And, indeed, it was amazing! Within two or three weeks the whole factory and the refrigerator department were totally changed. It was as if people had entered some powerful electromagnetic field: they all seemed to turn in the same direction and look the same way and understand things the same way. All sorts of fabulous tales were told about the new manager. (Yemtsov was away on a week’s holiday at the time, doing some ice fishing, and did not return when called. When he did appear, Borunov’s secretary said: “He told me to say that he doesn’t need you any longer.” Borunov refused to see him for three days.) In January Borunov suddenly declared: “As of February 1, the factory will work by a balance sheet system.” Every day each department had either a red column (plan fulfilled) or a blue one (plan not fulfilled) posted on their bulletin boards. When a department had a series of blue columns, its life wasn’t worth living. Sweat and slave was what it meant! He seemed to have solved the technical problems with the refrigerators, but then the electroplating shop couldn’t supply the wire shelving in time. A small thing, but the refrigerators couldn’t be finished without them. The head of the electroplating shop begged him: “Just sign that you received them today and I’ll have them for you tomorrow morning.” This happened again, and then a third time, and the shortage kept building. Yemtsov refused to sign, and his department was given a blue column. At the next planning meeting Borunov told him: “Yemtsov, get out of here!” Yemtsov even threw up his hands to beg his boss for mercy: he’d done the right thing, after all. But no, he might have been talking to the wall. He gave up.
At the planning meetings he watched how Borunov did it. He never shouted or pounded his fist. But he was confident that he was better than any of his subordinates. He was intellectually better. He had a quicker grasp of detail. He had a keener mind. He had better judgment. (But Yemtsov had all these qualities himself!) It was impossible to argue with Borunov. It was impossible not to produce results.
What was possible for Yemtsov, though, was to get ahead of him and suggest something of his own. The opportunity came when the relays from Kursk began arriving irregularly and disrupting the plan. He came to Borunov with his idea: “Get me an airplane and a bit of money! I’ll fly to Kursk with a group of electricians.” The manager beamed and immediately gave what was needed. At the Kursk factory, Yemtsov sent in his team to sort out the problems with the relays and met with the local engineers. We need the relays, whatever the cost! Thereafter there were only red columns.
Borunov did not stay long as manager. He wasn’t sacked, though; he was promoted to secretary of the Oblast Committee.
Yemtsov matured so much and absorbed so many things through that brief experience. What had happened at the factory was due not so much to Borunov personally but to the fact Borunov (or anyone like him, or you yourself) was riding the crest of that great Impetus that Stalin had begun and that would grip us all for another fifty or a hundred years. This was the only rule: Never listen to anyone else’s excuses (you’ll lose your momentum, begin to slacken, and ruin everything). This is the only thing to think about: The job either gets done or it doesn’t get done. And if it doesn’t get done, look out!
People have no choice! They’ll do the job, without fail! The whole system is easily managed as well.
Soon he was the head technologist in the factory, before he had even turned thirty. Barely past thirty, he became the chief engineer.
Now there was a new task assigned by the party: to begin producing magnetrons—powerful generators of ultra-high-frequency waves that were to be used in the radars of antiaircraft defenses. Were there any examples to follow? Of course, here is a German one, here’s an American one. Copy them as much as you like, though a magnetron is a lot trickier than a refrigerator: How can we prevent overheating? How can we regulate the power? And simply generating high-frequency waves wasn’t enough: it had to be done across a very narrow spectrum, otherwise the target couldn’t be recognized. (Several groups of theorists in the design offices were working on all these things.)
A few years passed, and the complex of defense industries, scattered across the country but linked by reliable delivery channels, solved one problem after another, problems that had so recently seemed to be insoluble. The words of Khrushchev (his godfather) were now being repeated: “We’re turning out missiles like sausages on a conveyor belt.” But to ensure that these missiles could fly on an absolutely accurate course, we needed gyroscopes. The gyroscopes had to run constantly so that the missiles could be quickly launched, and this caused them to wear out. But when laser technology came into being, a way was found to make a laser gyroscope with no moving parts, that could be ready in an instant. Yemtsov, who had become unaccustomed to sitting still, needed no urging to go into action and seek out new possibilities on his own. He suggested that the minister and head of the defense section of the Central Committee, who was visiting his factory, should entrust them with a laser. (It was a desperate act, but he took it on, like a kamikaze.)
The minister agreed. And immediately thereafter, at age thirty-three, he became manager of the factory.
This was in April 1960. On May 1, one of our missiles shot down the aircraft of Francis Gary Powers.
But how did it happen? Several days later Ustinov, then deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and Khrushchev’s deputy for defense, held a top-level meeting. Ustinov still very much had a hand in the business of his former post, the Ministry of Defense Industries. (This was the first time this fresh young factory manager had been among such a high-ranking assembly.) There was also a group from the Ministry of Defense. The head of that group, Baydukov, made serious accusations that the military-industrial complex was making a mess of Soviet defense.
Those damned American U-2s (it was an amusing coincidence that our old low-altitude plywood “crop-dusters” had the same name) could fly at altitudes beyond the reach of our fighters and could jam our radar or confuse it by throwing out metallic chaff. Our system could not reliably distinguish the nature of targets and we could not accurately direct our weapons. Our technology, clearly, wasn’t advanced enough to shoot down these aircraft.
And now Powers had passed through our air-defense system with no resistance and had flown directly over our air-defense testing area of Kapustin Yar on the lower Volga. From Iran he had flown halfway across the USSR, and though we’d taken some shots, we hadn’t been able to bring him down. (We did manage to shoot down one of our own planes, though.) Only when he was over the Urals did we hit him, and then it was essentially by chance. (Powers, by the way, preferred captivity to killing himself with an injection, as stipulated in his contract. Then he published his memoirs and made a lot of money.) The whole incident was made public, but the story was that Khrushchev, out of compassion, hadn’t wanted to shoot him down at first. But we knew very well that our systems were flawed.
It was obvious how difficult and unpleasant this was for Ustinov. Yemtsov was sitting quite close to him, not at the main table but in one of the chairs arranged along the wall. Ustinov, his long face twitching, was clearly trying to find a way to justify himself and to find someone who could speak and come up with some ready answers.
At this point Yemtsov was seized by a sudden burst of inspiration, as he had been with Khrushchev some years earlier or when he undertook the manufacture of laser gyroscopes. He was simultaneously both terrified and fearless, as if he were flying through the air without wings: Would he soar upwards or crash to the ground? With a bow to Ustinov, he raised his hand to speak. (But inwardly he was hoping, please don’t give me the floor! Those high-level meetings were more deadly than a battlefield or a minefield: a single careless remark or a tiny break in your voice would be enough to ruin you. His engineers, though, had assured him that a solution was at hand.)
Ustinov saw his raised hand, but he wasn’t ready to risk letting this scrawny young upstart speak: He was so young, and who knew what he might blurt out? One general spoke, then another; one factory manager, then another. Afte
r each speaker Yemtsov would raise his hand (though he was still trembling inside). Ustinov looked questioningly into his eyes, and then Yemtsov sensed how his eyes had lit up, sending a clear signal to Ustinov. And Ustinov understood and accepted that signal. He gave him the floor.
Yemtsov jumped to his feet and began speaking in a voice filled with energy. He was also relying on his experience with the galvanizing shop: yes, there were times when you had to declare something done that was not yet done. And the business with the Kursk relays as well: we can make up for the failure in time, but we have to have our red column! Though he knew that the system of selection of moving targets had not yet been perfected, it would be perfected! It would—by the law of the great Impetus!
He tossed his head haughtily and assured the room full of generals in ringing tones: “We have already solved the problem of high-altitude target selection. In a very short time, we will be making the equipment to do it.”
Everyone in the room froze, mouths half agape.
Should he stop at this? No, his victory wasn’t yet complete. Now, in a very concerned but also haughty tone, he added: “Actually, we have been working on another problem, one that concerns us all: We want to create a system for identifying low-flying targets. Every now and then the Americans reduce their altitude . . .”
The meeting was stunned. During the break Ustinov grinned approvingly at him: “Well, you didn’t disgrace the defense industries.” Another prominent general took Yemtsov by the arm (Yemtsov couldn’t understand why he had come to him, but later he learned that the general’s influence was on the wane and he was trying to strengthen his position) and led him to a group of even higher-ranking officers: “So, the two of us have been talking . . .”
And so it was all very satisfying but also terrifying: What if we can’t pull it off? Indeed, it was quite possible that we might not be able to pull it off . . . We might not be able to, but for the Great Impetus! That summer he had to repeat at another top-level meeting (the heads of the militaryindustrial complex were burning with impatience) that everything was going according to plan—yet the equipment still had not been developed.
In a case like this you wouldn’t just destroy your career, you’d go to prison . . .
But he had Borunov’s example to follow: be quicker and sharper than your subordinates; don’t allow them to take the initiative (but pick up anything useful from them at once). Use psychology on your subordinates: those blue columns are useful for all sorts of situations! He already felt that he was a ruthless industrialist and an inspired manager. From time to time a car would come during the night to fetch him from home: “The conveyer’s broken down!” or something of the sort, and he would rush back to the factory. (Now they were telling fabulous stories about him as well.) He believed that miracles could be worked. It would seem that the normal laws of nature would not allow a process like this simply to be ordered up in advance; the whole project might fall apart. But there was also a psychological law: “Push on regardless!”
So they kept pushing. For the fourth quarter of that year, the factory was awarded the banner of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers, and the manager was made a Hero of Socialist Labor.
After that he went on soaring higher and higher. (He could see his inexorable triumph reflected in the eyes of any factory girl—and can we advance very far without feeling this sort of pride? He had some aristocratic blood in his veins, after all, and it showed in the way he held his head high.) His factory, now renamed “Tezar” for security reasons, expanded as more and more buildings were added and thousands of new workers hired. It produced UHF generators, radar transmitters, and the complex power supplies for them; other of his divisions were producing wave guides for antennas and calculating systems for radar sets. (The signals sent out by radar had to be of varying frequency so that the enemy could not detect them and take preventive measures.) The first anti-missile defense system was under construction. The “Moscow umbrella” had already been set up: 140 complexes for each of the four corners of the earth (an attack over the North Pole was particularly anticipated) to detect the flight of a missile from a thousand kilometers away. The complexes were arranged in three belts so that the inner ones would pick up anything missed by the outer ones. A thousand targets could be processed simultaneously. And later, computers were used to assign targets for each missile. (With this “umbrella,” we had left the Americans behind!)
Still later came multiple warheads, and here we again caught up to the Americans. We learned to use radar signals to distinguish warheads from dummy missiles.
Yemtsov was heaped with rewards. And he lost count of the number of these high-level meetings he attended, the places he had flown, and the high-ceilinged offices he visited where, as they say, all the doors were open to him (not every door, of course). He even served on a commission editing the decrees of the Central Committee. And how many of those grim faces with their flabby cheeks, double chins, expressionless eyes, with lips that barely opened when it was time to utter a few phrases—how many of them reluctantly changed their innately hostile expression when they faced Yemtsov? (They found this defense plant manager alien: he was too young, too slender, and too lively; he had those eyes that glowed with inspiration and an aristocratic forehead.) Dmitry Fyodorovich Ustinov, though, had simply fallen in love with Yemtsov.
(There was a time, however, when Yemtsov’s career ran onto the rocks. One of his close friends, a scientist and electronics specialist initiated into many of our secrets, went to Europe for a conference—and never returned! He rebelled against our System! Yemtsov was placed on the list of those not allowed to travel abroad—for twenty years! It could have been much worse, though; he might have lost his job altogether. But how could he comprehend his friend’s sudden and completely unanticipated about-face? There was no comprehending it, in fact: he had simply lost his head. Surely it wasn’t for the blessings of life in the West—he had more than enough of them right here. Freedom? But what freedom had he lacked? Was it personal—an act of treachery? Yes, it must have been “personal.” Because of this turncoat, the whole anti-missile defense system had to change all its codes, its names and its numbers . . .)
YET OVER THESE twenty years Tezar continued to expand. The factory headquarters was a marble palace. Even the new workshops were luxurious buildings, a feast for the eyes. There was never any shortage of money for new buildings. Now it was no longer just a factory but five factories combined, all enclosed behind a stone wall, along with three design offices (these had even tighter security than the factories). There were 18,000 workers and office staff. Yemtsov had presided over it all for almost a quarter century now, still sitting in the same old office chair (he had taken it with him into the new building). He maintained his slim figure, his brisk gait, and his rapid, intelligent gaze. He had lost much of his hair, but what remained on his temples had not gone grey. He gave all his orders forcefully, and there was no one who could get the better of him. He was now past fifty.
At such an age a wife is hardly likely to present her husband with a second son. But his new son was the focus of his pride, his love, and his hopes and showed promise of continuing in his father’s footsteps in the years to come. It was as if Yemtsov was taking his first steps along with him. His elder son had been on his own for some time and had made many missteps, but this one, who had arrived twenty years after his first son, would go on to astonish them all! And how much meaning he was to give to Yemtsov’s life in the years to follow.
Tezar continued to lay its foundations ever deeper in the land along the Volga, swallowing up the acres of nearby houses and farmland. But it was its output, its mission, and its activity that made it more and more of a colossus among the defense industries of our nation. Its manager never missed an opportunity and never tired of staking out new areas of production. (Yet he was still not allowed to travel abroad. The Central Committee trusted him—and how could they not?—yet it seemed the security organs still had rea
son to be cautious . . .)
Yes, the Soviet defense systems—and its offensive capacity as well—continued as indestructible and effective as before. Still, a sharp mind, one that also was aware of the details contained in secret reports coming from across the ocean, could begin to see in the early 1980s and the Reagan era that we were no longer the same contender in the race that we had once been: we were beginning to fall behind. That could not be tolerated; we must not allow ourselves to pause! But those wrinkled old fellows in their armchairs, with their dead eyes and lowered brows, squinting at you as they listened with only one ear, hostile to anyone subordinate to them—how could they be moved? How could anyone reach their benumbed minds? (Even Ustinov had changed in his old age.)
Then, suddenly, a new figure appeared on the scene and displayed his talents: Gorbachev! From the first plenum of the Central Committee he roused hopes. We will come to life again! With him was Ligachev, and he allowed Yemtsov to speak to the Politburo! And Yemtsov, as far back as the failed reforms of Kosygin in ’65, had been aware that the time had come for us to rebuild our economy; but we were timid and halfhearted, and in our indifference we let an opportunity slip through our fingers. In those days the industrial managers felt themselves in fighting trim and believed in the slogans of planning in a totally new way and creating new incentives for labor. And Yemtsov was speaking not only for himself when he eagerly took on the task of speaking to party audiences and even to the Higher Party School on what a new economic system should be and how it would save the country. They listened and were amazed. Then a local university invited him to give a series of lectures on “The Foundations of Socialist Economic Policy.” Yemtsov accepted the challenge. At that time, for his own interest, he had become thoroughly fascinated by the then-forbidden science of cybernetics; he had read much of the work of W. Ross Ashby and included in his course those elements of cybernetics that he had managed to master. He himself was amazed that one might approach absolutely everything from the point of view of complex systems! How about that? (The grateful university awarded him a PhD.)
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