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On the Times and My Contemporaries
The little Katyushas provided our great rocket-space technology with more than
just two generals. Future chiefs of firing ranges and cosmodromes Vasiliy Ivanovich
Voznyuk and Aleksey Ivanovich Nesterenko came to rocket technology from posts
where they had commanded combat Guards Mortar Units.
The future chief of Scientific-Research Institute 88 (NII-88) and future first
deputy to the Minister of General Machine Building, Georgiy Aleksandrovich
Tyulin, was chief of staff of a Katyusha regiment commanded by General Aleksandr
Fedorovich Tveretskiy. At the end of the war,Tveretskiy was deputy commander
of a Guards Mortar Unit group. Such a position existed because the Guards Mortar
Units were subordinate to the Supreme Command Headquarters. But in 1945,
Tveretskiy was instructed to form the first “special assignment brigade,” which
began the combat launching of A-4 rockets in 1947 and R-1 rockets in 1948 at
the firing range in Kapustin Yar.
Here, I would like to return again to Gaydukov’s feat. Reporting to Stalin, he
requested that someone from among the ministers of the defense industries be
instructed to further develop and produce rocket technology. Stalin did not make
hasty decisions and proposed that Gaydukov himself talk with the ministers and
then prepare the appropriate resolution. Gaydukov met with Boris Vannikov, who
announced that he had quite enough responsibility with the production of the
atomic bomb and that it was absolutely no use talking to him about rockets.The
Minister of Aviation Industry, Aleksey Shakhurin, was preoccupied with the
production of jet aircraft. For him, too, the troubles of unmanned rockets seemed
excessive. Armaments Minister Dmitriy Ustinov thought about it, but before
making a decision sent his first deputy,Vasiliy Mikhaylovich Ryabikov, to Germany
to examine everything on site.
Our rocket-space technology was obviously lucky in terms of great Chief
Designers. But we were no less fortunate when it came to talented, brilliant
organizers of state industry. One of the results of the Second World War was not
the waning, but rather the substantial acceleration of science-intensive technologies.
The push was beginning for the use of new physical principles in the
creation of weaponry.The statesmen of the victorious powers devoted particular
attention to fundamental scientific research. It was statesmen rather than scientists
who had the primary responsibility for developing strategic doctrines to achieve
national and international military security through the effective use of pure and
applied science. Ustinov was one of the Soviet statesmen who met this challenge.
Ustinov and Chief of the Main Artillery Directorate (GAU) Marshal Nikolay
Dmitryevich Yakovlev drew up a memorandum for Stalin with proposals for
organizing rocket technology work in occupied Germany and the Soviet Union.
This memorandum, dated 17 April 1946, was signed by Beriya, Malenkov,
Bulganin, Voznesenskiy, Ustinov, and Yakovlev. Of these six, Voznesenskiy, an
outstanding economist and organizer of the national economy during the very
difficult war years and during the period of transition to peacetime life, was
executed in 1950 on Stalin’s orders. In 1953, Beriya was tried and executed. For
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