NIZHNY NOVGOROD, July 26 (RIA Novosti) - Venezuela's president visited Wednesday a shooting range in one of Russia's leading defense-industry cities, the home of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, a spokesman for the local authorities said.

Hugo Chavez arrived in Izhevsk, the capital of the Republic of Udmurtia about 700 miles east of Moscow, earlier Wednesday to meet with regional leader Alexander Volkov and gun-maker Mikhail Kalashnikov, Alexander Chernov said.

Chernov said that at the shooting range Chavez was shown weapons made at the Izhevsk Mechanical Plant (IMP) in action, particularly Kalashnikov assault rifles, Dragunov sniper rifles, hand-held grenade launchers and other arms.

The spokesman said the test-firing continued for about an hour and Chavez applauded the shooters at the end, but passed up the opportunity to test some weapons himself as he was short of time.

After the shooting range Chavez went on a tour of IMP, which designs and produces most of the Russian Army's small arms, met with the plant's management.

A plant's official earlier in the day refused to disclose what Chavez would discuss with the management, but said the plant had already delivered to Venezuela over 30,000 AK-103 automatic rifles in late June under a contract for the supply of 100,000 automatic rifles.

In June, Chavez said he wanted to build a plant to make Kalashnikov rifles and cartridges in his country under license.

Oil-rich Venezuela is a major purchaser of Russian weapons and hardware. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said last week that Russia had signed a contract on supplies of military planes and helicopters to Venezuela worth over $1 billion.

Izhevsk is the second stop of Chavez's Russian tour. On Tuesday, he visited the southern Russian city of Volgograd, where he paid a visit to the Volgograd Tractor Plant, which produces tanks and other military vehicles.