Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Mikhail Kalashnikov, the self-made inventor of the world’s most popular assault rifle that’s in use in about 100 countries and adorns the flag of Mozambique, celebrates his 90th birthday today.

As a child, Kalashnikov dreamt of becoming a poet. After being wounded in the first year of World War II, however, the 22-year-old sergeant from a farming family in southern Russia turned his talents to designing a gun that the world would come to know as the AK-47.

Kalashnikov meets in the Kremlin today with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who will present him with the latest in a long series of state awards.

On his way to Moscow from his hometown of Izhevsk in the Ural Mountains, Kalashnikov said he would ask Medvedev “why our Russian soldiers don’t have the latest versions of my rifle. Why are there no orders?” he said in comments broadcast on state television.

Kalashnikov still works four days a week as chief weapons designer at Izhmash, the company that produces the rifle he began working on during the war and perfected in 1947, he said in an interview published today in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the government’s newspaper of record.

The Soviet army adopted the AK-47 as its standard issue weapon two years later. Since that time, Kalashnikov has designed more than 150 modifications of the assault rifle and other guns.

Counterfeit Guns

“I have some regrets, of course, just like anyone does, but I can say for certain that I wouldn’t live my life differently if I had it to do all over again,” Kalashnikov said in the interview.

The Kalashnikov rifle has been used in at least 40 of 60 large armed conflicts since 1945, Alexander Uzhanov wrote in a biography published this year to coincide with the designer’s 90th birthday.

Of about 100 million Kalashnikov rifles in use worldwide, about half are counterfeit, Rosoboronexport Chief Executive Officer Anatoly Isaikin said last month, according to the state- run RIA Novosti news service.

About 30 factories produce Kalashnikov’s in countries such as China, Poland and Bulgaria. Russia accounted for 10 percent of global production in 2006, according to Vladimir Grodetsky, general director of Izhmash.

The designer’s birthday comes at a time when Russia, ranked the world’s second-biggest arms exporter to developing nations by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, is stepping up efforts to ensure licensed production of Kalashnikovs.

Rifle Patent

Rosoboronexport, Russia’s arms exporter, is in talks with a number of countries on production licenses after Soviet-era licenses expired, according to Isaikin. So far only Venezuela has reached such an agreement with Russia.

Izhmash didn’t begin to patent the rifle until 1997. On his first trip to U.S., Kalashnikov declined an offer to register his name as trademark, according to the biography by Uzhanov, who is also a professor at the Moscow-based Academy Of Military Science. Kalashnikov was first allowed to travel abroad under his own name in 1990.

“I have been fortunate to live a hard but very interesting life with ups and downs, with triumphant fanfare and unconscionable slander,” Kalashnikov said in Uzhanov’s biography. “The global popularity of my name is the result of my life’s work and it’s the wealth I bequeath to my country and my descendants.”

17th Child

Kalashnikov was the 17th child in a farming family in the Altai region of southern Russia. When he was 10, his parents were repressed as “kulaks,” or relatively affluent peasants, and exiled to Siberia.

He was known to his schoolmates by the nickname “the poet.” “If not for the war, I might have gone on to become a poet,” he said in Uzhanov’s book.

“He’s a genuine personality, and one who has imparted his own longevity into his designs,” Joe Ancona, the founder of the Kalashnikov Collectors Association in the U.S., said by e-mail. Ancona attended Kalashnikov’s 85th birthday in Izhevsk.

“With so many millions of Kalashnikov’s rifles in existence today, the lessons to be learned as an engineering success are only outweighed by the historical events in which they have been used,” Ancona said. “To learn of the AK-47’s history is to take a grand lesson in human history.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Lyubov Pronina in Moscow at lpronina@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 10, 2009 05:00 EST