But wasn’t it true that something had changed in the Komsomol City Committee? Not everyone entered there with reverence. And some were clearly deficient in ideological enthusiasm; their affectation was obvious and could not be hidden. It was true, to be sure, that once a person yields even a little to his personal interests, it’s very difficult to put him back on the right path. One person is scheming against another to get a better job. Suddenly, the second secretary of the City Committee gets caught on his office sofa with a secretary. Well, measures were taken . . .
Like it or not, there are also certain facts that slip into each of our lives. Here was a fact: Beginning with his promotion to deputy director of the section and continuing with each promotion, a long envelope, always of the same greenish brown color, would slip into his hands each month. It was called a “package.” Inside was the equivalent of a month’s wages, the full amount, without any deductions, taxes, or payments for state loans. And you’d be lying if you said that you found this awkward, unnecessary, or unacceptable. In fact it was very acceptable: there’s always a use for a bit of extra cash.
He married one of his classmates, but they had no honeymoon: like all party and government officials in Moscow, he had to be on duty in the City Committee until two or three in the morning, wide awake because of the will and the habit of Stalin. He would come home in his Pobeda sometime before four a.m., and why should he wake his wife? She had to get up at six to catch the suburban train for work.
His work and his responsibilities expanded in a big way. They set up the International Union of Students (he worked in it with Shelepin himself) and made it a part of the international struggle for peace. Here he also had a support job, writing speeches for the big bosses: “We will not allow the clear sky of our homeland to be darkened once more by the clouds of war!”—that sort of thing. Some tasks were secret, some quite open, but he was in the public eye and he held his head high.
Then his father came to visit him while on holiday. He stayed for a week. He listened to what his son had to say and took a close look at everything. But he expressed none of that fatherly pride that Dmitry had expected. Even worse: he sighed and said, “So, now you’re one of the straw bosses. You’d be better off back on the shop floor. Production— that’s the only real job.”
Dmitry was wounded and offended. He felt that he had always been flying high, and if he did touch the earth he walked about it like a bigwig. Then suddenly to hear that he was a straw boss?
His father read only the newspaper For Industrialization. And he lived “for the good of the people,” as he was fond of saying.
The son rejected what he had heard as merely a father’s grouchiness. But as the weeks passed, something began to gnaw at him inside and to weigh heavily on him. His father’s censure lay on his heart like a stone. It would have been easy to brush it aside had it come from anyone else. But from his father . . . ?
Perhaps his father was right: What sort of “job” did he have? He could see it himself: talk and more talk, sitting through meetings, plotting and scheming, too much drunkenness. When he looked at his colleagues, he could see they were all blockheads and bureaucrats. And if you yourself had such abilities, why not find a place where they could be better used? (But where should he go? That he didn’t yet know.)
Still, parting with his “packages” and his Pobeda wouldn’t be easy.
Something kept gnawing away at him. And it wasn’t easy to decide what to do about it.
Suddenly, just like that and with no real consideration, he put together a letter of resignation and sent it in.
Then he learned what such a letter meant. How could a member of the party send in his resignation? Against the will of the party? He’s an unreliable element in our midst! And they made him out to be such a troublemaker, and they gave him such a going over and chewed him out at the party meeting so that he could only sit there like a boiled crayfish and go on apologizing for his error.
Perhaps it was for the best. His career took a positive turn again. (He was given some very odd assignments: the students at one institute had established, supposedly in jest, the Society for the Protection of Bastards and Bootlickers. When you looked into it closely, though, was it not a case of political subversion?)
Then there was a major shake-up in the party in Moscow. At a plenum of the Moscow City and Oblast Committees, the longtime first secretary, Popov, who was so solidly entrenched, so imposing and so unshakeable, was suddenly ousted. (His enemy, Mekhlis, had been plotting against him, and Stalin had decided to purge those who had done well by the war. There was no shortage of accusations against Popov, either: How was it that a paved road outside the city reached just as far as the home of Popov’s mistress and no farther?) Khrushchev was designated to take his place.
Then came Komsomol Day. A group of Komsomol activists were invited to a reception and a banquet in the St. George Hall in the Kremlin. The lively and generous Khrushchev, whose round head looked as though it had been shaven, made a promise to them: “Keep working! Keep working, and you all can be secretaries of the Central Committee!”
Suddenly—and what in blazes ever made him do it?—Yemtsov spoke up. Recklessly he jumped to his feet: “Nikita Sergeych! May I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“It’s been two years now since I graduated, and my diploma is still lying idle in my desk. Don’t we need people to work in manufacturing? I’m prepared to go anywhere the party wants to send me.”
(Now how did that sound! Right in the St. George Hall. He had to admire his own courage.)
Khrushchev barely paused before he nodded his bald head: “Comrade Sizov, I believe that you can look into this request?”
“Look into it!” Why that’s as good as an order when it comes from the mouth of one of the country’s leaders! (Mitya never expected such a sudden and irreversible turn of events. Had he been too hasty in jumping up like that?)
Sizov called him in to discuss the matter. He said expansively: “Why did you take that approach? You should have said something to us earlier. We could even have moved you up to the Central Committee.” Well, I’ve lost that chance. “So where do you want to go?” “Somewhere in the aviation industry.” “The Aviation Materials Research Institute? Or the Central Aerodynamics Institute?” “No, I want to go directly to the manufacturing sector. “
The request went through the ministry’s personnel section, and he was assigned a place in the provinces. True, he was able to choose the city he had come from and where his parents were living. The names of such factories are made deliberately obscure to conceal their purpose. This one was called the “Modular Assembly Plant”—try and figure out what’s going on in there. What was going on was the manufacture of aviation electronic equipment, autopilots, and fuel metering devices, but the plant was also supposed to produce consumer goods. They were to get busy producing household refrigerators, for example: We should be ashamed to be lagging so far behind Europe!
People there knew that “Khrushchev himself had sent him,” and this helped him become head of a factory department rather quickly. (But now he had only a fifth of the salary and the “package” he had earned in the Moscow City Committee, and that really pinched; he even felt the loss of his thirty-ruble “bread increment.”) His department, though, had been assigned the task of producing refrigerators! They had a refrigerator from England right there, and their only job was to make a copy of it. Lord knows, they made an exact replica, but there must have been some secrets that they still hadn’t grasped: a tube in the condenser coil would clog, or it would produce so much cold that everything would freeze. Buyers would return the refrigerators with complaints and curses: “The damned thing won’t stay cold!” The stores would submit claims for replacement.
What made his job easier, though, was that in those years—the early 1950s—the factory still maintained the unquestioned discipline of wartime—this despite the fact that the townspeople called it the “booze factory�
� (they were allotted a good deal of alcohol, intended for cleaning their equipment).
Stalin’s death was shattering! It wasn’t that they considered him immortal, but he had seemed some eternal Phenomenon that could not simply cease to exist. People sobbed. His old father wept. (His mother did not.) Dmitry and his wife wept.
Everyone realized that they had lost the Greatest of Men. But at the time, Dmitry still did not fully realize how great he had been. It would take many more years to grasp fully the Impetus that Stalin had given to move the whole country into the future. The sense of a war still being fought would pass, but the Impetus would remain, and only through it would we achieve the impossible.
Yemtsov, of course, was much more than a common man. He had an uncommon mind and uncommon energy. His work at the factory demanded not so much the knowledge he had acquired in his institute as the knack of handling equipment and people skillfully. Once again, he was spending very little time at home. Now, though, he had a new son, and when could he find time to help bring him up? He didn’t have a moment to spare. His greatest life lesson, however, he learned from the factory manager, Borunov.
Managers came and went, staying for a year or eighteen months at best. The latest manager, along with the chief engineer, had been replaced “for producing poor-quality goods”: review commissions from the merciless Office of State Inspection showed up unexpectedly, as did commissions from the Office of the Prosecutor; the factory’s work was halted; one office after another was interrogated; everyone lived in terror. And so Borunov came in as the new manager. He was a strapping, handsome man of about forty, a Russian original. His face seldom wore a smile, but it radiated an assured superiority that said that he could remedy any problem.
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 Kapusti
n 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.)
Apricot Jam: And Other Stories Page 31