The message reads, in part:
"Your legendary personality and your career as a world famous weapons designer deserve great respect. Every stage of your life is inextricably linked with the history of this country, its heroic military history, and the development of Russian weapons. Your immense efforts, talent, inexhaustible energy, creativity and engineering insight have allowed you to develop a great many of small arms that are now in the arsenals of many different countries' armed forces. And your greatest creation, the AK-47, has been acknowledged as one of the best inventions of the 20th century more than once."