I thought this was an OK book but not as interesting as the other four volumes. I read the entire series in the following order: Volume II “Creating a Rocket Industry,” Volume IV “The Moon Race,” Volume III “Hot Days in the Cold War,” and now Volume I (no subtitle). In my opinion Volumes II and IV are the most interesting.
This Volume I discusses Chertok’s early days in the 1920s, 1930s, and during WW II as an electrician in the Soviet aircraft industry and his eventual electrical engineering specialties: aircraft radio communications, radio control of rockets, spacecraft, and satellites, aircraft and rocket fuel control and engine monitoring systems, telemetry systems, antennae systems and deployments on aircraft and spacecraft, and so forth. The Volume ends with his involvement in the “RABE” rocket research institute established in Germany from 1945 – 1947 before it was transferred to the USSR.
The book also describes (perhaps inadvertently) the emerging Soviet bureaucracy that executed the aircraft and rocket programs: ministries with associated Main Directorates, Directorates and Departments, State committees, scientific research centers (NIIs), design bureaus (KBs), manufacturing factories, the VPK (military industrial committee), and so forth. I found this even more fascinating than the stories of the satellites and rockets. The old USSR had developed quite the formal bureaucracy even in its early days!
Page 23 describes the enormous effort the old USSR devoted to the military industry by the late 1970s: 1770 enterprises or factories under nine main industrial ministries, 450 scientific research organizations, and 250 experimental design organizations. A total of 10.45 million people were employed in these organizations. Nowhere does Chertok consider the enormous impact this had on the reduced standard of living of ordinary Soviet civilians. I have read elsewhere that the USSR may have devoted as much as 30% of its GDP to the military by the late 1970s – and this during peacetime!
Chertok also occasionally touches on the effects of the political purges of the 1930s on the industry in which he worked. Managers and supervisors simply disappeared with no explanation other than that they were enemies of the people or members of a Trotskyite anti-Soviet organization.
As in Volumes II, III, and IV Chertok occasionally ruminates on the disastrous decline of the old Soviet scientific and technological base after the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s. Who can blame him? He was a member of the Communist Party and simultaneously part of the Soviet “nomenklatura” elite. By Soviet standards, he led a privileged life.
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![Rockets and People - Volume I by [Boris E. Chertok]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/517559Hv5kL._SY346_.jpg)
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