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Rockets and People
was more than just a matter of prestige for aircraft designers and pilots. Each new
aircraft had to set some kind of record. Annushka had set many Soviet and four
world records. Nikolay Grigoriyevich Kastanayev, Georgiy Filippovich Baydukov,
and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Nyukhtikov completed record-breaking flights. In the
1936 May Day parade, our Annushka flew full speed over Red Square. Kastanayev
executed a steep ascending banking turn.This gripping spectacle provoked a storm
of delight. Once again, as in 1932 when the first TB-3s flew over the square, I got
a lump in my throat from sheer joy. Now I was walking not at the head of a factory
column with workers from the vanguard OS shop, but somewhere in the middle
with a crowd of design intelligentsia.
at factory no. 22, after Mitkevich’s departure, acting directors came and went
without leaving a mark. In the summer of 1936, Boris Nikolayevich Tarasevich
took over as chief engineer. Since the factory was lacking a strong director, he took
all the power himself. Tarasevich had been director of the Kolomensk Locomotive
Building Factory until 1930. In 1930, he was arrested and convicted for his
involvement in the “Industrial Party Affair.”
In the history of Russia throughout the pre-revolutionary, Soviet, and post-
Soviet times, the Industrial Party was the only organization of the technical intelligentsia
that professed truly technocratic principles. The leader of the Industrial
Party, a scientist and thermal engineer with a worldwide reputation, Professor
Leonid Ramzin, sincerely believed that the nation’s power should be in the hands
of scientists, engineers, and industrial leaders.The Industrial Party carried out no
direct sabotage. Its members dreamed of replacing the dictatorship of the proletariat
with a dictatorship of scientists, engineers, and industrialists.
They dealt with the Industrial Party members humanely (for those times), but
cunningly. They gathered together all those who were sentenced to long prison
terms and proposed that they work under the leadership of their chief ideologue,
Leonid Ramzin, in a special closed institute for thermal engineering focused on
the creation of new types of steam boilers. Here Ramzin developed the design for
a straight-through boiler, which was called the Ramzin boiler.The intellect of the
Industrial Party members was used with a high degree of efficiency.
In view of the fact that the convicts worked with complete devotion on behalf
of the government of the proletarian dictatorship, they were freed and assigned to
managerial work.That is how one of the members of the Industrial Party, a former
“saboteur and servant of world imperialism,” was entrusted with the technical
leadership of Factory No. 22.
Our short, gray-haired, slightly balding, agile, and very lively chief engineer
began to introduce order and very strict discipline—not into the ranks of the
workers, but among the technical intelligentsia. He sometimes flaunted his
allegedly anti-Soviet past. “I have already recovered from that case of influenza.
That’s why you can complain about me and accuse me as much as you want. Just
remember that I will not tolerate idlers, illiterates, or demagogues.”
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