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. He died on 15 March 2009. ==Designs==

• LAD machine gun – 1942 • Afanasev A-12.7 – 1950 • 2A-14 23 mm autocannon, used in the ZU-23 – 1960 (with P.G. Yakushev) • 2A-7 23 mm autocannon, used in the ZSU-23-4 – 1960 (with P.G. Yakushev) • TKB-011 • TKB-0136, competed in Project Abakan • OTs-02 Kiparis ==Honours and awards==

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