Nikolai Afanasyev

Nicolai Michaelovitch Afanasiev was born in Russia on 14 November 1916 in St. Petersburg. In 1938 he graduated from a Tekhnikum of the Mechanization of Agriculture.

In 1939 he was drafted to serve in a tank corps in Mongolia, where he started to work on machine gun design. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, he volunteered for front-line service. He was allowed to be a fighter from September 1941 until the fall of 1942, when he was recalled to work on armaments, initially on improving fuses for 82- and 120-mm mortars.

After 1948 Afanasiev worked at the KBP Instrument Design Bureau.[1]

He died on 15 March 2009.

• LAD machine gun – 1942[2]
• Afanasev A-12.7 – 1950[1]
• Afanasev Makarov AM-23 – 1953[1]
• a bullpup design with which he participated in the AKM contest - 1955[3]
• 2A-14 23 mm autocannon, used in the ZU-23 – 1960 (with P.G. Yakushev)[1]
• 2A-7 23 mm autocannon, used in the ZSU-23-4 – 1960 (with P.G. Yakushev)[1]
• TKB-011
• TKB-0136, competed in Project Abakan[1]
• OTs-02 Kiparis[1]

• Hero of Socialist Labour (1986)[1] – For achievements in the design of aircraft gun armament
• Two Orders of Lenin (1963, 1986)[1]
• Order of the October Revolution (1977)[1]
• Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class (1963)[1]
• USSR State Prize (1967)[1]
• Mosin Prize[1]
• Honoured Inventor of the RSFSR (1968)[1]

• http://www.bratishka.ru/archiv/2007/8/2007_8_17.php Archived 2011-03-08 at the Wayback Machine (in Russian)
• Photo of Afanasyev's small arms designs at Tula museum
• Николай Михайлович Афанасьев page at KBP