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Factory No. 22
forgot the number. A propeller got stuck on the skid. But we looked into it
ourselves and fixed it.We can go out to the flight field and check!”
The assembled company could not contain themselves and burst into gleeful
laughter. The joke was so old it had a beard, and Dobrovolskaya herself felt like
laughing, but she stood firm. “At the next quality conference, I will without fail,
ask for the floor to recount how successfully you eliminate design errors.” She
turned and left, slamming the door behind her.
One who loved practical jokes and awkward situations even more was the new
LIS Party organization secretary, Klevanskiy.When he heard about the “propeller
and skid” episode he was amused, but he persuaded Dobrovolskaya not to speak
at the conference. If one were to tell such a story in front of Mitkevich, who
knows, she might in all seriousness ask, “Can you show me how a propeller can
get stuck on a skid?” Klevanskiy warned the flight mechanics that if Mitkevich
were to make a routine visit to the airfield and somebody got it into his head to
complain to her about quality with jokes like that, he would see to it that they
were fired.
Test pilots, flight mechanics, and engine mechanics did not display a friendly
attitude toward the Party and Komsomol leadership. Calls for mastering technology,
for socialist competition,“using all 420 minutes in a shift”—none of this was
for them. Mitkevich, who had a great deal of experience taming the obstinate
masses, understood that for the post of LIS Party leader she needed to find an
individual who would command trust and respect by the force of his or her
special human qualities.
She had hunted down Klevanskiy at the Moscow Komsomol committee. He had
a well-developed sense of humor and always had jokes, proverbial sayings, anecdotes,
and funny stories in reserve.When the timing was right they could defuse
the most strained situation. He rallied the LIS work force, eliminated drinking
binges, increased discipline, and achieved a high evaluation for his activity from the
Party committee. However, Klevanskiy stunned us all.
The Party leadership headed by Stalin did not permit any slackening of intra-
Party tension. Under the slogan of a struggle against the vestiges of capitalism in
the economy and in the peoples’ consciousness, the leadership demanded heightened
vigilance; they called for the exposure of harmful activity perpetrated by the
bourgeois technical intelligentsia,Trotskyites, and those “deviating to the right.” 33
In addition to learning the technology of their own job, Party members were also
required to systematically expose the ideology of hostile classes. A campaign to
purge the Party under slogans of freeing its ranks of alien and degenerate elements
followed the general appeals.The atmosphere of the widespread labor boom was
poisoned by the need “to expose, stigmatize, and uproot.”
33. The “Right Deviation” was one of the last major Party factions to oppose Stalin before he assumed
absolute power in the late 1920s.
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