Gennady Krivoschapov: "The Russian military-industrial complex and space are doomed to degradation"

Sergey Baimukhametov

Engineers of "secret factories", scientific workers of scientific research institutes, design bureaus, and special design bureaus (special design bureaus) largely determined the face of Soviet society. They were respected, proud of them. It was an amazing generation.

Many of my friends, senior comrades, relatives are from the military-industrial complex, space rocketry. They were versatile people, burned at work, constantly invented something. They were eager for world experience, for world technologies, but they stumbled against a blank wall, because they lived in a closed system. But the human potential was enormous!

One of them, from the engineers of that Soviet rocket and space era - Gennady Fedorovich Krivoschapov. He took part in the preparation and launches of the Soyuz spacecraft, led a team of adjusters for a test stand 1 (one) kilometer long. He is proud of the fact that under his leadership two 50-ton monoliths were docked with a gap tolerance of 0.5 millimeters. Who knows, he understands what it is.

Recently Gennady Krivoschapov turned 80 years old. When we met, remembering those days of old, heated arguments in kitchens, I asked him:

- In the 70-80s, you, engineers, researchers of KB and SKB, said that the USSR lagged behind the advanced countries in scientific and technological development. How does that huge intellectual potential compare with "lagging behind"?

- Corresponds, how the eras correlate. The breakthrough of the USSR - the era of industrialization. Scientific and engineering personnel were required - and they were trained. But they were forced to work within the industrial paradigm, formulated in Galich's song: "So that there is more iron and steel per capita in the country." And the world was moving into a new, post-industrial era: already in 1973, Daniel Bell's book "The Coming Post-Industrial Society" was published. This is how the term, ideological definition and name were born and consolidated. We are stuck in the old economic order, while pretending that the world does not exist outside our walls.

Yes, the human potential was enormous. That is why it is especially insulting. There were not only traditions of scientific and technical schools, but also family traditions. Since childhood I have been at the "objects". My father, Fyodor Stepanovich Krivoshchapov, after the war, worked at the Volga training grounds - they built launch sites for missile launches. Then - Chelyabinsk-40. I was thirteen years old. We swam and fished in the now concreted lake Karachay and in the Techa river, which is still radioactive today. Then Kazakhstan - missile and other ranges from Baikonur to Semipalatinsk, underground bunkers for nuclear explosions. At the construction of the first nuclear power plant in Obninsk, my father was the head of the site. This is how the history of the country's industry was reflected in the life of one person.

- Somehow I was excited by a sudden thought from the series "what would have happened if...". If then, with that creative potential, our engineers and scientists opened the world as it is today, would we rush forward in the scientific and technical direction?

- Unfortunately no. We had a "socialist economy". A breakthrough is possible only in the market. And there was a communist ideology. Let's say we would abolish ideology and discover the world, which is unimaginable in itself. But then inevitably it was necessary to abolish the economic system as well. That is, to cancel that country.

- It turns out the triumph of Marxism-Leninism, the doctrine of productive forces and production relations. We were taught that capitalist relations of production hinder the development of the productive forces, and the collapse of imperialism is inevitable. But it turned out that the development of the productive forces was hampered by the socialist system.

- A striking example is our military-industrial complex. After all, the USSR actually worked for the "defense industry". And "they" in the West also spent a lot of money on the military-industrial complex. But there, military orders were and are being carried out by private companies operating in a competitive environment. And then the costs pay off. How? For example, devices for filming from military satellites so that the license plates of the cars can be seen. These technologies were sold to civilians and the money returned. Today's digital cameras are the development of their military-industrial complex. Like so much else, starting with the internet. At the same time, civilian projects that withstood competition were used in the military sphere. The same Silicon Valley is the fruit of joint efforts of the state, universities and the private sector.

We didn't have that. Everything that was done for the civilian population was the secondary production of the military-industrial complex.

- Yes, in the early 70s the decision of the Central Committee of the CPSU on the additional production of consumer goods in the military-industrial complex was perceived as a burden and was called "consumer goods". Everyone thought so - from designers to workers. That is, it was considered honorable to regularly, according to a plan, ruin billions on "Products" that would go to arsenals and lie there, and making scarce pressure cookers necessary for people was humiliating, "not prestigious."

- And now there is not even what it was under the USSR. In the USSR, by the way, there was something like competition. Several design bureaus (design bureaus) worked for almost every type of weapon, the best designs were chosen. For example, there were three most powerful design bureaus for rocketry - Yangel, Korolev and Chelomey.

In Russia, under capitalism, competition for defense products has been eliminated. By the very power. She created, for example, the United Aircraft Corporation, and some others like that. As it is written in the decree-decree: "For the concentration of intellectual, production and financial resources".

It's the same with rockets. Not only is there no competition - control is very conditional. When the Bulava missile was being developed, the late Pavel Buzayev, the late head of the Roskosmos Navy's missile armament department, said in an interview in the press: “Not a single member of the state commission accepting the Bulava has seen her. It is not shown to any of the specialists... Although I am the deputy head of the department, which should directly deal with Bulava. But... in our agency... there is not a single blueprint of her.

Nobody doubts anything and does not ask any questions... And budget money flows like a river”.

- The fate of the Bulava seems to be known. Or unknown - how to look. For 20 years (!) It was developed, made, and in the end ... In 2018, TASS, with reference to "a source in the Russian military-industrial complex", - said that it was put into service. But then there was a strange text: "TASS has no official confirmation of this information".

- And since 2014, as you know, a course towards import substitution has been taken. President Putin set the task: “We must do everything to ensure that everything that is used by the military-industrial complex, everything that the military-industrial complex needs, all this is done on our territory, so that we do not depend on anyone for a single from the directions of re-equipment of the army and navy for new weapons systems".

Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, spoke about this even then. “In theory, it is impossible to completely abandon imports, otherwise we will turn into North Korea. Now we buy not only weapons, but also machines, on which we produce almost all the weapons".

Machine tools! The world machine tool industry has gone far ahead. These are the most complex software-controlled systems: from one end you fill in the workpiece - from the other you get the finished product.

- Doesn't it seem that the purchase of machine tools (which was), in a certain large, general sense, is a combination of French and Nizhny Novgorod?

- That's the point! To buy a machine is half the battle. It is necessary to buy factories - a full cycle. And already on their basis, move on, including independently. The Chinese bought a microchip factory a long time ago. We mastered the technology. Yes, 20 years behind. But they have mastered it. Its own industry has appeared. They began to develop it further. From the very beginning, since the 90s, we had to follow this path. And now we would live in a different country.

- And we have again won Marxism. Inside out. The state-oligarchic system, which established new production relations in the new Russia, was unprofitable to modernize production and modernize the country. This system has pumped and is pumping out everything it can from the legacy of the USSR and the deposits of raw materials. And with the current course of isolation...

- But there is nowhere to go. The world lives with openness and competition. Silicon Valley is considered to be America's "everything." But few people know that the Japanese have long been introduced there. They sell there not even high technologies, but technologies for introducing technologies. Technology is everything! Although corruption decides everything here... Back in 2013, expert on competitive intelligence Yelena Larina said: “The story with Google began in the very center of Silicon Valley - Stanford University. There, students Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on the Stanford Digital Library Project. The library needed a search engine. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation (by status - the US Federal Agency, closely associated with the intelligence community and the Pentagon). The first $ 100,000 for Google for the two students came from Andy Bechtolsheim, a contractor for a number of projects funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Technologies Agency (DARPA). In the mid-90s, the company's leaders came to Russia to create the "Silicon Taiga" on the basis of the universities of Novosibirsk or Tomsk. Seeing that everyone in "Taiga" is only interested in cutting the former Soviet property, after a year of torment they returned to America..."

- What to do and how to be globally? At the annual April conference of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, it was said directly: Russia is at a “fundamental fork” and is in danger of “falling behind forever” from countries developing advanced production technologies.

- There is only one way. It has already been tested by several countries, including China. And not only China. Closed systems are doomed to degradation. But, I repeat, it is far and not only about technologies. Until there is a political and public verdict on changing the direction of development, all attempts to solve problems by technical means, suggesting, for example, some new technologies, are obviously futile.