During those years, the entire country was in the grip of an aviation craze. This was a reflection of government policy—overnight industrialization, and collectivization just around the corner—and swept the country like a storm. The best engineers and designers worked in powerful research labs and institutes, creating new models of airborne vehicles of all kinds. A paramilitary organization for the masses (the Society for Promotion of the Defense, Aviation, and Chemical Development of the USSR) was established, and later reorganized several times. Technology centers for children and youths opened all over the country, along with many model-airplane clubs. From nine years of age, like a little speck of dust, Genrikh was swept up in this current of mass enthusiasm. The boy succumbed to this wholesale mania for aviation, and, like a glider pilot, floated in its midst. This moment marked the fundamental renunciation of his search for an individual, personal path, which had been so important to his parents. For the first time, he felt the happiness of blending into the masses, of feeling at one with the surrounding world.
His former favorite toys—building blocks and construction sets, the results of the joint project between Nadezhda Krupskaya and Marusya, which had not borne fruit—now only irritated Genrikh. But, of course, the whole world was flying through the air, cutting turns and spirals and sideways twists, and he was still playing with children’s toys. He dived headfirst into the mass hobby of model-airplane making, waiting for the time when he would be big enough to get behind the controls of a real flying machine. And, even better, the controls of a machine gun! To fly and to shoot—those were his two big dreams. The favorite dreams of an entire generation.
Jacob made great efforts to push his son’s interests in a cultural direction. He lectured him on the first dreams of flying—from Icarus to Leonardo’s inventions. He gave him books by Jules Verne to read, because balloon flights and trips to the moon also spoke to Genrikh’s imagination. The boy began to get good grades in school, at least in the subjects that had something to do with his chosen profession. Jacob taught him German, and the boy didn’t seem to mind too much.
Alas, his father couldn’t impart to his son what he so stubbornly resisted—Genrikh was completely indifferent to the world culture that Jacob so admired and valued. Still, Jacob taught his son how to work in libraries, how to use the card catalogue to find the information he needed, and to discriminate between what was useful to him and what was superfluous.
By the age of fifteen, Genrikh had become fully defined as a person. He had outlived his interest in gliders and model airplanes, and had joined, and then quit, a parachuting club. Now he had his heart set not on a career as a pilot, but on the serious profession of engineering in the field of airplane construction. He was one of many thousands of such young enthusiasts.
Meanwhile, Jacob had been making a successful career in the VSNKh, the Supreme Council for National Economy. The problem of finding an apartment was resolved from the very beginning—the marvelous room on Povarskaya was a remarkable acquisition during the housing crisis of those years. They had bought a bookcase, a desk, and, finally, a piano—an old-fashioned upright with a wonderful sound—the last instrument in Jacob’s life that he truly owned. In a very few years, he made a name for himself in the world of economists, scientists, and scholars, gave lectures, wrote articles, and changed jobs several times, in search of himself. He published the book he had written, The Logic of Management, which contained many penetrating and inopportune ideas and thoughts.
Marusya, who understood very little about sophisticated sciences, somehow sensed, with a woman’s intuition, the danger the book posed for their lives. Jacob was oblivious to this. He was in charge of the Department of Statistics at the VSNKh, developing what seemed to be unprecedented subjects and fields—industrial geography and culture. He wrote descriptions of all the enterprises in the regions, their histories, their economic characteristics. In fact, this particular branch of economic geography had been all but forgotten for two centuries, since the time of Lomonosov. Jacob, describing and annotating already defunct manufactures, compared them with new enterprises with future prospects, scientifically developed and adapted to the ways of life in a small region, taking account of the specificities of geography and the local population. To give Marusya her due, her intuitions and her sense of unease about Jacob’s interests did not mislead her; the entire country of the Soviets was walking in step, but he had strayed off somewhere into the sidelines.
By the spring of 1928, the Shakhty case was under way. More than fifty people who worked in the mines in the Donbass region and the Head Mining Directorate of the VSNKh were accused of “wrecking” or sabotage, and then of espionage. The trial lasted for less than two months. Of those accused, thirty confessed to the crime, and five of these were executed. Jacob knew one of those executed, from Kharkov, and couldn’t believe he was guilty of such a crime.
Another event occurred at the time, in their own family. Jacob’s father, who was working as a manager of the milling company that had once belonged to him, was arrested in Kiev. Although it had not yet been announced, this was the end of the NEP period.* Jacob considered this to be a precursor of economic catastrophe.
In the summer of 1928, at the plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin announced: “The greater our progress toward socialism, the more the class struggle will intensify.” This pronouncement sounded like a theoretical construct, but Jacob, a Marxist, who had read the works of the writer not in translations for underground study circles for the proletariat, but in the original German, and already in his youth, had a low opinion of Stalin as a theoretician, although he acknowledged his skill as a politician. He also understood Stalin’s words as a warning to the entire caste of the technical intelligentsia, who, despite pressure, were unable to carry out industrialization within the time stipulated by the official directives of the Party management.
Jacob was torn apart by conflicting thoughts. He lost sleep composing (in his mind) a letter to the Leader in which he tried to explain to him the misguidedness of his idea about the “intensification of the class struggle.” It might, of course, intensify; only not in the broad expanses of the homeland, where the proletariat had won out, but precisely in the capitalist world, which had not yet matured to the point of accepting the idea of worldwide proletarian revolution. The Russian technical intelligentsia, on the contrary, was investing all its energies into building … and so forth. The other idea that kept him up at night was—escape. Escape from the field of economic statistics, which had become a dangerous science, and taking refuge in music. Why not? A teacher of music literature, music theory, director of a choir, private piano lessons, flute, clarinet … Wasn’t that a dream worth having? Wouldn’t that offer safety to him personally and to the whole family?
The attack on the technical intelligentsia, the search for wreckers and spies, was proceeding full speed ahead—and Jacob was too late. While he was analyzing the situation at hand, the next trial was already getting under way: the Industrial Party Trial.* Becoming acquainted with the trial transcripts, Jacob realized his own existence was in jeopardy.
Professor Ramzin, who was one of the defendants in the case, offered testimony that guaranteed corporal punishment to himself and his codefendants, leading specialists in the State Planning Committee and the VSNKh. Although the execution was commuted to a prison sentence, Jacob realized he was still in danger. He would be next.
Wrecking was discovered in the economy, in mining, in forestry, in microbiology—everywhere. In 1930–31, the Special Council of the OGPU—the secret police—reviewed more than thirty-five thousand cases. One of those was the case of Jacob Ossetsky. He defended himself in a rather florid, elegant style; though he did not admit to wrecking, he repented of some of his mistakes. He was sentenced to three years of exile, serving in the Stalingrad Tractor Plant.