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School in the Twenties
breathe without a respirator, which prevented you from closely examining the
tangle of wires in the distribution boxes. One false move and the shock made you
remember the rubber gloves and galoshes that were mandatory for such work. But
no galoshes were available and the thick gloves prevented you from adjusting the
delicate mechanisms of the switches manufactured by the Swedish company Asea.
I learned to talk back at the comments of our excessively faultfinding foreman,
who was always drunk by the end of the workday. As punishment, under the
ridicule of the other electricians, I was sent to run power lines on the poles in the
workers’ settlements and to do the dirtiest electrical work of all: repair the lighting
network in the dormitories. However, after a year in the school of hard knocks I
became a full member of the workers’ collective, a member of the trade union, and
proved that I was fully capable of sustaining myself.
Soon, my comrades from my former boyhood expeditions began to campaign
for me.Their parents were quitting work at the textile factory (they had set up a
boat crossing over the Moscow River) and were now working in Fili at Factory
No. 22.They had found jobs for their own sons there too.They promised to pull
strings for me.
More and more I gazed longingly at the opposite bank of the river.There at the
airfield factory, along a forest clearing, stood a row of new, two-engine TB-1
bombers. In the autumn of 1929, a TB-1 named “Land of the Soviets” completed
a Moscow-New York flight.The entire country followed this flight with tremendous
excitement. The names of the pilots, S. A. Shestakov and F.Ye. Bolotov, the
navigator, B. F. Sterligov, and the flight engineer, D.V. Fufayev, appeared regularly
in the newspapers from August through October.
In the autumn of 1930, the brick factory authorities conferred on me the title
of “jobhopper” when I left that factory and was accepted at Factory No. 22, named
after the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution.
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