Polish-Kazakh Family on the Train and Progress Rocket Space Center in Samara

          Yuri and Toshek weren't exactly talkative characters but, when approached by travelers and coaxed into a conversation, they could hold their own. It sometimes seemed like they had rehearsed their "good cop...bad cop" routines to be able to get information from people or, as in the case of casual train travel, get ordinarily quiet Russian or Kazakh travelers to open up about things they may not normally talk about to strangers. Such was the case with a Kazakh family returning home from Lvov in the Ukraine, a formerly Polish city that had been forfeited to the Soviet Union when the borders shifted at the end of WWII. Interesting in this case, this family could speak Polish since they had been uprooted and forcibly sent to Kazakhstan during the Stalinist terror of the 30's and 40's. With my Polish and their Russian with Yuri and Toshek, we had a pretty lively discussion about life on the steppes of Kazakhstan and the occasional  arrival of 20 ton Soyuz space boosters falling on farms and villages around their own property.

The following statement is from a recent conference and meeting between Polish and Kazakh National Governments recognizing a shared history:

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     "Migration of Poles to Kazakhstan, largely of an involuntary character, began soon after the Kazakh Khanate came under the control of the Russians. Captured participants of the 1830-1831 November Uprising and the 1863-1865 January Uprising, as well as members of clandestine organizations, were sent into exile throughout the Russian Empire.  By the time of the Russian Empire Census of 1897, there were already nearly 12,000 Poles in Central Asia, 90% male.  Poles both inside and outside of the Soviet Union would later get caught up in Stalinist population transfers in the late 1930's.  At least 250,000 Poles from the Polish autonomous regions of the Ukrainian SSR were deported to the Kazakh SSR in 1930; among those, as many as 100,000 did not survive the first winter in the country."

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     This family, with what I thought were classic Polish features, blondish hair and blue eyes, composed of mother and father around 40 and a boy and girl in their early teens, all unusually tall and thin but not unhealthy by any standard, lit up as I spoke realizing they would be able to practice their Polish with me. They all chimed in about the night a heavy piece of flaming metal streaked across the sky and crashed into a barn outside of their village, starting a fire that consumed several houses and killed a lot of livestock. Fumes from the fire and burning fuel killed another family that was downwind from the crash site. Other debris stories were told as fires starting in fields or woods and consuming large swathes of steppe...depending on the time of year and how dry the grasses or timber was.

          The father said it was common to find strange smoking hunks of metal on the ground, strip them of anything removable or useful for around the farm, and then plow around it for years until the dirt piled up and created a strange mound in the middle of the wheatfield.   He figured that there were nearly fifty or sixty such buried space fossils that he knew of within 10 miles of his village.  The young children chimed in and told their father that there were others that only children knew about and were keeping secret. They smiled and giggled as their father's eyes got big with surprised concern.

     Finally, an air of concern and even fear took over in the compartment with this family as Toshek asked about space part pirates. The father immediately reacted describing caravans of them coming to take these man-made meteorites away or claim them and then guard them from being taken or even being seen or photographed by others.

     "Who are these bastards?" asked Toshek "Locals? Rif-raf from Moscow?"

     "We have our own locals that try to control who gets space junk but we don't fear them. We fear the guys from Chelyabinsk and other bigger Siberian cities that come in and set up their camps. They have guns and feel comfortable in our village causing a lot of fear and pain. Small battles are fought all around us sometimes as the groups fight for control. We are told that some of the people are from the government trying to reclaim things that are rightfully theirs. I sometimes have my doubts about that since they seem just as willing to kill people as the rif-raf from Chelyabinsk."

     "Does anyone have the ability to lift a whole 10-ton piece of metal onto a truck and haul it away? Do you see this happening ever?"

     "That happened a few times. One of our richest neighbors in the next village has a trucking company. He hired a crane from a state construction company not far away and they rigged up chains and cables on several pieces of space junk. They were able to lift these pieces onto a flatbed truck he owns and haul them away. He has them on his property with guards and cameras all around...afraid that a space part pirate will come and try to steal them."

     "Would a farmer who has a piece of space junk on his property be willing to sell it if someone offers them money?"

     "Everything has its price. Of course!"

     I laughed and nodded in agreement along with everyone else but was thinking about earlier conversations about money, bribery, and how much money it might take to get anything done when I returned from Novosibirsk. Also, I wondered if I'd be doling out money to Dima's people before I ever got back to Chelyabinsk.  Would I have enough left? Would Yuri and Toshek take care of "arrangements" as they said their job was to do? Would I even find them when I returned with Dima and would Dima be upset that I didn't trust his arranging things?

This trip was wearing me thin emotionally and I was only heading into my fourth day.

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     The train pulled into Samara after 48 hours of "rough-riding" the rails from Kiev. The short rail lengths still in that part of the former Soviet-Bloc made for a rhythmic "duggity - dug (two seconds) duggity-dug (two seconds) duggity- dug". I wouldn't guess that we had ever gone faster than 80 km per hour the whole way...if that. Stops at nearly every small village slowed our progress, as well. And, long waits on side tracks for priority trains going the other way when there was only a single track for two-way travel added what I calculated to be more than 8 hours to the trip.

     Once in Samara, Yuri suggested that he and I go to the factory that makes the Soyuz rockets..."PROGRESS".   It was located in Samara and offered some watered down tours for foreigners. At least I would become somewhat familiar with the unclassified versions of the booster and upper stages. Yuri also wanted to show me in person where some of the more interesting "bolt-ons" would probably be found if we actually got to the debris sites. I was happy to be off the train for a couple of hours and in a pleasant enough city on the Volga and Samara rivers. The rocket factory had a long history of space vehicle production as well as aviation and military jet construction...even before WWII.

     Industrial cities in the former Soviet Bloc all smelled the same. At least, that was what it looked like to me. Way too much coal always being burned in cities where humans actually needed to breathe to stay alive. It always seemed an overlooked aspect of the Soviet planned economies that factories and energy production, producing the most unpleasant of exhausts and pollutants, were walking distance from residential areas. Planned communities with names like, "First Proud 5-Year Plan" or "Defense of the Motherland" would be within two or three tram stops or right next to an extremely dangerous chemical plant or steel mill, as was the case in Krakow's Nowa Huta, where the Lenin Steel Factory was located just five minutes from the flat where I first lived in Krakow from 1986 to 1994.

     Samara seemed the same. It was mere walking distance to the coal fired generation plant that belched tons of unscrubbed sulphur and CO into the air every day. Just a tram ride of 10 minutes to the PROGRESS Samara aviation and rocket fabrication plant from the train station. How convenient!!!  The 10 megawatt generating facility on site took care of any problems with interruptions in electrical power, and added a nice gray to black patina to everything around the plant...especially to the east and the south. Add that, just like in Krakow, these plants were located upwind from the major residential areas, and you have to wonder what kind of city planning or urban development decision making was going on. In the case of Poland's communist leadership, decision making, and industrial planning, it served the government well to employ a hundred thousand workers moved in from the penury of the rural south of Poland and to locate the plant upwind from Poland's intelligentsia in an effort to literally smother it and silence the resistance. I can't say that this was the case in Samara but the similarities were glaring to these eyes in a new proud industrial city of the former Soviet Union.

     "Sergei greeted us in the visitor reception area of the PROGRESS Rocket Factory. Tall with silvery long hair and a face like Leonard Nimoy's Spock on Star Trek, his combed back coiffe reminded me of my intensive Russian teacher at the University of Washington.  Just as intense as that teacher that I couldn't get along with (I eventually dropped his class), Sergei acted unaccustomed to leading an unannounced American through the factory. He told of  "countless American official visits" and then, pausing to emphasize his surprise at my arrival, said that he'd only taken American relatives of high level PROGRESS employees, American astronauts, and NASA officials through the plant on short notice.   He finally agreed only on a short tour and asked us not to photograph anything. These were the days before cell phone cameras so we merely indicated that we had no cameras with us and signed what appeared to be a non-disclosure agreement in Russian.

     Indeed, the tour was short and we were only allowed to view production areas through windows on second level mezzanines. Cameras were everywhere pointing at us wherever we went. A lot of mirrors, too. Probably these mirrors were one-way glass. I'd always been amazed at how Russian heavy payloads were boosted into orbit by rockets with a lot of engines that seemed much smaller than US rocket engines. I asked Sergei and he told me that for the first stage booster rocket, there are four identical conical liquid booster rockets, strapped to the second stage core. Each booster has a single rocket motor with four combustion chambers, two vernier combustion chambers, and one set of turbopumps. I then understood that it was four rocket engines with multiple combustion chambers for each rocket booster that made it look like a Soyuz rocket had to synchronize nearly two dozen engines.  I hoped I would see such a configuration during my debris site visit in a couple of weeks. 

     Yuri, showing no emotion but acting a little rushed, suggested we finish the tour after about 30 minutes out in production areas. We were taken to a large room for tea and cookies that had displays with scale model rockets and some famous rockets that had carried the world's first humans to space.  Sergei excused himself for a few minutes and allowed Yuri and me to walk around the room on our own reading the displays and museum exhibitions. 

     "You see interesting things? Get better idea what Soyuz rocket look like?" Yuri asked.

     "The stuff in the information packet is pretty detailed but it was good to see these things in person. I am glad we took this little side trip."

     "Not saying too much now, please." he whispered to me.

     Sergei came back and asked us, "We are interested in where you are going now. You said Novosibirsk earlier. Are you scientist, businessman, or government person?"

     "Novosibirsk is my final destination. I have some meetings with a man to introduce me to Novosibirsk State University officials. We are going to discuss a business program cooperation project.  And maybe I will visit some more factories."  I noticed that I was starting to talk like my host and Yuri. That was inevitable whenever you wanted to avoid confusing someone when speaking in English and unsure how proficient your audience was in the language.  

     "Very good idea! I am a former faculty member at NSU. Political Science and Information Management...kind of propaganda expert"  Sergei laughed at his own joke.  "Your train is leaving soon. Best to be on your way."

     We thanked Sergei and were given a bag full of Soviet and New Russian pins and brochures about the factory, The propaganda chief also gave us a brochure on the beautiful area around Samara that included campgrounds on its rivers.

     Sergei waved at us as we were leaving, "Much luck and be careful! Don't be too curious out here in Siberian back country. Curiosity is not good for survival here except in the laboratory."

     As Yuri and I walked back toward the tram stop, I asked him what he thought Sergei was really trying to say.   He replied, "Sergei is not sure what he smells but he wishes he were involved in it.  It's a good thing he works here. If he worked in a uranium enrichment plant, every bad guy would get what they want with his help."