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Factory No. 22
many orders and honored titles, that is to say, I, would be delivering a speech
before the elite of the former Soviet military-industrial complex reminiscing
about my work as an electrician.
It was April 2002 and I had been invited to an evening celebration in honor of
the seventieth birthday of Oleg Dmitriyevich Baklanov.
Baklanov’s career path had taken him from foreman at the Kharkov Instrument-
Building Factory to minister in the rocket-space sector, and then CC CPSU
Secretary of the Defense Industry. It was likely that after the collapse of the USSR
he would have occupied high posts in the government of the new Russia.
However, his participation in the GKChP putsch, which attempted to wrest power
from Mikhail Gorbachev before Boris Yeltsin could seize it, precluded the possibility
of a subsequent political career. 16 Baklanov has remained a symbolic figure
for the former elite of the Soviet Union’s military-industrial complex. When
compared to the catastrophic degradation of the defense industry in the period of
criminal market reforms, the Soviet past seems great and heroic.And there is nothing
surprising about that.
In the first-class restaurant, the assembled crowd included former defense ministers,
the former chairman of the military-industrial complex and deputy chairman
of the USSR Council of Ministers, the former minister of the once powerful shipbuilding
industry, pilots, cosmonauts, and many others who could rightfully
consider themselves the true creators of the former superpower’s might.
I began my toast by commenting that we were in a building that was opened
the year our birthday boy was born. I provided this testimony as one who participated
in the construction of the historic canteen and in the construction at
Factory No. 22 of an air force that even then, seventy years ago, was the most
powerful in the world. The thunderous applause that followed my toast, with its
nostalgic remembrances of the former canteen, reminded me of the first applause
I had earned after its construction at the Hall of Columns.Then I was twenty years
old and now I was ninety! You couldn’t dream this up if you tried!
the country was enduring a difficult period of transformation from being
technically backward and primarily agrarian to being industrially developed.The
government supported and encouraged all measures to shorten the time required
to complete new aircraft in every possible way.
In June 1931, the newspaper Pravda published a USSR TsIK decree on the
awarding of Orders of Lenin to a group of workers from our factory.Among them
were Malakhov and Gorbunov. They received awards for fulfilling the five-year
plan in two and a half years! The slogan Technology Solves Everything! was joined
16. The GKChP was the State Committee on the State of Emergency, which orchestrated the coup against
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. Its members included First Deputy Chairman of the Defense
Council O. D. Baklanov, KGB Chairman V.A. Kryuchkov, Prime Minister V. S. Pavlov, Minister of Internal Affairs
V. K. Pugo, Defense Minister D.T.Yazov, and acting President of the USSR G. I.Yanayev.
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