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Rockets and People
tor of NII-88 after being released from his post as director of the Bolshevik
factory in Leningrad.
During the first postwar years, the apparatus of the Communist Party Central
Committee and the KGB began to zealously follow the anti-Semitic moods of
Stalin. Gonor was not only a Jew, but a member of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist
Committee. His appointment to the post of director of the main scientific-research
institute could not have passed without the approval of Stalin and Beriya. In January
1947, I arrived from Germany as chief of the guidance department and deputy
to the chief engineer of the new head institute NII-88. I had been appointed on
Ustinov’s orders. During a confidential conversation Gonor warned me:“We were
appointed to leadership posts in the new field at Ustinov’s insistence. Over in
Germany you did not sense that here, anti-Semitism has been inculcated into the
consciousness of the officials of the state apparatus by secret instructions from
above. I worked under Ustinov for many years and I could never accuse him of
that syndrome. But even in his own ministry he will not be able to oppose that
policy for long.”
Gonor was right. In 1950, Ustinov sent him far from Moscow to Krasnoyarsk,
to be director of an artillery factory. But in January 1953, during the infamous
“Doctors’ Plot,” Gonor was arrested. 10 Ustinov could not save him.What saved him
was Stalin’s death.
In terms of their historical significance in the field of armaments—during the
war and during the postwar organization of work on a broad spectrum of rocketspace
technology—I would equate the accomplishments of Dmitriy Ustinov with
the feats of Marshal Zhukov.
The Special Committee on Reactive Technology under the USSR Council of
Ministers, which was created by the resolution of 13 May 1946, was soon reorganized
into Special Committee No. 2 under the Council of Ministers. In all, there
were three Special Committees: No. 1 was the supreme state agency on nuclear
technology and No. 3 was the agency for radar and air defense issues.
In February 1951, Special Committee No. 2 was reorganized into the Main
Directorate for Rocket Technology, under the USSR Council of Ministers. In
1953, it was temporarily combined with the Council of Ministers Main Directorate
for the nuclear program. In 1955, a new state agency was formed on the
basis of these organizations—the sole Special Committee of the USSR Council of
Ministers—for the three most important strategic and most science-intensive
programs: nuclear, rocket, and radar.This union, however, did not last long.
Vasiliy Mikhaylovich Ryabikov was the de facto head of these committees from
1951 through 1957. In the system of all the Special Committees, Vyacheslav
10. The “Doctors’ Plot” was orchestrated by Stalin in 1953 to blame nine doctors, six of them Jewish, for
planning to poison the Soviet leadership. Their arrest was a pretext for the future persecution of Jews in the
Soviet Union. Fortunately, after Stalin’s death in March 1953, all the accused were released.
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