I came to work at the beginning of September, after military camp and a trip home to Stary Kangysh with Rita to meet my parents.
I arrived at my appointed time, but I couldn’t start working because I had no clearance to access secret documents. That process took a little more than a month. Then it turned out that I was supposed to work in the experimental unit, Workshop 17, for developing the technologies for producing boranes, which are highly explosive and poisonous compounds used in making rocket fuel.
I passed the test on safety measures, and I went to the plant, where there was a continuous line of machines and devices with valves, under a glass hood purged by a powerful stream of ventilating air.
Like all employees, I had to change into cotton work overalls before entering the workshop. They were a whitish-blue color and hung on me like an old potato sack, because of numerous washings with bleach. I was given a gas mask, which I had to carry with me at all times while working in the unit. We wore white cotton caps on our heads, and to be honest, we looked somewhat ridiculous. To top it all off, we had heavy crudely tanned leather boots, and our feet were wrapped in soldiers’ foot-wrappings. All this made us look like the prisoners in the movies of that time.
There was a pungent smell in the workshop that almost blew the caps off our heads, despite the powerful ventilation. It was literally killing us, as it slowly but constantly permeated our entire bodies. I was completely nauseated. I asked the assistant foreman Efimych, how long that smell would persist. He flashed me a toothless smile, and said that it would always be so. For some reason, Efimych’s eyes were sparkling unnaturally and he was waddling like a boatswain on a ship in stormy weather…
Soon I successfully completed my study at the unit and started working as a shift engineer. From time to time, the work was very intensive and dangerous, because the experimental reactor for producing diborane was leaking occasionally. It was damaged at high temperatures by the corrosive mixture of poisonous and explosive gas. In those days, it was very hazardous and labor-intensive work to trace the leak in time and to replace the reactor. If this happened during the night shift, it was twice as difficult, and of course people got seriously poisoned. We spent an hour in the chamber of this reactor saturated with poisonous diborane, replacing this damned unit.
Though we were in our so-called hose-type gas masks and breathed fresh air pumped in from the outside when we were in this chamber, our clothes absorbed a lot of diborane. When we finished our work and left the chamber, we went through a corridor where other shift workers without gas masks, were standing near the control panel. Then we went to shower and change our clothes. On our way through, we breathed in high concentrations of diborane emitted by our clothes, and the men and women standing around in the corridor were also forced to breathe in this poison.
People with various qualifications and levels of training worked on my shift. Most of them had solid work experience, and they helped me adjust well to this dangerous profession. After a few months, I developed good relations with my workers and they hardly ever let me down. Still, we did have a few accidents, which I will never forget.
During each shift I got about 30 liters of ethyl alcohol on receipt (it smelled strongly of toluene) to wash down the machines and units that were being repaired. We were pretty careful with this liquid, though not entirely. Everyone knew that it wasn’t poisonous, and sometimes people even drank it without any noticeable consequences. During one of the night shifts, I told two young workers, Kostya Dzhavadov and Dima Eminov, to wash down the alkaline hydrolysis unit with this alcohol, though I didn’t stay to supervise this operation because it was too trivial. Soon I heard Dima’s shrill cry, and he ran to his work station, along with some other workers. He buried his face in his hands and moaned with pain, so we dragged him to the water tap and washed his eyes and face. We did everything we had to, according to the safety instructions for cases of eye burns with alkaline solution. I called the ambulance, which immediately arrived and took Dima to a Moscow hospital.
The accident was largely my fault, because according to the instructions, the supervisor was directly responsible for everything that happened on his shift. Still, I was puzzled: how did this accident occur, if there was no alkaline in the unit being cleaned?
Later, during the investigation, we found out that the two young men had finished their job and started fooling around, pouring alcohol over each other. Some of the alcohol got into Eminov’s eyes. Fortunately, his burn wasn’t serious and he soon returned to work. Of course I was punished for my negligence, and I was deprived of my quarterly bonus.[9]
Another emergency incident occurred on another of my night shifts that literally shocked me. A young worker on my shift was studying journalism by correspondence at Moscow State University, and this was the source of his pride and arrogance. He had the highest worker’s category and conducted an important technological operation – the low temperature distillation of diborane. Purity of the product depended on the precision work of the operator. If the quality of the end product was lower than standard, they had to run the distillation over again and the reactor unit had to be stopped.
I started noticing that my aspiring journalist often came to work not quite sober. According to the protocol, I was supposed to dismiss him immediately and send him to the clinic for a medical examination. I decided that a reprimand would be sufficient, but it happened a few more times. I sincerely sympathized with the young man because he would have been fired at once, if I had dismissed him.
One night my “journalist” arrived tipsy again for his shift. Though he assured me that everything would be fine, I decided to stand near him and we would conduct the distillation of the product together. We worked like this until almost midnight, and then I was called to another machine. I had to leave him for just a few minutes, but this was long enough for an accident to take place. I heard the frightened cries of women, who were working nearby on the drainage unit, and ran back. A shaft of flame was bursting from the wall. I immediately understood that the “journalist” had opened the purge valve, which was never supposed to be used under any circumstances, unless all the gas mains had been purged with inert nitrogen gas. The valve had to be plugged immediately, but this hadn’t been done. Every second counted. Flames were licking the pipelines filled with diborane and hydrogen, and this could easily have resulted in a powerful explosion. There were two large tanks of pure diborane, only a few steps from the raging fire, behind the door on the landing. If they exploded, only a pile of ashes would be left of our entire Post Office Box institution and its personnel, and a whole block of buildings in Moscow would be seriously damaged. The situation was terrifying.
I acted like an automaton. I grabbed a roll of asbestos cloth, which was hanging on the opposite wall, and threw it over the valve, having no time to unroll the cloth completely. Urgently I covered valve with the cloth, and quickly I began to turn it off. Fortunately, it worked. The fire went out and when I came to myself, I just felt a slight chill. Only then did I notice the silence. There was no one around anywhere. Everyone was terrified and had run away.
Soon they returned to work, and I wrote a report about the incident. I felt confident because I had managed to do everything that was necessary. Privately, I was pleased that I didn’t panic in this critical situation. However, my worries were not over. Another worker reported that our “journalist” was nowhere to be found. He had vanished into thin air, but since the guards couldn’t let anybody leave the workshop without my written permission, I decided that my hard worker was still around there somewhere. We started looking for him, but to no avail. Suddenly, an idea struck me and I decided to check out my guess. There was a degassing chamber in the unit, which was used for removing poisons from the machines and reactors. It was flatly prohibited to enter this chamber without a hose-type gas mask on. That is where we found our “journalist” stretched out on the floor, sleeping like a log.
9
Thirty years later, in 1994, I was happy to run into this same man at an international meeting, devoted to the role of mass media in the democratization of society. I was very glad to see him. He was a Doctor of Jurisprudence, a professor, and the head of the Department of Criminal Law at the Moscow Law Institute. I realized then that my old colleague was very embarrassed about his worker’s past.