Ladyzhenka

In early April 67, two of the unit’s technical innovators—the engine specialist Ponomaryov and me—were sent from the launch team to a recovery base for spent first stages and fallen rocket hardware. It lay about 300 km northeast of Tyuratam, near the village of Ladyzhenka, an exile settlement so isolated that, as the saying went, nothing ever went there. Because the range launched many types of missiles on different trajectories, 12 such bases had been established along impact corridors across the Soviet Union. Their duties included warning and evacuating residents, suspending local work, recovering fallen stages, and repairing environmental damage. Alerts were relayed through village councils, forestry offices, and the local police over open channels using a coded phrase. People were evacuated, livestock moved away, and so forth.

These units were deployed in Dzhizzhazgan, Kustanai, Kokshetav, Tselinograd, Omsk, Novosibirsk oblasts and the mountain areas of Altai Krai and the Tuva Republic. The area of the approved impact fields was about 1 million sq. km. The Ladyzhinka part was formed as the very first one in the 56th year.

What interested me in this assignment was one of the SOBIS blocks, and Ponomaryov had some kind of balloon from the pneumo-hydraulic system.

We fly in an LI-2, and in the aircraft there are only us and the crew. I remembered the navigator; when he went out to us in the passenger cabin to smoke, he did not shake the ash from the cigarette but stuck it out through a hole in the fuselage ceiling, doing it very naturally and elegantly.

We landed at a snowy little airfield and immediately went to headquarters to report to the commanders. From the commander we heard that the officer corps of the unit was mainly made up of people who had somehow misbehaved at the range and were basically exiled here for “re-education.” We were housed in a hotel-hostel, that is, in an ordinary barrack, dimly lit, because all electricity is supplied by a weak diesel generator. We go to the locals, and the locals, without any hints, suggest immediately going to the village for firewater.

A call to the vehicle park and a tank tractor pulls up to the hotel doors. There were about five or six of us; we heave ourselves onto it, hold on to improvised grab rails and at an excessively high speed speed off to the village supply depot. We buy what we need and go back. And then I wanted to drink plain water—good heavens, how bitterly salty it was! In the morning we tried to boil it, to make tea. We boiled the water in a chemical flask on an electric hot plate. But no strong brew could extinguish that terrible taste.

We arrived conveniently, because the two-week blizzard had just ended and on the impact fields there remained uncollected stages from four launches, essentially sixteen blocks. A day later, for some reason in the evening, a tractor came to the hotel with a harsh-looking cabin instead of a turret. In front, at the levers, sat the driver and to his right an officer, both in helmets, and we on a wooden bench in back. We were advised to pull down the ears of our caps and tie up. We can watch only through narrow side slits and at the sky through the round hatch above the captain’s head. In front of us, across the full width of the cabin, was a heavy handrail made of very thick pipe at chest level.

To the base, it is a hundred kilometers. As soon as we started, and we did not start but tore off, the movement dynamic was nothing like a car’s; we clung to that damn handrail without letting it go even for a second, and only thanks to it we stayed intact. It was dark in the cabin; through the slit you could see as if from the exhaust pipe at high throttle, streams of sparks shot out, the roar of the engine was stunning, we were effectively sitting on it. The ears were traumatized so much that later for three or more weeks there was continuous hissing in them. There was no damping at all. Of course, tankers would object and argue that it exists, but Kola and I, without agreeing in advance, instantly tore off our beat-up butts from the bench and, like jockeys in such wildly uncomfortable poses, half-standing, heads bent to avoid smashing them on the metal, we flew into the night unknown.

The terrain is hilly, and we were moving at maximum speed, at times even in jumps, in the air. Landings are nightmares, a hard blow like a board to the backside, even the position does not save you, since we do not see the road. The captain spent half the way standing, sticking his head out the hatch. We stopped several times, scanned around; as we later understood, we were wandering. In those blessed moments, passengers fell onto the cursed bench, giving rest to hands and legs. For a tank, they told us in the hotel, the most dangerous thing is to hit an ravine with deep snow. It gets stuck on its belly, the cabin fills with steam and until it has burned the snow down to ground, movement is impossible. Once, they struck the track fingers with a gigantic hammer.

After four hours we were there. It is in the bare steppe: a small barrack, in whose antechamber stands an iron stove, its pipe passes through the wall and then runs through the entire sleeping area. In this large room there are about twenty beds with nightstands, and the walls and ceiling are absolutely black from soot and are heavily covered with pornographic scrawls, scratched in many places. Near the stove is a large box with peat chunks; this is what fuels the stove, no firewood is needed and there is none. The flame from peat is bright yellow, but very smoky. On half of the beds soldiers in uniform lie on black pillows, all with completely black faces and hands. In the right corner a junior lieutenant answered and got up and then immediately started swearing at the commander in front of the soldiers. In him I recognized an old acquaintance, once a fearless automobile lieutenant. Somewhere in the 63rd year at some dances for some holiday I danced a super-fashionable twist of that time in our club with some striking brunette from the training center. She, according to rumor, soon married a young lieutenant-driver, also from the training center. He was the one I knew; we sometimes played basketball together. The girl gave birth to a boy but renounced him and her husband. The lieutenant placed the boy with the mother. From that moment his life and service went awry. He started drinking and going out. They sent him for correction to this godforsaken place, but it seems that here he will finish his service.

We chatted about life, and then it dawned, so we could move out. We stepped into the yard; nearby stood two winch tractors, and to the left a giant hill of fragments and whole blocks of rockets of different types. The height of the hill is about ten meters, and the diameter over one hundred, or even much more, since all the snow in the visible area is covered with small fragments of rocket hardware, various devices, pipelines, cables, radio components in an incredible quantity. The task for the smoked-over team is to tear the blocks apart with torches into pieces and haul them to a pile. For reference: to blow up the first stage of a heavy carrier you need 0.5 tons of explosives.

The junior lieutenant climbed into our tank and we tore off to the impact fields. They are twenty kilometers away; we got there quickly, stopped, and saw that the blocks, at impact with the ground, are practically not destroyed. Only if it lands on its side does the block deform slightly, but if it lands vertically, then there are virtually no visible deformations and accordingly the side blocks are only slightly shifted from their places. I unscrewed my device, fetched Kola’s balloon, and off we went back. We said goodbye to the junior lieutenant and in the “saddles,” again, a nightmare.

How we reached Ladyzhinka is somehow not in memory; it seems the hosts showed a bit of pity on us and did not drive the horses. And then there was a surprise—in the coming days there would be no flights. Fine, we sit, drink tea, though it would have been less harmful to drink vodka. But money is tight for us, we had taken very little, and besides, why would we need much money. A week later, intense melting of the snow cover of the airstrip began, and there was still no aircraft and none was in sight. A few more days of this April and we would stay here until June, until the takeoff strip dries. We panicked in earnest. Kola had completely gone wild, he swore at his home range, grabbed his balloon and threw it away into a distant snowdrift for good. I held back from voicing a protest in that manner. In short, after two weeks of waiting, an AN-2 came for us. We left!.

As entertainment I remember the active participation of our team during serious inspection checks, in particular during the completion of a graded three-kilometer cross. For an absolutely untrained, plump, and not exactly young officer, in the heat, in heavy boots with a holster and gas mask, this was not only an unattainable standard, but also dangerous in general. After all, we are not an ordinary line unit, whose officers it would be fair to expect an appropriate physical shape in, unlike staff rats, who regularly and obligatorily romp in a gym or on sports grounds. And yet the standards are identical for all these categories, which is completely unacceptable for officers of a unit conducting practically continuous testing of missiles and satellites. One has to improvise, find ways around. We figured it out.

The operation for a successful passing of the standard by the next inspected unit is organized this way: At half the distance, out of sight of the inspectors, behind a little hill, stands our full team, almost at full strength, waiting for the start of the cross. Fast “crossmen” run by; they do not interest us. We are aimed at the laggards, already losing hope, heavily out of breath, with bulging eyes. And here they are, our targets! With joyful laughter, screaming and hooting, we leap from the ambush and grab the unlucky ones from the front by their shoulder straps and actively, despite their whining, tow them to the finish. The task is, incidentally, not simple. Their stamina is bad anyway. We reached the finish, everyone was satisfied, and none of them drove a pole showing a decent result. The Moscow dapper men checking were fully satisfied with these fake indicators of the physical condition of testing unit officers.

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