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Rockets and People
of bare spots with insulation and rejected batches of pyrocartridges. The trouble
was that pyrocartridge reliability and safety were theoretically difficult to achieve
for the single-wire system of aircraft electrical equipment. Nevertheless, the
scrupulous preventative repairs helped.About two weeks later the airplanes began
to fly off to troop units.
I returned to my special laboratory, having earned the gratitude of Nikolay
Godovikov, who at that time was OTK chief, and for whom the disruption of the
production plan due to the low quality of the produced aircraft had been very hard.
That meeting at the airfield with Olga Mitkevich turned out to be the last. It
was the beginning of dark days of repression, not only against monarchists who
were innocent of Kirov’s assassination, but also against many Party members
who were suspected of sympathies toward Kirov. The problem was that at the
Seventeenth Party Congress, many delegates had talked about promoting Kirov to
General Secretary. Mitkevich was among them.The time had come to deal with
all those suspected of being excessively sympathetic to Kirov.
The situation at the factory was grave. Party organization leaders, who through
Mitkevich’s intercessions had been transferred to the factory from the Central
Committee offices and the Moscow Committee, disappeared from the shops one
by one. Next, the arrests began even among the factory’s leading specialists. In early
1935, Mitkevich fell ill. It was announced that she had been removed from her post
as director and sent for studies at the N.Ye. Zhukovskiy Air Force Academy.
I made a slip and mentioned to my mother that Mitkevich was not our director
any more. To my surprise, she took this news very hard. For the first time,
Mother told me about her meeting with Mitkevich regarding my fate. During that
single meeting they discovered that they had mutual acquaintances through underground
activity. According to Mother, Mitkevich was quite an extraordinary,
outstanding woman. “Such people ennoble the Party. But there are too few of
them,” she said.
During her studies at the Air Force Academy, Mitkevich tried to intercede on
behalf of many so-called “enemies of the people.” She considered them to be
honest people who were devoted to the Party. In 1937, she once again became
gravely ill. It is known that she sent a letter to Stalin and Beriya from the hospital.
She was arrested immediately upon leaving the hospital. I am not aware of
her subsequent fate. Mitkevich was rehabilitated posthumously after the
Twentieth Party Congress. I was unable to determine the circumstances, place,
or date of her death.
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