The photo features Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov (2nd from the right) and Andriyan Grigorievich Nikolaev, pilot-cosmonaut No.3 (in the center).The photo features Mikhail Timofeevich Kalashnikov (2nd from the right) and Andriyan Grigorievich Nikolaev, pilot-cosmonaut No.3 (in the center).

Mikhail Kalashnikov became interested in weapons as a teenager, and in 1941, when he was taking treatment after a wound, he had an idea to create a rapid-fire machine gun. The gun was introduced in 1944. Over half a century, Mikhail Kalashnikov developed dozens of models of assault rifles, machine guns, pistols and hunting carbines; many of them are still unrivaled. However, the talented engineer was known not only as the inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

 
His name was the key to any official doors, so in his native Udmurtia Mikhail Kalashnikov was often asked for help by both ordinary workers and party functionaries. Since 1953, the designer himself was a member of the CPSU and was elected as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR for six times. It first happened in 1950 and was a complete surprise for the 30-year-old Kalashnikov. By that time, the young inventor had already received the Stalin Prize for his machine gun, but he was known only to a small circle of people, specialists at the Izhevsk Motor Plant where prototypes of automatic weapons were created.

 
Andriyan Grigorievich Nikolaev was a Soviet cosmonaut who, after Yuri Gagarin and German Titov, made the third space flight. He was born on September 5, 1929 in the village of Shorshely of the Chuvash USSR in the family of a groom and a milkmaid. After school, he graduated from the forestry college, and then enrolled in an aviation school. A member of the first set of cosmonauts, he was among the top three men chosen for the first flight, but he visited space only in 1962. He was the first cosmonaut who spent some time on the orbit without a spacesuit. Andriyan Nikolaev took his second space flight in 1970.

 
Since the mid-70’s, he was one of the deputy directors of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, took an active part in public life, and was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR several times. He married Valentina Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut. Nikolayev wrote three books of memoirs about space flights. He died in Cheboksary in the summer of 2004 from a heart attack.

 
Andriyan Nikolaev was several times nominated as deputy of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR; after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he worked in the Mandate Commission of the State Duma. He is the author of several books on space travel.