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