to open next chapter. - NASA's History Office

Factory No. 22
parents what had happened. Without warning me, my mother headed for Fili
and had a meeting with Mitkevich. Neither one of them told me then about
this encounter.
The Party committee finally found the time to discuss the Komsomol committee
decision and unanimously voted for me to receive a “severe reprimand with a
warning.”This was also to be “noted on my registration form.” In a private decision,
it was recommended that I be transferred to a job in my specialty. Mitkevich
gave instructions placing me in the same OS shop where just the day before I had
been the Komsomol boss.
And so I once again became an electrician; no longer an industrial electrician,
but one who worked on avionics. My fall from grace and my brush with expulsion
from the Party was a very painful experience at the time. Many years later, I
assessed everything that had happened not as a blow, but as a gift of fate.
They knew me well in the shop, and for “re-education” they sent me to Lidiya
Petrovna Kozlovskaya’s female shock-worker team. This team’s job was to wire
ignition systems.They were releasing them to flight mechanics on the airfield to
be checked out on working engines.
Kozlovskaya was happy. “Finally I have at least one male subordinate, and one
of the former leaders, to boot.” She kept her young female subordinates in a state
of fear. Incidentally, it was not just subordinates who were afraid of Kozlovskaya.
She had been hired by the factory after several years in a “correctional” camp on
the infamous Solovetskiye Islands. 34 The labor discipline and quality of work in
Kozlovskaya’s team was exemplary. It was hard to believe that she had a criminal
past. She made very sure that every member of her team devoted 420 minutes per
shift to production. Always “together,” affable, and sociable with her shop
comrades, she even knew how to win over carping bosses.
The most spirited troublemakers, the airfield flight mechanics, who carped
about every piddling thing to the foremen and assembly shop team leaders, were
careful not to clash with Kozlovskaya. She said exactly what she thought about
unfair faultfinding, using language that would make a veteran engine mechanic’s
jaw drop. If somebody still needed to be taught a thing or two, she had developed
a high-voltage shock technique using the manual magneto used to start up aircraft
engines. When work was being done inside the spacious fuselage of a TB-3, the
opportunity presented itself to unexpectedly touch an offender with an ignition
wire.The sparking 20,000-volt discharge made a hole in his clothing, and while it
didn’t cause burns, it did give a brief jolt to the nerves.
A portrait of Kozlovskaya stood out vividly on the Honor Board, and in 1935
she was awarded the Red Banner Order of Labor. It is probable that the personnel
department where the biographical data from questionnaires were stored and
the people whom Kozlovskaya trusted knew about her criminal past. Her parents
34. The Solovetskiye islands,located in the White Sea,were home to one of the more notorious GULAG camps.
87