#RussianTrials

Mikhail Kalashnikov has designed a number of firearms other than AK family of rifles he is famous for. Some of them were experimental, others took part in various trials, but because they lost and were never adopted, they’ve become forgotten.

The dark horse of the Russian next-generation individual weapon trials has been the A545, better known as the AEK-971. Where the AK-12 is essentially the well-known and respected Kalashnikov with some new architecture that supports the modern accessory-driven paradigm, the A545 is the incarnation of a more radical concept, dating back to the Abakan trials that produced the AN-94. While the AEK-971 and its derivatives fundamentally do trace their ancestry to the Kalashnikov, they incorporate the “balanced action” principle, where in addition to the mass moving rearwards, a forward-moving mass is coupled to the reciprocating group, which allows not only a great reduction in center-of-gravity shift during firing, but also gives a measure of constant-recoil effect to the firearm as well. Coupled with an effective muzzle brake, this mechanism dramatically reduces disturbances in fully automatic fire. Below is a Russian-language video from November of 2014 discussing the A545: