On the public record, the inventor of the AK-47 assault rifle expressed pride in his work and rejected any idea that he was responsible for the lives lost to his biggest achievement.  In private, the question of responsibility weighed heavier with each passing year until Mikhail Kalashnikov died last month at age 94.

“I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I... a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?” Kalashnikov asked in a previously unpublished letter to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church written last May.  Russia’s pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia revealed it this week.

“The longer I live,” Kalashnikov continued, “the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man to have the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.”

Wounded by Germans in World War II, designer Mikhail Kalashnikov came up with the AK-47 a couple of years after the war ended, because he wanted Soviet troops to have a weapon they could count on.  Reliable and inexpensive to manufacture, 100 million AKs and knock-offs were used in subsequent conflicts all over the world, as well as in robberies, murders, and other crimes.

“It is painful for me to see when criminal elements of all kinds fire from my weapon,” Kalashnikov said in 2008, in an earlier hint of the guilt that was bearing down on him, but never publicly acknowledged.  He found religion at age 91, entering a church for the first time and getting not only baptized, but also getting some form of absolution.

“The Church has a very definite position: when weapons serve to protect the Fatherland, the Church supports both its creators and the soldiers who use it,” wrote Russian Patriarch Cyril Alexander Volkov in a return correspondence.

“He designed this rifle to defend his country, not so terrorists could use it in Saudi Arabia.”

Kalashnikov died on 23 December, was widely mourned in Russia, and was given a hero’s funeral attended by President Vladimir Putin and other top leaders.