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On the Times and My Contemporaries
production factories from the other State Committees, but also all of the other
allied enterprises as well, should be considered his first personal contribution.
Under Afanasyev, the legendary Council of Chief Designers was placed for the
first time under a single ministry.The Chief Designers were transferred as follows:
Korolev came from the State Committee on Defense Technology; Glushko came
from the State Committee on Aviation Technology; Pilyugin and Ryazanskiy came
from the State Committee on Radio Electronic Technology; Barmin came from
the State Committee on Machine and Instrument Building; Kuznetsov came from
the State Committee on Shipbuilding.
Accordingly, the tens of factories that fulfilled the orders of these Chief Designers
as well as other factories were transferred to MOM.
Georgiy Aleksandrovich Tyulin was appointed First Deputy Minister of MOM.
He was very familiar with our history. He participated in the work in Germany,
was a former chief of NII-4, and former Deputy Chairman of the State Committee
on Defense Technology.Tyulin was an organizer/scientist, very much a kindred
spirit to Korolev and to all the members of the Council of Chief Designers. He
also enjoyed the support of Ustinov, but in his own subsequent work his relationship
with Afanasyev did not improve. During the so-called “small civil war” he and
Afanasyev were on opposite sides of the front.
MOM was given almost all of the duties that NASA had in the United States in
terms of cosmonautics, plus a whole host of other responsibilities, including the
production of all onboard and ground equipment; the weighty responsibility,
together with the Ministry of Defense, of producing strategic nuclear missile forces;
and ensuring the social well-being of all the workers in this branch of industry.
Therefore, Minister Afanasyev and the corresponding deputies had to bear the
responsibility for all unmanned and manned flights, for the N1-L3 lunar program,
had to speak in front of the Central Committee either for or against Chelomey’s
alternative proposal concerning the creation of the UR-700 lunar launch vehicle,
had to sort out the debate between Minister of Defense Andrey Grechko and
Yangel concerning his proposals about the mortar-type launching of strategic
missiles, had to have a new mission control center built in order to be ready for
the Soyuz-Apollo program, and had to keep track of construction progress at
hundreds of other industrial and social facilities from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine to
Ussuriysk in the Russian Far East.
In and of itself, the epic of the major construction of the rocket-space industry
deserves separate historical study. The MOM enterprises, which formed
entire towns, created new living conditions in the cities of Korolev, Khimki,
Reutov, Peresvet, Yurg, Nizhnyaya Salda, Zheleznogorsk, Novopolotsk, Miass,
and many others.
Independent of MOM, because it had its own budget, the Ministry of Defense
made a large contribution to the creation of rocket-space “science cities.”The cities
of Leninsk (today Baykonur), Mirnyy (Plesetsk),Yubileynyy, Krasnoznamensk; the
military towns of the command and measurement complex; and finally the
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