevsk that the legendary AK-47, the most popular weapon of the present day, began to be mass-produced. The design team of Izhevsk Machine-Building Factory gave birth to five generations of AK weapons. Mikhail Kalashnikov lived here most of his life and became an honorary citizen of Izhevsk and the Udmurt Republic. Mikhail Kalashnikov, Gennadiy Nikonov, Evgeniy Dragunov and Vladimir Yarygin make up a group of renowned Izhevsk weapon designers that made our city famous all over the globe.

The main exhibition of the museum tells about the history of our country and weapon production, shows new samples of guns. All exhibition halls are equipped with multimedia facilities. In our demonstration halls (firearms, air gun and archery ranges) there is a variety of historic and modern weapons to try.

History

Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov entered the history of small-arms as a designer of a submachine gun which became a legend of the arms industry in XX century.

M.T. Kalashnikov was the first in the world who invented a design, which became the basis for a line of unified automatic arms models. The derivatives have identical automatic action, design and operating principle to give great advantage to the armament of military forces.

The origin of Izhevsk city was the Armory Factory founded by the order of the Emperor Alexander I in 1807.

The factory became the ground point of Izhevsk and many enterprises of the city go back to it. Over the two centuries the city of great plants and the city of great workers had bought the fame of the armory origin in Russia.

Interesting Facts

The total area of the museum complex is 4000 square metres. The area of exhibition halls is more than 1000 square metres. The Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms is one of the most attractive sites for tourists in the capital of the Udmurt Republic.

Besides the permanent exposition, the museum developed a movable exhibition “Legendary Kalashnikov”. For the past decade it has been to a great number of regions: from Sakhalin to Kaliningrad. In 2017, the renovated version of the movable exhibition was presented in the Tula State Weapons Museum, having launched its anniversary tour. At the moment the Kalashnikov Museum in cooperation with the Ural Regional Museum Design Institute are working on its content updating.

The Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms constantly opens thematic temporary exhibitions, devoted to the key topic and revealing new aspects of Izhevsk gunsmiths creative work in general.

In 2007, in connection with the 200th anniversary of Izhevsk weapons and the 60th anniversary of the AK, the museum opened a large-scale exhibition “The Glory of Russian Weapons”. Among its partners were representatives of Izhevsk defense factories, historians and designers of the Udmurt Republic, experts of the Museum Design Laboratory of the Research Institute of Cultural Studies of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation (Moscow), artists of Artefactum design studio (Yekaterinburg), multimedia centres programmers of Udmurt State University and Kalashnikov Izhevsk State Technical University. The exhibition was opened due to archeological work on the territory of the oldest enterprise of the city (Izhevsk Weapons Factory) and huge research work in the archives and museums of the Udmurt Republic and St. Petersburg. The anniversary exhibition covered the area of 400 square metres in four museum halls and aroused great interest.