to open next chapter. - NASA's History Office

Rockets and People
had been very wealthy and as a child she had grown accustomed to luxury.The
revolution took away everything.
Having lost everything, including her parents, Kozlovskaya became an active
member in a gang of robbers. Naturally gifted with organizational skills and an
enterprising nature, she soon became the gang leader. Answering for serious
crimes, she was threatened with the death penalty, but considering her age and the
fact that she had no prior convictions, the court sentenced her instead to eight
years in prison. During her stay at the correctional labor camp on the Solovetskiye
Islands, Kozlovskaya’s capabilities enabled her to obtain an early release with a
reference attesting to her rehabilitation. She was even given the right to work at
an aircraft factory.
On one of the hot days when the next batch of aircraft was being released, I was
waiting to present the completed wiring of the electrical equipment to the quality
control department (OTK) controller. Usually, a former Baltic Fleet sailor, whom
we called Sasha-Bosun, conducted the acceptance process. He would carefully
examine the aesthetics of how the cable bundles were run and check the security
of the clamps holding them against the corrugated construction of the skin.
Instead of Sasha-Bosun, Kozlovskaya climbed into the roomy fuselage.With her
was an unknown woman wearing a civil aviation uniform tunic. Kozlovskaya
introduced the shapely, young, green-eyed woman saying,“This is our new quality
control foreman, Katya Golubkina.” Kozlovskaya immediately noticed that the
new controller had conquered me at first glance.“Chertok will explain everything
to you,” she told Golubkina, and left the plane.
I began my interrogation and learned that Katya had just graduated from an
aviation technical school with a specialty in aircraft special equipment.They sent
her to work at Factory No. 22. Here she had ended up working for the chief of
the final assembly shop quality control department, Nikolay Nikolayevich
Godovikov, who had assigned her to do quality control on Kozlovskaya’s team.
After a week, controller Golubkina announced to Kozlovskaya that she would
not sign the form on the ignition system wiring until the faults she had noted had
been eliminated. In order to meet deadlines, the team had to work overtime to
correct the defects and again present its work for release. The disputed situation
ended late in the evening and I asked the faultfinding controller for permission to
walk her home.
It turned out that Katya lived with her brother and cousin in the studio of their
deceased aunt, sculptor Anna Semenovna Golubkina. Anna Golubkina began her
creative activity in her native city of Zaraysk. She studied in Moscow and
St. Petersburg, and also in Paris under the renowned Rodin.The Soviet government
presented her with a studio in the Arbat area on Great Levshinskiy Lane.
Anna Semenovna died suddenly in 1927. Her nieces and nephews became the
heirs and proprietors of her many sculptures and her studio.The oldest of them,
Vera Golubkina, turned to Boris Ponomarev, a man from her home district of
Zaraysk who held a senior Party post, asking for his assistance to create an Anna
88