Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (51 page)

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 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. After 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.