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“Everything Real Is Rational...”
True, there were mitigating circumstances. Anna Semenovna Golubkina, the
natural sister of Katya’s father, was a well-known Soviet Russian sculptor. By
decree of the Presidium of the USSR Central Executive Committee, all of her
closest relatives had been granted personal pensions.This same decree had opened
Anna Golubkina’s studio as a memorial museum in Moscow.The second mitigating
circumstance was that Katya’s husband, Boris Chertok, was a Party member
and esteemed inventor.
By virtue of these good reasons, she would not be fired, but to get out of harm’s
way they asked that she submit a statement of resignation of her own volition. Not
wanting to get me, or anyone else who might stand up for her, involved in this
incident, Katya wrote the statement without leaving Room No. 16.
among the thousands of incidents associated with the repressions, there was
one with a happy ending, where the arrest saved a life. In July, Kerber had been
removed from the N-209 crew so that he could be arrested in August.After taking
an abridged course in the infernal science of the “GULAG Archipelago,” he
returned to his favorite work in Tupolev’s collective. 2 By that time, the entire
primary staff of the KB’s work force had been arrested along with their head, the
world-famous “ANT.” 3 At the Tupolev Special Design Bureau 29 (TsKB-29) on
Gorokhovskaya Street, now called Radio Street, they set up a relatively comfortable
special prison, with design halls and a factory for experimental designs, where
the imprisoned specialists worked.
Kerber wrote his memoirs about the life, work, and customs in the prison that
they called the sharashka. 4 In spite of all the tragic elements of the events
described, Kerber’s memoirs are overflowing with his characteristic optimism and
sense of humor. 5
During the time of the Khrushchev thaw, when all the prisoners of the
sharashka were rehabilitated, I met with Kerber, who had come to see Korolev.
After talking shop for a bit, we turned to our recollections of the N-209. I asked
Kerber what he thought about the fact that, in contrast to thousands of other
repressed individuals, he should be thankful to the NKVD agents for arresting
him in August 1937. If they had delayed this action, he, Kerber, would not have
escaped an icy grave in the Arctic. He categorically disagreed with me. “If I had
flown, that would not have happened,” stated Kerber so flatly that I stopped opening
old wounds. In 1987, Kerber came to the Moscow House of Scientists for an
2. GULAG—Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovykh LAGerey (Main Directorate of Corrective Labor
Camps)—was the system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The term ‘GULAG Archipelago’ was
coined by the Nobel Prize-winning Soviet dissident Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenytsin (1918–)
3. Tupolev’s initials were “ANT”, which formed part of the designation of his aircraft
4. Sharashka is the diminutive form of sharaga.
5. L. L. Kerber, Stalin’s Aviation Gulag: A Memoir of Andrei Tupolev and the Purge Era (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).
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