This holiday season witnessed the passing of a man whose impact on the second half of the 20th century is hard to overestimate. Whenever fighting broke out over the past six decades, the weapon of choice for both jungle revolutionary and proletariat utopian defender alike was the AK-47, designed by Major-General Mikhail Kalashnikov. Kalashnikov died earlier this week in his home Izhevsk, the capital of Udmurtia, about 800 miles east of Moscow.

According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, "the Kalashnikov rifle is a symbol of the creative genius of our people." In addition to the vast Soviet military and its various clients states, such as the Warsaw Pact, the AK-47 also found many satisfied customers in terrorists and mercenaries around the world. At its peak, the automatic rifle was licensed for production in over a dozen countries, with a reputation for reliability in a wide variety of climates and battlefield environments. Its success was based in great measure to its simplicity in construction and operation, making it especially useful to insurgents and irregular fighters in the Third World. As perhaps the highest symbolic honor that can be granted to an inanimate object, an image of the gun has for years graced the flag of the African nation, Mozambique.

Although created by Kalashnikov to help defend his beloved motherland, Russia, Russian soldiers would ultimately suffer significant losses when they encountered these weapons in the hands of rebel fighters in Afghanistan and, later, in Chechnya.

After the Berlin Wall fell and communism was consigned to the dustbin of history, Kalashnikovs were frequently associated in the public imagination with Islamist extremists and African child soldiers. Estimates have at least 70 million AK-47s produced since its creation by the self-taught gun maker. Firing 600 rounds a minute and with accuracy to 1,000 feet, the AK-47 was originally designed in 1947 based on a German gun that from WWII, Sturmgewehr 44. It was a simple and effective weapon, which eventually became a symbol in its own right of the revolutionary causes in which it was used.

Given the communist society in which the gun originated and the anti-capitalist purpose to which it was so often put, the AK-47 earned Comrade Kalashnikov little during his life. He died having spent his years showered with fame and recognition, but enjoying only a modest lifestyle. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, he tried several times to capitalize on his recognizable name, including through a launch of his own vodka, but with only limited results. By contrast, Eugene Stoner, who designed the M16 assault rifle for the U.S. military, earned substantial sums for his own invention.

The decades after WWII saw the immense utility in an inexpensive weapon that could easily arm a vast peasant army while withstanding the uses and abuses that such non-professional soldiers would subject them to. But even as the face of conflict changed during the war on terror, it is clear that asymmetrical warfare will remain a feature of military engagements for many years to come.

The AK-47 was a weapon for the villages and souks and remote, inaccessible locations. It found its greatest utility and fame a long distance from the multi-billion dollar nuclear weapons that were mass produced at a rate that ultimately bankrupted the wobbly Soviet economy and served as a significant drain on American resources. While the nuclear threat of "mutually assured destruction" remains to many people the defining military construct of the Cold War, the willingness to which both sides indulged in proxy wars between "allies" of various stripes is perhaps its more lasting legacy. The AK-47 fuelled generations of violence in a way that a nuclear warhead design or an intercontinental ballistic missile system simply could not. While we wallowed in the existential crisis that a theoretical Armageddon might have brought, we largely ignored the proliferation of these "cheap-and-cheerful" weapons that delivered death with an inexpensive efficiency.

Widely advertised on the internet today, the AK-47 will have a legacy that long outlasts it human creator. The democratization of warfare is a trend that first gained momentum in the trenches of WWI and continued with each wave of national independence that was unleashed in the aftermath of WWII. War as a populist endeavor, to which each citizen could be required to participate, rather than a trade for a limited number of well-trained and specially-equipped professionals, was a defining trait of the 20th century.

Although the rhetoric of national liberation and communist revolution has now been replaced in the 21st century by the cries of jihad, the Kalashnikov assault rifle continues to serve as the symbol of the effectiveness and lethality of a highly motivated revolutionary, especially when he is well-armed.

Timothy Spangler is a writer and commentator who divides his time between Los Angeles and London. His radio show, "The Bigger Picture with Timothy Spangler," airs every Sunday night from 10 p.m. to midnight Pacific time on KRLA AM 870. To find out more about Timothy Spangler and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.