Pavel Otdelnov

No Entry Without a Gas Mask!
Vignettes from My Working Life
Aleksandr Otdelnov

 
About the Author
Born in 1956 in Dzerzhinsk. After graduating from Dzerzhinsk Polytechnic Institute, he worked at several of the city's chemical plants, including in hazardous trades, rising from an operator mixing solutions to plant director. He built and ran the Capella works for almost twenty years, which produced hair-care products for Wella, Schwarzkopf and P&G. Author of No Entry Without a Gas Mask! Vignettes from My Working Life.
 
Preface
My parents, my sister and I moved from the Voroshilovsky settlement to Dzerzhinsk in the early 1960s. A big new block! We carried our simple furniture in through the front entrance. I can still remember the smell of fresh paint in our new flat. After the poky little room we'd had out in the settlement, this flat seemed enormous to me. The stove in the kitchen burned wood, and so did the water heater in the bathroom.
There were lots of children among the new tenants. We all played together, and the older ones never picked on the little ones. Nobody locked their doors, and we could go round to each other's flats whenever we liked. There was a fuel-oil boiler house in the courtyard. The boiler itself sat underground, reached by a steep iron ladder, black from top to bottom with fuel oil. It was our secret hideout, where we stashed our childhood treasures.
Every courtyard also had a white, limewashed bin — the "pomoyka"* — liberally dusted with bleaching powder. It did nothing to keep off the swarms of fat green flies or the particular stench that hung over it all summer. That structure disgusted me from an early age. As new blocks went up and filled with new tenants, the problem of the pomoykas only grew more pressing. To solve it, someone among the city's higher-ups hit on the idea of having food waste hauled away by lorry instead. The lorries called at every courtyard on a fixed schedule. At the appointed hour, crowds of tenants would gather in the courtyard with their buckets, waiting for the "bin lorry". Each lorry had a driver and a binman, whose job was to tip the stinking muck out of the buckets. Plastic bags were a prized commodity in those days, and something of a fashion item besides, so nobody wasted them on rubbish. To me, a five-year-old boy, the binman's job made a powerful impression. I couldn't imagine how anyone got used to that foul smell, that swarm of flies, that flurry of torn newspaper — put to a purpose rather more prosaic than the elimination of political illiteracy†.
Yet, working at the chemical plants of Dzerzhinsk, I would go on to see countless other examples of just what a person could get used to. I'll introduce you to a few of them in the chapters of this book.
 
Transparent Cockroaches and the "Chinese Trace"
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 31. 1986. "Korund" plant, Diisocyanate Shop. 1980.
Early in 1986 I was appointed head of Shop 31. It produced a product sadly famous throughout the world: DDT*. By the time of my appointment, ours was the only plant of its kind left anywhere on Earth. To my mind, no more effective insecticide than DDT has been developed since, and there still isn't one to this day. We supplied it not only to regions across the USSR but also to a number of other countries. In Sri Lanka, for instance, our product was used to wipe out the malaria mosquito, and in Angola it was used with great success against the tsetse fly. For a few years, both countries more or less forgot about malaria and mass livestock die-offs.
But as I had occasion to discover, it isn't only people who get used to the effects of poisons — insects do too. Malaria mosquitoes and tsetse flies, after what had looked like DDT's total victory over them, came back in considerably greater numbers than before. I once saw for myself, in the finished-goods warehouse, a colony of hardy Soviet cockroaches that, judging by how briskly they were scurrying about, were feeling perfectly well. But these weren't quite ordinary cockroaches. They were almost transparent — like a cloudy droplet of liquid with legs. Mutants?! Apparently, the DDT had stripped the colour from their chitin shells. Otherwise, though — cockroaches were cockroaches.
People who work in constant contact with chemicals are exposed to their effects, and that usually leaves a trace. I learned just how true that was from my own experience, when I worked as an operator in Department 102 of the diisocyanate shop at "Korund" in 1980. My job was to prepare a solution of toluenediamine (TDA)* in chlorobenzene*. TDA vapour penetrates the pores of the skin, reacts readily with moisture, and stains the skin a bright yellow. I had to work the whole shift in rubberised gauntlets. My palms naturally sweated inside them, and the upshot was that my hands took on a bright ochre tint. I was embarrassed to offer my hand, especially to people I'd just met, and had to explain that I wasn't Chinese and didn't have jaundice.
And that's just my hands! Sometimes, after a hard night shift, you'd shower, lie down on a clean white sheet to sleep, only to wake up and find a yellow silhouette on it, like a shroud! "The Chinese trace," my wife called it, as she took the bedding off to be washed.
After that, transparent cockroaches no longer struck me as anything much to marvel at.
 
Khalkhin Gol
"Korund" plant, Diisocyanate Shop, Department 102. 1980.
Department 102 didn't have the best of reputations among the Korund crowd, because its main feedstocks were exceptionally hazardous and toxic substances: phosgene*, chlorobenzene*, and the TDI and HDI diamines*. Working with a cocktail like that brought little pleasure, and involved dreadful health risks and the ever-present possibility of death. And yet, you got used to even this.
It happened on a night shift. Certain processes — solution preparation, rectification, gas stripping, filtration — had built-in breaks. During these breaks, the shift crew would gather in the smoking room to rest and have a cigarette. A game called "the matchbox" was hugely popular. You flicked a matchbox off the edge of the table with your finger, and depending on which face it landed on, you scored points: 0, 1, 5 or 10. The last player to reach 21 lost, and the loser had the matchbox's outer sleeve slipped over his nose — which he then had to shake off without using his hands, solely by using his facial muscles. The unlucky one had to pull faces and toss his head about, which gave everyone else plenty to laugh and joke about.
That night the poor soul was Gena Goose, the owner of a remarkably large nose, onto which the matchbox sleeve was wedged with some effort. Goose was older than most of us. He'd earned the nickname not only because of his nose, but because he lived out in the settlement and kept geese — which gave us city lads no end of opportunities to tease and needle him, and drove Gena wild. You can imagine the scene in the smoking room: he grimaced, spat, swore, and struggled in vain to shake the box off his nose. At last his patience snapped, and the furious Goose, having called us fucking goats and rams, stormed out of the smoking room, promising to give us a "Khalkhin Gol"*, which, in his book, was the very height of the apocalypse.
Nobody in the smoking room took his threat particularly seriously, since Goose had promised many of his other tormentors a "Khalkhin Gol" before. The Homeric laughter over this "clown act" had barely died down when Goose reappeared in the doorway wearing a gas mask and holding a rubber glove full of liquid phosgene. Some inarticulate mumbling came from under the mask — but everyone understood what he meant: "Khalkhin Gol". The glove hit the floor, and the phosgene flashed instantly into vapour, filling the smoking room with the smell of musty hay characteristic of this deadly poison gas. Under normal circumstances, every one of us should have been dead. But nothing happened to us: we never let our gas masks out of our reach, even in the smoking room, and we all knew how to hold our breath and get one on within seconds.
Gena was caught, of course, and given a few kicks — but nothing serious. So what? Phosgene!... We were used to it.
 
Fire!
"Korund" plant, Diisocyanate Shop, Department 102. 1980.
Not everyone in Department 102 had it equally hard. The solution-preparation operators spent the whole shift tearing back and forth between the first and fifth floors, while the filtration operators — nicknamed "the rodents" — worked in gas masks, discharging the filtrate and wheeling the appallingly foul-smelling mass out to the dump in a barrow. They were called "the rodents" because the filters were fitted with scrapers that made a dreadful gnawing screech as they worked. The synthesis operators kept running the pumps that fed TDI or HDI* solution in chlorobenzene* into the reactors, while phosgene* was being fed in at the same time. The slightest hitch in the pumps threatened to bring the whole process to a halt — and restarting it would have meant stripping the lines down, which would have filled the shop with phosgene. There was no relaxing here.
The gas-stripping operators, on the other hand, had it easy. Every two hours you closed two valves, opened another two, and took a sample for the lab. That was it: sit down and have a smoke. And their pay packet was ten roubles fatter for it! It was a cushy job, and naturally the other operators were jealous and resentful of these "lucky devils". And then, one day, the hour of reckoning arrived…
On the night shift, Alexei, a gas-stripping operator, switched his four valves over, sent his sample to the lab, and sat down on a bench in the synthesis section to have a nap. He put his gas mask on first, to protect himself in case of a gas leak, and dozed off… Meanwhile the synthesis operators came out for a breather, pulled off their own masks, tipped the sweat out of them, and sat down on the bench too. Alexei lay there peacefully snuffling and snorting into his corrugated breathing tube, his head resting against the fire point board. Beside him stood a tin of red "fire" paint, which we'd been told to use to touch up the fire point board, ahead of a fire inspection due the next morning. We ended up painting not just the fire point board but the lenses of Alexei's gas mask as well. Kolka, an out-and-out troublemaker from "the rodents", let out a wild yell — "Fi-i-i-i-ire! Fi-i-i-i-ire! Everybody out!" — and started hammering a spanner against the pipe. Alexei sprang up and began spinning on the spot with his arms flung wide, still half-asleep, not understanding where he was or what had happened, until at last it dawned on him that he should take his gas mask off…
We never got to laugh about our stupid joke, though, because Alexei turned out to be holding an almighty great spanner, and the rest of us had to make ourselves scarce — sharpish…
Alexei never slept on the job again after that.
 
An Accident
"Korund" plant, Diisocyanate Shop, Department 102. 1980.
I never did like night shifts. It's hard to imagine anyone actually enjoying them — especially in a chemical plant, and especially in winter, when it's dark and cold, and the pipes and valves freeze up. There's nothing pleasant about pulling a freezing gas-mask facepiece over your head so you can strip down a frozen product line. It's dangerous to duck into the steam distribution room* to thaw out numb hands and then doze off in the warmth. All sorts of things can happen! If there's a breakdown or an accident during the night — and as a rule, there is — there's no one to rely on: one duty fitter for the whole shop. Grab your spanners and get on with it.
The chemical-solution-preparation operator's job could fairly be called the "hub" of the whole shop. The entire shift's work depended on the quality of the solutions fed to synthesis, and on getting them there on time. Run late, and you'd have to flush the system and shut down. Make the solution too weak, and you get no finished product. Make it too strong, and you get blockages, a shutdown, stripping down, flushing, reassembly, and starting up all over again. In chemical technology there's nothing worse than shutdowns and clean-outs, because that always means gas contamination, with every other hazard thrown in. It's nerve-racking, high-stakes work — who wants to land the whole shift in trouble, with everyone blaming you for it?
Every time I got ready for a night shift, the mournful André Popp tune that closed the Vremya† evening news programme would be playing, and a terrible gloom would settle over me. Home was so warm and cosy, my little boy sleeping there, fed and contented, an interesting film just starting on the television… But it was time to go.
That particular January night shift went wrong from the very start. On the previous, evening shift, the pump feeding TDA* solution in chlorobenzene* through to the synthesis reactor* had jammed. The synthesis operators and the duty fitter had spent half the shift in gas masks, stripping down the pump lines* and flushing them out. The shop was thick with phosgene*. But the shift had to be handed over regardless: every problem had to be fixed and the equipment running again — that's the unwritten law in every process shop. At last, the piston pumps in the synthesis section settled into a steady thump, the gas cleared, and it was time to take over the shift.
Every operator knows that a long equipment stoppage brings all sorts of trouble. It can take a whole shift for the process to settle down at every stage and the plant to get back up to full load. So it was this time too. At the start of the shift there wasn't enough chlorobenzene, and I spent half the shift running between floors of the section, sorting out the vacuum, the distillation-column temperature, and the reflux* flow. Eventually chlorobenzene of the right quality began collecting in the solution vessel — but slowly. Meanwhile, the TDA-in-chlorobenzene solution prepared on the previous shift was down to its last hour's worth. The synthesis section had only just reached the required throughput, and the process had settled down. There was no way I could let the solution run out — that would mean stopping synthesis all over again, with everything that entailed. Preparing a fresh batch and getting the lab analysis would take at least thirty minutes, and I still didn't have enough chlorobenzene.
At last the vessel filled. Time to feed the molten TDA through to the mixer. There was still just enough time to make it…
The phone on the operator's desk kept ringing off the hook. It was the synthesis operators, fretting:
"How much solution have you got left? Will you make it? Get that stirrer going, or we'll be down again!"
"That's it. I'm feeding the melt through to the mixer now. I'll be ready in twenty minutes — if necessary, we won't wait for the lab result!"
"You'd better watch it, student! Cock this up and you'll be the one having to give the samples yourself!" the senior synthesis operator threatened, half in jest. He didn't know how right he was.
Under normal conditions, TDA is a black, crystalline solid that looks very much like asphalt. It was used to make up the solution in chlorobenzene, and was kept pre-melted at a temperature of 140°C in a jacketed* vessel standing in the corner of the solution-preparation section, by the window.
I closed the vent* valve, opened the nitrogen line to build up pressure in the vessel, opened the gate valve on the line feeding TDA through to the mixer, and hurried over to the sight glass — mustn't overfill it. What the hell? No melt coming through! Was I just not seeing it?
The room was dim, lit by a weak bulb showing through a glass hood smeared with product. I wiped the sight glass clean and shone a torch on it: sure enough, no melt was coming through. I dashed back to the melter and ran through the whole valve sequence again, in reverse. Then again… Still nothing. Nothing at all!
The phone on the desk shrilled again. It was the shift supervisor on the line:
"What's going on with your solution?!"
"TDA's not getting through to the mixer! Might be the siphon's blocked again. Send me a fitter, Mikhalych!"
This business with the siphon happened fairly often, especially after a long stoppage, when the melt at the bottom of the vessel overheated and "resinified", turning into something like modelling clay. The duty fitter, Slavka — never an easy man to track down on a night shift — turned up fully kitted out and ready in no time at all. It seems that the usually mild, cultured Mikhalych had found just the right words to say to him.
We checked the valves: the vent was open, the nitrogen and product lines* were closed, and the pressure gauge read "0". We set about stripping down the gate valve on the product line. Slavka put on his "monkey"* and started undoing the valve cap to clear the siphon. I stood a little to one side, so as not to get in the way.
Suddenly a fan of molten TDA burst out from under the cap! Slavka was shouting something, trying to force the cap back onto the valve, but the fountain of molten product wouldn't let up! There was still pressure in the melter, and only the valve cap in Slavka's hands stood between him and the scalding melt! For the first second or two I didn't even feel it. Then a hot arc of liquid splashed past my face and caught me on the neck and chest through my open shirt collar. I lunged for the vessel and unscrewed the blanking plug. It popped out of my hands with a bang like a champagne cork. Nitrogen, together with TDA vapour, burst into the room like gin from a shaken bottle. The fountain stopped.
Slavka, swearing filthily, dropped the valve cap and jumped off the platform straight into a greasy black puddle of hardening melt. He was lucky: in his boots, gas mask and heavy woollen overalls, the valve cap had saved him from being burned. I wasn't so lucky — the skin came away from my neck and chest along with the hardened melt. The girls in the lab bandaged me up and smeared something on the burns, and the shift supervisor sent me home. By tram, of course — call an ambulance, and they'd have to report it as an industrial accident! It was the last night shift before the weekend, with three days off ahead. Never mind. I recovered. I went about for a week or so with a yellow bandage round my neck, like a fashionable scarf. TDA, on contact with moisture, produces a stubborn bright-yellow stain, so my yellow "collar" matched my yellow palms rather well…
When we went over the whole affair afterwards, the full picture finally came out. On the previous shift there'd been an emergency shutdown and heavy gas contamination. An operator had taken a pane of glass out of the window beside the melter to air the room, and had forgotten to warn me about it. It had been bitterly cold that night. The vent and the pressure-gauge line on the vessel had frozen solid, which was why the gauge needle had "frozen" at zero! It was just as well that the plug on the vent gave way, or Slavka would have been boiled alive too…
 
Sausage
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 33. 1984.
I was studying part-time at the Dzerzhinsk Polytechnic Institute, and decided to write my thesis on aluminium chloride* production at "Caprolactam". At the time, there were three plants like it in the USSR producing this vitally important product: in Dzerzhinsk, in Pavlodar (Kazakhstan), and in Sumgait (Azerbaijan).
Aluminium chloride is used as a catalyst in producing a huge range of organic substances. The process is based on chlorinating kaolin briquettes* in a furnace in the presence of carbon monoxide* at 1,200–1,400°C. Those two poisonous gases — Cl₂ and CO — combine to form COCl₂, the poison gas phosgene*, which had already been used as a weapon of mass destruction during the First World War. The chlorination process yields not only aluminium chloride but pretty much the whole periodic table of inorganic chlorides as well: iron, titanium, silicon…
What makes aluminium chloride unusual is that it has no liquid phase at all: it turns solid straight out of the gas phase, at temperatures below 180°C. This produces extremely fine particles, about 15 microns across — an exceptionally fine dust. When aluminium chloride meets moisture in the air, it forms aluminium hydroxide and hydrogen chloride, which, when inhaled, burn the airways. In production, the product cools almost instantly and deposits on the inside of the gas ducts, blocking them up very quickly. And because chlorine and carbon monoxide are fed into the furnace continuously, the gases coming out of the furnace have nowhere else to go but into the work areas. That is precisely what makes the process so hazardous and difficult.
The chlorination furnace is a cylindrical vessel twelve metres tall and three metres across on the inside, lined with a special refractory material — "dinas" brick. A vacuum is maintained inside the furnace, and the gases, laden with chlorine and carbon monoxide, are drawn off through ducts to the condensers (water-cooled vertical vessels fitted with scrapers) and the traps (large-diameter cylindrical vessels), where they cool and turn solid.
The traps and ducts had to be periodically hammered with sledgehammers and cleared out by hand with special scrapers. Whenever this happened, gas from the chlorination furnace would burst into the room. It reacted instantly with moisture in the air, forming a dense, poisonous fog of hydrogen chloride, unreacted chlorine, and phosgene. On top of that, the periodic discharge of spent charge from the furnace, every two hours, only added to the bouquet. A gas mask and a sledgehammer were the basic tools of the trade for operators in this particular hell! And yet people got used to even this nightmare…
One day, while doing my rounds of the work areas, I found heavy gas contamination — nothing unusual, since it was time for another discharge of briquettes from the chlorination furnace. In my gas mask, with practically zero visibility, I was picking my way through the condensation section almost by touch. Suddenly my hands brushed against a rounded object. Odd — there shouldn't have been anything like that there! I took hold of it with both hands and tried to bring it close to my eyes — or rather, to my gas-mask lenses. Some inarticulate mumbling followed. To my utter astonishment, the object began to rise on its own, and only then did I realise it was the head of a man in a gas mask! Still holding his head in both hands, I backed towards the exit and led the fellow out into the corridor, where it was safe to take the mask off.
"Semikov! What are you doing in there?"
"Just stopped for a bite," he answered, pulling off his mask and still chewing away.
That's when I noticed the piece of smoked sausage in his hand.
"How on earth do you manage to eat your lunch in gas like that, wearing a gas mask? Couldn't you find somewhere else?"
"It's fine, boss: you just pull the mask away and take a bite. Only trouble is, my jaw's worn out from all that chewing. Got myself a new mask, see, and the rubber's a bit too tight! And I haven't got time to go to the mess room — the product's coming through nicely, and I'll need to pull the drums* off again soon, or they'll overflow!"
 
A Cure for a Runny Nose
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 33. 1980.
Winter. A day off. Morning shift. I'm the shift supervisor, at the central control desk. I glanced out of the window and… froze. There, parked by the shop, was the director's Volga. Blow me, the general director himself! In the ordinary run of things, you only ever saw him at meetings — and here he was, on a Sunday, no less! Sensing trouble, I bolted out to the car, straightening my none-too-fresh overalls and adjusting my gas mask as I went. The doors of the sublimation section swung open in front of me. There, standing in billowing clouds of gas — hydrochloric acid, chlorine, phosgene* and God knows what other chemicals — was the general director himself, still wearing his civilian winter coat and muskrat-fur hat!
My legs automatically went into parade-ground mode as I reported:
"No incidents in Shop 33, sir, working to plan. Shift supervisor Otdelnov."
He looked annoyed.
"What kind of thugs have you got in there?! Nearly kicked me out! Well, never mind that… I came to see you for a spot of treatment — looks like I'm coming down with a cold, got a runny nose. Thought I'd breathe in some chlorine as a precaution. When's the next discharge? I'll stand here by the trough."
A concrete trough ran the full length of the shop, with water fed into it under high pressure. Every two hours, briquettes of spent feedstock were discharged from the chlorination furnace into this trough and then carried off to the dump by hydraulic transport. At that moment, billowing clouds of gas, chlorine and steam would burst out along the entire length of the trough. It would never have occurred to me to treat a runny nose with that infernal mixture — but it turned out the director of the biggest chemical plant around had his own private pharmacy…
The director drove off safely, and I set about finding out what had actually happened. Our lot in the shop were a hard bunch. Even the ones who hadn't already done time in prison, or in an LTP*, were desperate characters with a fair chance of ending up there eventually. One of them explained it to me like this:
"Some fucker walks in — no monkey* on, and in clean clothes, if you please. Fuck knows who the fuck he was, so I told him to fuck off!"
A week later, at the Safety Meeting*, the general director held our shop up as an example to the rest of the plant:
"I toured half the plant the other day. Every single door has 'No Entry Without a Gas Mask!' written on it, and Shop 33 was the only one where that rule was actually observed! They wouldn't let me in…"
 
Gena Katorov
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 33. 1983.
Handing over a shift in Shop 33 was never a straightforward matter. The outgoing shift had to leave every workstation in good order. By the end of the shift, any fault or gas leak had to be cleared up, no matter what — that rule was enforced without mercy. By the end of a shift every operator was worn out, especially after a night shift. In the small hours, there was neither a process engineer nor a section head anywhere in the shop, and there was no one left to track down the cause of a gas leak except the shift supervisor and the team leader. Getting exhausted operators actually to fix the problem was harder still — everyone just wanted the shower and home! But someone had to see that order was kept. If you can't get the men whose job it is to do it, you have to do it yourself. When all's said and done, the team leader is responsible for how a shift is handed over.
Gena Katorov joined the shop in December 1982. He was thirty. A young man, recently married, with a newborn son. He wanted to earn a bit more, and that's how he came to "the Crematorium" — Shop 33's nickname, on account of its gruelling, hazardous conditions. A thoroughly responsible, careful and decent man, he quickly earned the highest sixth grade, and was made a team leader.
One day in February 1983, about an hour before the end of the night shift, at around six in the morning, a serious gas leak broke out. Somewhere in the process line, the gas ducts had clogged with product. Excess pressure had built up in the chlorination furnace, where there should have been a vacuum, and gas from the furnace had burst out into the work areas. The blockage had to be found urgently, the ducts cleared, and the lost vacuum restored — otherwise there'd be no handing over the shift, and the whole team would have to stay on until the problem was fixed!
Whose job was that? The chlorination and condensation operators, of course, under the team leader's direction. But this time Gena decided to track down the cause himself. He put on his gas mask and set off into the gas-filled shop.
By 6.30, the leak had cleared, the morning shift had arrived, and the night-shift operators had headed for the showers. Gena wasn't among them. At first nobody thought much of it — the team leader could easily have been held up somewhere. The alarm was raised at 7.00 by the morning-shift chlorination operator, who found the pressure gauge on the chlorine feed line and the flow recorder both reading "0", while the carbon monoxide* flow chart was tracing a dead-straight line at 150 cubic metres an hour. That meant carbon monoxide was still flowing into the chlorination furnace — and, with no chlorine to react with, was passing straight through to the off-gas* line. Carbon monoxide has neither colour nor smell; a few breaths are enough to cause loss of consciousness, cerebral hypoxia and… death.
The valve on the carbon monoxide line was shut off at once, but the valve on the chlorine feed line had already been closed by someone! But by whom? And where was Gena Katorov?!
They found him at 7.30 in the off-gas chamber, on the platform housing the injector* that maintained the vacuum in the system. The inspection hatch for the injector was open — Gena had evidently opened it himself to clear the blockage — and the entire volume of gas from the chlorination furnace had rushed, unimpeded, not into the gas outlet stack but straight into the room.
He was lying beside the hatch he'd opened, still wearing his gas mask. The concentration of carbon monoxide was so high that even the special hopcalite filter* — fitted in addition to the chlorine filter — proved useless… Gena died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The investigation never did establish who had shut off the chlorine feed. Perhaps he'd done it himself; perhaps one of the operators on his shift had decided to "help him out", so that the gas leak wouldn't contain chlorine and its reaction products as well. Nobody gave carbon monoxide a thought — it has no smell, after all, and no colour to give it away. Everyone was in a hurry to hand over the shift and get home…
 
Carbon Monoxide
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 33. 1981.
You'd think there couldn't be much difference between carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO₂), which every one of us breathes out — just one extra oxygen atom. And yet how many lives that one missing atom has claimed! Carbon monoxide starves the brain of oxygen: it doesn't support respiration at all, and within minutes a person loses their sense of orientation, then consciousness. Deprived of oxygen, brain cells begin to die within six minutes, and the damage is irreversible. Many thousands of people died in the gas chambers of the Second World War. And there is simply no telling how many more have been overcome by fumes in houses with stove heating, or in bathhouses, through the careless use of a flue! And yet this same trick — carbon monoxide's ability to steal back that missing oxygen atom in various chemical reactions, its reducing power — makes it indispensable in some chemical processes. Using it has always carried serious risks and has sometimes cost lives.
In the production of aluminium chloride* in Shop 33, carbon monoxide was used as a reducing agent and fed into the chlorination furnace alongside chlorine. A separate building housed four generators in which coke was burned. Blowers* fed the carbon monoxide to the chlorination furnace and into a buffer gasholder* through a system of liquid seals*. The sealing liquid in these outdoor liquid seals was "brine" — a calcium chloride solution with a low freezing point. To keep the brine at a constant level, each liquid seal was fitted with an overflow pipe with a funnel to break the stream. If pressure in the system rose too high and forced the sealing liquid out, the gas was meant to escape to the atmosphere through that same overflow pipe, which would then serve as a vent line*. You'd think the process had been designed to cover every eventuality. As it turned out — not quite.
On 31 December 1981 it was bitterly cold, the temperature down below minus 40°C. But no frost could dampen the pre-New Year spirits of the men at the diesel-locomotive depot in the transport shop. The whole night shift came in early to let their colleagues on the evening shift catch the 22:10 electric train and get home in time for the New Year's feast. At nine o'clock, the whole shift — all twelve men — went off to the changing rooms for a shower.
At that same moment, over in Shop 33, the load had been taken off and the chlorine and carbon monoxide feeds to the chlorination furnace had been shut down. The blowers, though, kept right on driving carbon monoxide into the gasholder — until the gasholder overflowed. The gasholder stood three hundred metres from the main building, so the operators never noticed it filling up. Add to that the darkness, the bitter cold, and everyone being in a hurry to get home — New Year's Eve was practically upon them!
The gasholder's bell rose to its full height and jammed against the upper stops, while the blower kept right on pumping carbon monoxide into it. Excess pressure built up in the pipework, forcing the brine clean out of the liquid seal and through the overflow pipe. As bad luck would have it, a solid casing of ice had formed around the funnel, sealing off the gas's escape to the atmosphere. The carbon monoxide had nowhere left to go. It found its nearest way out through the drains — through the drainage gullies and into the men's shower room at the diesel depot.
The entire shift died. All twelve of them. Right on the eve of the New Year…
There followed funerals, an investigation, and a great deal of blame being handed round to everyone in turn… and then it was all forgotten until 1983, when Gena Katorov died of carbon monoxide poisoning in Shop 33, and a year after that three fitters very nearly succumbed to it too — and I could easily have been the fourth.
*  *  *
 
The author's own diagram of the carbon-monoxide feed system described above — generators, blower, gasholder and chlorination furnace.
Every Thursday there was a scramble in Shop 33 — a planned shutdown to clean out the gas ducts. The senior operator in Building 281 was Nikolai Ivanovich Sazonov. He shut the equipment down, cut the power, and reported that the system was ready for its scheduled clean-out. A team of fitters set about opening up the ducts — routine, weekly work. A couple of hours later, the duct-cleaning in the chlorination section was finished, and it was time to bring the load back on. I rang the central control desk in Building 281 to let them know we were ready to start feeding carbon monoxide into the chlorination furnace again. Nobody answered. I assumed the clean-out in Building 281 must still be going on, with the operators tied up on the shop floor. I went over myself to find out what the hold-up was.
At the central control point, I found Sazonov sitting at his desk with a vacant look on his face, blood trickling from his nose. Nikolai Ivanovich had once been a police officer, and Shop 33 employed quite a few former convicts, so my first thought was that one of them had "settled a score" with him.
"Nikolai Ivanovich, what's happened? Who hit you? Where are the fitters?!"
He mumbled something back at me. I couldn't make out a word, and rushed into the production area to find whoever was responsible. There was nobody in the generator section; the gas ducts stood open. The room smelled of stagnant water, like a bog. My head began to swim, and I ran back out through the building's wide-open doors. Out on the snow beside the building, the whole team of fitters was down on its knees… being sick. It was obvious at once: carbon monoxide was pouring into the room through the open gas-duct hatches. I put my gas mask on and went back inside. The gate valve on the carbon monoxide line from the gasholder had been left open. I closed it and led Nikolai Ivanovich out into the fresh air; he'd evidently been overcome before he could close the valve. That one oversight could easily have been fatal, had I come along even a few minutes later…
That's the treacherous thing about that damned carbon monoxide!
 
Goat
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 33. 1983.
No, this isn't about animals! In chemical engineering, a "goat" is a thick or fully set mass that forms in a reactor and is often extremely difficult, or simply impossible, to remove, since it has turned into a solid monolith.
In Shop 33, "goats" forming in the chlorination furnace were a chronic problem. As a rule, they arose from a breach of the process regime or a flaw in the technology itself. A powerful exothermic reaction took place inside the chlorination furnace, with a normal reaction-zone temperature of 1,200–1,400°C — hot enough to melt kaolin and fire it into a kind of ceramic. Cylindrical kaolin briquettes*, 2.5 centimetres across and 5 centimetres long, were loaded periodically — every one and a half to two hours — into the top of the furnace through a charging hopper, heating up as they worked their way down and reacted with the chlorine. Spent briquettes were discharged on the same schedule. Steady, even loading and discharging kept the charge moving down through the furnace, preventing it from sitting still and sintering into a solid mass.
But keeping the briquettes moving evenly through a furnace three metres across is no simple task. Delays in loading or discharging, caused by process hiccups or equipment breakdowns, were the chief cause of sintering. This in turn made it harder for the charge to move and often blocked the furnace completely. This was known as "cooking a goat". Beating out a "goat" was hard, dangerous work — and "goats" varied a good deal in how "stubborn" they were. Small, shallow patches of sintered material were knocked out from below, through the discharge hopper, using a pipe five or six metres long and 40–50 millimetres across, with a chisel welded onto the end. This was pushed into a special fitting* on the discharge hopper until it met the "goat", and sledgehammer blows on the other end broke the sintered mass into small pieces. The whole operation had to be carried out in a gas mask, since a successful strike brought the charge crashing down into the discharge hopper, and on into the hydraulic-transport flume*, in a cloud of dust and gas.
Sometimes the sintering was too high up to be reached from below. In that case we used special rods made of metal bar, three metres long and 40 millimetres across, with a threaded coupling welded to the end of each one. As a rod was driven down through the top of the furnace towards the sintered patch, we'd screw a new length onto the coupling, extending it further and further. It was fiendishly hard work: gas mask on, wielding the "team leader's" sledgehammer, which weighed twelve kilograms. Driving a rod eight to ten metres into the charge took the combined efforts of a good many operators — and not just operators, either. Everyone got a turn, right up to the shop superintendent.
Swinging a great sledgehammer in a gas mask, standing on the furnace's scorching lid in temperatures pushing 40°C, is not a job just anyone can manage! And even this method didn't always get the desired result. Once the end of a rod reached the reaction zone, where the temperature topped 1,000°C, it would glow white-hot and, under the sledgehammer blows, twist itself into a spiral like a rubber hose. There was no pulling a molten rod back out after that; it was simply left to burn away inside the furnace.
One time we fought a "goat" for hour after hour and had nothing to show for it. Everyone was worn to a thread. Meanwhile, with both the chlorine and carbon monoxide feeds shut off, the temperature in the reaction zone had begun to drop — and that was something we absolutely could not allow. If the temperature fell below 800°C, the chlorination reaction would stop altogether, and the whole plant would be down for a month at the very least! So we were forced to feed chlorine in periodically just to keep the temperature up, which, with the charge not moving, only caused even more sintering. A vicious circle!
 
The author's own diagram of the chlorination furnace, titled in the original "Scheme for Beating Out a 'Goat'".
The shop superintendent, Anatoly Doronin, decided that we should open the assembly hatch on the cone of the chlorination furnace and try to break up the "goat" from below through it. We understood perfectly well how dangerous this operation was, but what choice did we have… We prepared a special rod from a length of pipe, with a blacksmith's chisel welded to one end. The resulting tool was an impressive size, but so heavy that no one man could hold it alone. We put together a team of four: myself, as section head, and three operators. We opened the hatch — 70 to 80 centimetres across — and, shining a torch upwards, saw the following sight: four metres above the hatch, the sintered charge had formed itself into a vault, like the roof of a cave. Not even the shop's old hands had ever seen a "goat" like it! Something had to be done to bring the whole mass down — and this was more than a hundred tonnes of briquettes at 1,000°C.
We decided to punch a "hole" in the sintered vault and gradually widen it, to get the charge moving down towards the discharge. We knew the vault could come crashing down from that four-metre height at any moment, and that if it did, there'd be a colossal blast of gas and dust. We tried to take every precaution we could think of, but beyond our gas masks and heavy woollen overalls, there was little else to be done. The problem was made worse by the fact that the only way to reach the assembly hatch was along a corridor no wider than a metre and a half, reached by a metal stairway. Our whole "crew" lined up in a chain, like something out of the old tale of the Enormous Turnip† — grandad pulling, grandma pulling grandad, and so on down the line. I got the part of grandad, "feeling" for the goat and steering the rod towards the softest-looking patch of the vault, while two of my helpers held it up level and a third swung the sledgehammer at its end.
Our first attempts were encouraging: we managed to chip lumps the size of a decent cabbage head off the vault. Buoyed by this, we kept on hacking away at the "goat" — until, without warning, the whole vault came down with a horrendous crash, pinning the rod fast in the hatch. The other end of the rod pinned one of the operators against the corridor wall, sealing off my own way out.
For a moment we were deafened and blinded. The lenses of our gas masks were instantly caked in a thick layer of dust, which clogged the breathing valve at the base of the filter canister, making it hard to breathe at all. Hard on the heels of the huge blast of gas from the hatch came a torrent of red-hot briquettes, pouring straight at me. My woollen jacket, trousers and boots began to smoke and smoulder… to this day I couldn't tell you how a builder's shovel came to be in my hands, or where it came from, but I jammed it into the mouth of the hatch to shield myself from the stream of fire. That shovel, its handle scorched black, held the flood back. The torrent stopped.
Meanwhile my assistant had torn himself free from under the rod that had pinned him, losing the buttons from his jacket and ripping his flies open in the process. He went tumbling head over heels down the stairway, out of a corridor now half-buried in red-hot charge. The way was clear! I bolted after him as if I were running over hot coals — which, in a manner of speaking, I was…
Bursting out of the shop into the open air, we tore off our gas masks and flung our smouldering jackets, trousers and boots straight down onto the snow as we ran. We were left standing there in our underwear. It isn't every day you see a spectacle like that at a chemical plant: grown men, barefoot, their foot-wraps trailing loose, capering about in the snow in nothing but their white long johns and undershirts! Our relief knew no bounds. We laughed like children at each other and at the ridiculous sight we made, and only later did it sink in that a minute earlier we'd been standing on the very edge…
It's a wonder none of us was burned. And there I was, like Saint George the Dragon-Slayer himself, spearing the treacherous serpent — except that I'd tamed my "goat" with a shovel, handed to me by my guardian angel at the critical moment!
 
Sludge* and "Chemical Protective Gear"*
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 33. 1983.
Every Thursday in Shop 33 was "Clean Thursday". Not because the staff were particularly keen on a thorough wash — you had to shower every day regardless. But every Thursday the load was taken off the shop for three or four hours (the chlorine and carbon monoxide feeds to the chlorination furnace were shut down) and the gas ducts and traps were given a full clean-out. That Thursday in December 1983, though, the usual clean-out procedure ran into trouble. The night-shift supervisor's report noted that the sludge* in the air cooler*'s liquid seal* had crystallised and couldn't be cleared without taking the load off.
A team of three was put together, led by the shift supervisor. After fruitless attempts to clear the liquid seal with metal rods under a jet of water, it was decided to open the sludge-tank hatch carefully and drain off the excess sludge. The sludge was made up mainly of iron chlorides, molten at 180°C, which turned into a hard crust as they cooled. The sludge also reacted "explosively" with water, forming hydrochloric acid. So the operation carried a certain amount of risk. As section head, I decided to stay and keep an eye on the hatch being opened.
Gradually loosening the lower nuts on the hatch flange, we drained the excess sludge into the diluter and opened the tank hatch. At the level of the lower flange, we found a crust of set sludge. What now? Try to break through the crust mechanically? We'd have to get inside the vessel — but how? It was very dangerous: the crust might not bear a man's weight, and he could sink knee-deep into the sludge beneath. We settled on a safer option instead — washing the crust away with water. We fitted a hose to a long pipe, secured it, turned on the water, and immediately withdrew from the danger area. The violent reaction wasn't long in coming. Clouds of steam and a hiss of spraying hydrochloric acid burst from the open hatch! But we were safely out of the way. After a while the violent reaction died down, the gas cleared, and the wash water was running quietly out of the open hatch. All that remained was to wait for the water to wash the sludge crust away, after which we could safely get on with cleaning out the sludge tank's liquid seal. We went through into the next room to take our gas masks off and get our breath back. It was at that moment I was called to the telephone, and went off to my office to take the call.
Only a few minutes passed. Then there was a dull thud, followed by desperate shouting… The members of my team came running towards me, one after another, tearing off their gas masks and what was left of their clothes as they ran! They'd been drenched from head to foot in hot acid blown back out of the sludge tank! Straight into the shower — wash the acid off! Every second counted! An ambulance… hospital… all three with thermochemical burns covering more than fifty per cent of their body surface. All three at death's door. Then four long months in hospital, endless skin grafts and blood transfusions — blood that the whole shop gave regularly to keep them supplied… Thank God, all three of them pulled through!
They told us afterwards how it had happened. It had looked to them as though the water had already washed away the crust of set sludge and the violent reaction had stopped. The men decided to get on with cleaning the liquid seal while still running water under pressure through the hose. When it turned out that the crust hadn't washed through completely after all, they punched through it with the hose's metal nozzle. Underneath was a great deal of liquid sludge. The violent reaction started up again. The crust burst, and boiling acid erupted out of the hatch! The men only just had time to turn away and save their faces.
What happened hit me hard. But what could I actually have done, had I been there with them at that moment? Precious little, probably. Taken some of that hot acid on myself, perhaps...
"Safety rules are written in blood" is a saying everyone knows. And it is people who've lived through disaster who write them. Only not everyone follows those rules — even people who witnessed the tragedy with their own eyes break them.
After this accident we finally agreed that the shop should always keep a full set of special clothing on hand — so-called "chemical protective gear"*, providing full protection against thermal and chemical burns. This kit was signed over from shift to shift and kept in a store cupboard, whose key was held only by the shift supervisor.
Not long after the accident, I was coming on for a night shift, and Lobanov, the outgoing shift supervisor, was most insistent that I check the chemical protective gear was still in place. When I handed over the shift the next morning, I discovered that the store-cupboard window had been taken out and the chemical protective gear was gone. Stolen!...
It turned out there was nothing better for winter fishing than a set of "chemical protective gear"! It kept the warmth in and kept the water out! The thief, though, was never caught.
 
The Kerosinka*
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 33. 1983. 
Shop 33 didn't only make aluminium chloride*. There was another product, too: silicon tetrachloride (SiCl₄). It's widely used across industry — in making organosilicon compounds, for instance, and silicones themselves, which in turn find work in everything from cosmetics to cable manufacture. But this product has another property worth mentioning: on contact with moisture in the air, it throws up a "smokescreen" — a dense fog. Half a glass of the stuff — this clear liquid — spilled onto the floor of a work area is quite enough to hide not just the room itself but an entire production building in the thickest white fog imaginable!
The process for producing silicon tetrachloride* from the off-gases* of the silicon chloride line was developed in Caprolactam's own central works laboratory and remains unique to this day. Off-gases from the chlorination furnace, once the main product, aluminium chloride, had been recovered, were drawn through special vessels. Inside these, high-speed spinning agitator-sprayers created a fine aerosol of kerosene, which circulated through the apparatus. The kerosene absorbed silicon tetrachloride* until it became saturated, after which the silicon tetrachloride was separated out by distillation. After that the product was purified and concentrated on a rectification column*. The unit was housed in a separate building, added on to the chlorination section in the late 1970s.
The operators of "the Kerosinka"* made good use of its unique ability for throwing up an impenetrable "smokescreen" whenever they wanted to see off an unwelcome visitor — a fire inspector, a safety officer, an inspector from the District Mining Inspectorate*, or anyone else of that sort. Half a glass of product was quite enough: a dense white fog, billowing out through the doors and windows, put paid to any uninvited visitor's wish to set foot inside the Kerosinka at all. And it should be said that fog was far from harmless — it carried a heavy dose of hydrogen chloride (HCl), that is, hydrochloric acid, so you couldn't go into it without a gas mask.
In all my working life in this trade, I never once met an inspector wearing a gas mask. Our plant's safety engineer, Rinat Khabidullin — a widower, father of three, serving out his last year before retiring at fifty "for hazardous work" — did his best to avoid going into the shop. Why would he? He'd sometimes crack the door open a sliver and, pinching his nose and screwing his eyes shut, yell out in a thin voice, "You're vio-o-o-lating the ru-u-ules!!!" — then he'd dash back to the office to write up his report.
4 November 1983. A Friday, on the eve of the October Revolution holidays. Raw, damp autumn weather: a nasty drizzle, a north wind cutting right through you. Puddles everywhere, the air soaked with moisture. That day we had to load silicon tetrachloride into a railway tanker. We drew the tanker up to the loading point, coupled up the pipework — time to start the transfer. The finished product was kept in a fifty-cubic-metre tank next to the Kerosinka section.

The job looked simple enough: open the gate valve, switch on the pump, and watch the level in the tank. But this time it was nothing of the sort. The gate valve opened only halfway, then jammed. Nikolai the fitter came to lend a hand. We put our backs into it with a big rogatka* — a heavy lever-wrench for turning the handwheels on large valves and gate valves. Something cracked, and the gate-valve stem shot easily up to its top stop. We tried closing it again — no good.
"Fuck! We've broken it… Must have jammed the gate. We had it half open, though, didn't we — will that do?" the fitter asked hopefully. We switched the pump on. Still no product reaching it. Either the valve wasn't letting the product through, or the pipe between the tank and the pump was blocked. We decided to check. Carefully loosening the pipe fittings ahead of the valve, we confirmed our suspicion: the pipe was blocked. But the valve was broken too! Had the valve been in working order, we could simply have cleared the pipe straight through the open valve — a couple of litres spilling onto the ground would have been no great matter — then shut the valve, put the line back together, and got on with pumping…
But Nikolai was a reckless sort, and he'd come up with a different plan. He suggested replacing the broken valve with a new one.
"We ease the old valve off nice and slow — the line's blocked anyway — fit a new one, then poke the pipe clear. As soon as it sprays, we shut the valve and that's that — job fucking done!" Nikolai laid out his plan.
Fyodor, the operator — a young lad, only a year into working the Kerosinka — went along with his more experienced mate. Neither of them thought to report it to the shift supervisor; you could tell neither one fancied looking soft in front of old hand Nikolai.
"Go on then, Nikolai, but careful now!"
They took the broken valve off. Sure enough, the tank's fitting* was choked with a dense, curd-like mass of silica gel*: water must have got into the pipe at some point, and the silicon tetrachloride, reacting with it, had formed silicon oxide compounds — the silica gel itself.
The reckless plan very nearly worked. They began fitting the new valve. At some point they must have knocked the pipe, because the plug of silica gel shot straight out of the fitting like a cork out of a champagne bottle! Product came gushing out of the tank and straight into a puddle on the ground! Our heroes dropped the valve and bolted out of the enormous cloud of fog to the windward side.
It's hard to imagine the scale of the disaster. The fog was so dense that, even with your arm stretched out, you couldn't see your own fingers. Breathing in it was impossible too: the hydrogen chloride (HCl) in the aerosol fog burns the throat and lungs. By the time the gas-rescue squad* arrived, established the cause, and finally got the new valve fitted, a third of the tank — the best part of twenty cubic metres — had spilled onto the ground. Luckily, a strong wind was blowing away from the plant's main shops, out towards the river. The fog rolled over not just the southern part of the plant but also the nearby settlements of Babino, Igumnovo and Kolodkino. It reached the Oka and crept on towards Dzerzhinsk itself. River traffic came to a halt. It's hard to imagine what might have happened had the wind been blowing the other way — that side had process shops full of hazardous chemicals, the offices, the canteen, the medical unit, the railway, the main road — and any number of people who had never once put on a gas mask in their lives… Thank God nobody was seriously hurt. At most, there was a bit of coughing until the wind finally blew the fog away.
 
Queue Up, You Bastards!
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 31. 1986. 
Shop 31 was a kind of state within a state. It had its own fenced-off grounds and its own checkpoint inside the wider plant. This "double" security existed because Shop 31 produced DDT*, the main feedstock for which was ethyl alcohol. In the age of "mature stagnation", of chronic shortages and the campaign against drunkenness, our shop drew a keen and thoroughly unhealthy interest from lovers of spirits — and this despite the fact that the alcohol used in production was of technical, not drinking, grade. It was made by hydrolysing wood cellulose: a spirit with a sharp, thoroughly distinctive smell, which is why it was known colloquially as "suchok"*. There were always "craftsmen" who knew how to purify and deodorise* it using their own "folk" chemistry — though there were plenty who were happy to drink it "neat" as it was! On top of that, it served as a kind of currency, capable of buying all sorts of things, not excluding the goodwill of inspectors of every stripe.
I was given the unenviable job of running this shop. My superiors set me the task of eliminating any possibility of the alcohol being stolen, and putting a stop to drinking on the job. It was no simple task: the process scheme ran to hundreds of metres of pipework and dozens of vessels and pumps. To keep out unauthorised access, the plant used lockable, sealed grilles, and ran the pipework high up, with as few detachable joints as possible. But for a true lover of "suchok", there was no obstacle that couldn't be overcome!
The shop's engineering and technical staff* began each working day by reading the night supervisor's report and doing the rounds of the workstations — not least to check on the state of the alcohol pipework and equipment. We would sometimes turn up all manner of ingenious contraptions: holes drilled into the pipework with a fine bit and temporarily plugged, the covers taken off shut-off flanges, and plenty more besides.
Anyone caught at the checkpoint showing signs of drunkenness was investigated at once, and as a rule dismissed under Article 33 of the Labour Code† for a gross breach of workplace discipline. But a change of staff was no guarantee against a repeat of the same offence. Given how hazardous the work was, and that it ran in shifts, there was never much of a queue to take a dismissed man's place, and we were chronically short-staffed. "Better a crayfish than no fish at all", as the saying goes — we ended up taking on men who already had a bit of "form" in their records. Even so, within about a year we did manage to put a stop to our own shop's staff being caught at the checkpoint.
The plant-wide statistics, though, didn't improve to anything like the same degree. On the electric train running from Gorky to Dzerzhinsk, you could tell when you were approaching "Igumnovo" with your eyes shut, purely by the smell! A cloud of that unmistakable "suchok" smell would roll into the carriage with the Caprolactam men heading home from their shift… So the thefts were still going on.
At one meeting called to tackle this particular evil, the deputy director for personnel and regime* told a story from his own experience. One night he decided to inspect the alcohol-handling shops in person. On a dark autumn night he put on a set of work overalls, slipped a plastic bottle into his pocket, and turned up unannounced at Shop 31's checkpoint, reckoning the watchwomen wouldn't have time to warn anyone he was coming. He needed no special pass — they all knew him by sight. A smoking room was attached to the main production building, and it was in smoking rooms, as a rule, that all manner of "dark dealings" tended to happen. In the dim light spilling from the open door, he made out a knot of men in overalls, lined up more or less in a queue, many of them holding jars and plastic bottles of one sort or another. Something was clearly being decanted… He quietly took his place at the back of the queue. "Queue up, queue up, you bastards!" the man doling out the "suchok" from a glass bottle kept shouting. At last it was the deputy director's turn, and he silently held out his own bottle… The man pouring gave him a stern look from under the peak of his cap, and, evidently recognising a familiar face, barked:
"Fuck off! I've already poured you one!"
 
Zmey Gorynych
"Korund" plant. 1980.
I only learned about "suchok"* later, in 1982, at "Caprolactam", in Shop 33. But I'd already encountered "oshparka"* at "Korund", in the diisocyanate shop — though not in person, so to speak, but through intermediaries: the operators of Department 95. At the time I was an evening student at the chemical-engineering faculty, working as a solution-preparation operator in a different department of the same shop. We shared a changing room, our lockers standing side by side, so we'd chat at shift changeover and swap factory tales. My locker-neighbour was Zmey — an operator from Department 95, pushing fifty, short and lean, wrinkled, wearing black horn-rimmed glasses. I never did learn his real name. He introduced himself simply and with some pride:
"Gorynych. Zmey, for short."
His skin, as it happened, was a sort of yellowish-green, and between that and the horn-rimmed glasses, he really did look rather like the boa constrictor out of the cartoon.† He'd already worked in that shop for some ten years, and it turned out, as I later found, that he didn't just work there — he lived there. We worked different shifts in different departments, but we always ran into each other in the changing room. He was forever rummaging in his locker, which held, alongside his overalls, an almost endless hoard of tools: drills and taps, files and needle files, sandpaper and whetstones, metal blanks, pieces of coloured plastic… you name it, it was probably in there. He could knock up any key you liked, mend any part going. But his great love, the thing he did best of all, was making knives! And what knives they were! Some special "spring" steel, razor-sharp, with composite handles, all manner of shapes. Zmey polished his knives to a mirror shine — good enough for a museum! He was always glad to take an order from a mate, and his going rate wasn't steep: one flask of oshparka. Not that he insisted on it — people just brought it of their own accord.
He was also an unbeatable hand at dominoes. Playing "goat"† against Zmey was a lost cause from the start. If anyone ever won against him, it was a genuine sensation in the shop! Then Zmey, every inch the dragon he was named for, would spit out streams of the choicest language at his opponents — language that promptly went straight to the top of the local folklore charts — and demand satisfaction from whoever had beaten him… who would, in the end, agree to another round, and lose it just the same, without fail. Had there been a world domino championship going, Zmey would surely have taken the title.
"Listen, Zmey, you work a different shift to me, yet somehow you're always around. Don't you ever go home at all?" I asked him once.
"I do, but not often. What would I do there, anyway? My wife's dead, I've got no kids, and the neighbours are a right pack of swine… Whereas here, in the shop — that's where my mates are. We'll get a game of dominoes going, I'll fix up a bit of this and that in the fitters' shop, get hold of some oshparka and have a nip when I'm off shift. Fill up at the canteen on my special ration ticket, grab something extra to go with it. Doze an hour in the changing room, then back to the dominoes… A week goes by like that before you know it."
"What's this 'oshparka', then?"
"Ah, you student! You'll have heard of C₂H₅OH, I dare say — well, our oshparka is something else!"
That was the first I ever heard of oshparka. It turned out to be absolute ethyl alcohol — and not 96 per cent, like medicinal spirit, say, but 99.98 per cent. The remaining 0.02 per cent was benzene, used to dry the alcohol out. Benzene is highly toxic — it's not for nothing that it's known as a "blood poison". In Department 95 they used oshparka as feedstock for producing diethyl ether, an excellent solvent. And people would "get scalded" whenever they managed to lay their hands on some.
Zmey didn't go on working much longer after our conversation. He went completely green, fell ill, and died… They said it was cirrhosis of the liver. What can you say to that? One phrase says it all: "blood poison". A shame — a craftsman like that, lost for good.
 
Eagle
"Caprolactam" plant. 1985.
Eagle worked in the vinyl chloride unit as the duty fitter. Few people knew his first name or surname — perhaps only the shop's management and the personnel department. Despite that, Eagle was a legend across the whole plant. His exploits were a regular topic in the smoking rooms. Nobody could say for certain now how the nickname first stuck. Some said it was because he had a matching tattoo on his chest, a memento of a past prison term. Others reckoned his surname was Orlov.† Still others put it down to his independence and reckless daring. Whenever there was an accident on site and someone had to climb into a piece of process equipment or down a shaft in a hose-fed gas mask, risking his life, Eagle was the man for the job — irreplaceable.
He was a short fellow of about forty, single, with every bad habit going: a foul mouth, a drunk, an absentee, and a dreadful slob into the bargain. On top of all that, he always reeked of stale "suchok" and something else that didn't bear thinking about too closely. And yet he was never remotely embarrassed, and behaved just as independently around senior management.
Once, after an accident in which our Eagle had distinguished himself yet again, the plant manager dropped into the smoking room where the emergency crew was resting, and asked, half-joking, in a matey sort of way:
"Eagle, you're a good man and all that, but why are you always so filthy and stinking?"
To which he, without a moment's hesitation, replied:
"Well, it's like this, boss. I'm a short bloke, see, and my head grew up too close to my arse… Hence the smell!"
That was the sort of "tearaway" he was. People laughed at him, and hauled him up before the workers' disciplinary committee for drinking on the job and for being caught at the checkpoint, but nobody ever sacked him. He was simply too much of a character to lose. Here's one of his "exploits".
It happened on the night of 7 November.† Eagle was due to start a night shift. During the day, first at the parade and then in the close company of friends, he'd had a proper skinful. Naturally enough, by evening the powerful "bouquet" hadn't had time to wear off yet. As luck would have it, the watchwoman on duty at the checkpoint that night was a particularly awkward customer, not to be talked round by any amount of joking — especially since it hadn't even been a week since Eagle's last arrest at the checkpoint for "the smell" and yet another "Chinese warning".† Eagle decided not to tempt fate and climb over the fence instead of going through the checkpoint. He knew a dark spot he'd already used for this manoeuvre more than once.
The trouble was, he hadn't reckoned on extra security being posted for the holiday, with the guards required to patrol the inner perimeter. Except for the guard commanders, the watch team was made up entirely of women, mostly of pensionable age. They were meant to patrol carrying carbines, though they could hardly have used them; the rifles did more for their own nerves than for anyone's protection.
That night, Maria Timofeyevna was on patrol for the very first time. She'd recently retired and taken the watchwoman's job to earn a bit extra. And wouldn't you know it, she happened to draw the very darkest, remotest stretch of the perimeter. Frightening work. Whether it was nerves or something she'd eaten at the holiday table, Maria Timofeyevna was suddenly taken short right there on her post. What was she to do? She leaned her rifle against the fence and crouched down in a dark corner… Little did she know that this particular dark corner was the very one Eagle had picked out for his manoeuvre.
Our hero came over the fence straight down on top of the watchwoman, like an eagle swooping on a rabbit. Timofeyevna let out a scream and fainted clean away… Another man would have taken advantage of the situation and made himself scarce as fast as he could. Not Eagle. He hoisted the watchwoman onto his shoulder, grabbed her carbine as well, and hauled her off to the guardroom! While her fellow watchwomen were bringing her round with smelling salts, Eagle quietly slipped away to his shop.
He was found out, of course — too well-known a face to hide — and questioned about the whole business. What tale he spun them, nobody knows, but for once in his life, he wasn't punished for his "noble deed".
 
A Cure for Athlete's Foot
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 31. 1986.
An annual major overhaul was standard practice at Shop 31. The corrosive environment there was so harsh that production had to be shut down for a month every year, to replace pipework and repair vessels, ventilation and other equipment. The shop's own staff couldn't possibly manage such a huge volume of work on their own, so specialist installation crews were brought in. Every production building, on every floor, was full of fitters, electricians, instrumentation men*, carpenters, painters, plasterers — you name it, they were all there! It was all hands on deck: everything had to be finished in a short time.
Shop 31 made DDT, the "death to vermin" insecticide, one of the most effective means of killing insects. Neither the product itself nor its raw materials were particularly good for human health, but what really worried the visiting crews was "suchok" — the ethyl alcohol produced by hydrolysing wood cellulose.
Among the workers of "the Muppets"† — as the staff of the VNKhM* contracting firm were jokingly nicknamed, for their do-anything talents — there were more than a few fans of this particular "beverage". Once, right in the thick of the overhaul, Vadim Kushnir, the fitters' foreman in my shop, burst into my office. Vadim was a legend in his own right: over two metres tall and a good hundred and fifty kilos, a true master of the fitter's trade, steeped in "installation folklore", and rightly respected by everyone in the shop. Normally calm and dryly humorous, he was, on this occasion, thoroughly worked up and furious. Waving his enormous hands about, spraying spit, drawing on the entire arsenal of "installation folklore" and leaping from one thought to the next, he tried to lay out just what had so outraged him:
"Boss, kick the fuckers out, they've got a bloody nerve!! Not a scrap of use to anyone at work, just sniffing round for spirit the whole time — I'll fucking rip their heads off!! They've drunk every last drop of my 'suchok'!"
"Calm down, Vadim, and tell me properly — what 'suchok' are you talking about? You don't even drink. And whose head are you planning on tearing off, exactly?"
Vadim sat down at my desk and drank half a carafe of soda water, and told me the following story. During the lunch break he'd gone to the changing room to get out of his work clothes, as it had been a hot day and his clothes were soaked through with sweat. His locker was lying in the gangway, surrounded by a puddle of spilled "suchok", with a filthy basin lying nearby… He picked the locker up, put it back in place, unlocked it with his own key, and discovered, to his horror, that the plastic bag in which he always kept a couple of litres of spirit was empty. Vadim immediately understood what had happened. The drinkers among the Muppets had been looking around for some free "suchok" to help themselves to, and one of the fitters on Vadim's crew had decided to play a trick on them:
"Third locker on the left in the men's changing room — there's always some in there!"
"So how did you come to have spirit in your locker in the first place? What were you keeping it there for? That's dangerous, surely."
"I used to rinse my feet in it after a shower! Excellent protection against athlete's foot."
 
Hosepipe Hypertension
"Orgsteklo" plant. 1980.
The men of the plant's gas-rescue squad* worked to a rather convenient schedule: a full day on duty, then three days off. Hazard pay came at the top rate, too, and there was always time left over for a bit of moonlighting. Some men re-roofed houses, others tended their vegetable plots. All told, it was a job for the young and the enterprising.
Stepan was one of them. He lived out in the Igumnovo settlement and kept his own smallholding — a vegetable garden, livestock, chickens… Men like him were known at the plant as "kurkuli"† ["tightwads"] — probably because, as a rule, they had a peasant's stinginess in them.
Stepan was pushing forty, and had already spent close to ten years with the gas-rescue squad. In that time he'd thoroughly explored every back lot in every shop, and every gap in the perimeter fence, and had made friends with the storekeepers, the lorry drivers and the railwaymen besides. Anything that was "lying around loose" and might come in useful on the smallholding, Stepan made a mental note of. There were plenty of different ways to get something useful off the plant, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. You could, for instance, lob something not too heavy over the fence — reasonably safe, but then again, next to impossible to find again afterwards: by the time you'd got through the checkpoint and made your way round to where you'd thrown it, someone else would already have picked it up. Or you could come to an arrangement with a driver or a railwayman to smuggle the item off the plant for you unnoticed — but drivers and railwaymen tended to want paying for services like that. All things considered, the best method was to carry it out through the checkpoint on your own person, provided, of course, that you hid it well.
One day Stepan got his hands on a coil of rubber hose, about twenty-five metres of it — exactly what he needed, both in length and diameter. You can always use a length of hose in a vegetable garden, and his old ones had long since worn through. The "business plan" didn't take long to draw up. Stepan decided to wind the hose round his body, and asked his partner Valerka to hold the end taut while he wound.
Stepan had never exactly been a slim man to begin with, and long years in the gas-rescue squad had only made him broader.
"Pull your gut in, Stepan. Come on, pull it tighter, tighter!"
Within a couple of minutes Stepan had turned into a knight in armour. He couldn't bend, couldn't breathe. His cheeks puffed out, his face turned purple. Stepan could barely draw breath, but he held firm:
"Let's go!"
His faithful partner laced up his boots for him, did up his coat, and jammed his hat on his head.
"Let's go. Don't worry, I'm right here with you!"
It was no short walk to the checkpoint — the best part of ten minutes. They made it through the first two hundred metres or so, with difficulty. After that it got worse. Stepan's face turned blue, and he wheezed:
"That's it… Can't go on. Unwind me!"
By this time, though, the two friends had struggled as far as the main road. The checkpoint was already in sight, and people were hurrying towards the exit.
"Where am I supposed to unwind you here — in front of everyone? Hold on!"
By the time they reached the checkpoint building, Stepan was in a very bad way. Valerka went up to the turnstile first and appealed urgently to the watchwoman:
"Where's your telephone? Ring the medical unit. My mate here's in a terrible state!"
"It's all right, Valerka, don't bother," Stepan wheezed. "I'll somehow manage to stagger over to the medical unit myself."
"What's wrong with him? He's not drunk, is he?" the watchwoman asked suspiciously.
"Come off it! Can't you see the man's got hypertension?!"
Stepan squeezed himself through the turnstile, remembering to breathe heavily in the watchwoman's direction, just to put her mind at ease.
Success. Valerka unwound Stepan in the little square behind the checkpoint. He got his breath back on a bench, coiled the hose up, and set off for the bus stop, a happy man.
 
Barter
"Orgsteklo" plant. 1973.
In my first year of work, in the summer of 1973, I bought holiday vouchers for myself and my friends at the plant's tourist camp in the Zhelnino settlement. In those days every chemical plant had its own tourist camp on the banks of the Oka, and for a rouble and a half a day, including full board, any worker could spend the weekend there. The young people from the plant would gather in groups in cosy plywood cabins set among the oak trees. Daytimes were spent swimming at the beach; evenings brought dancing and songs to a guitar.
At one of the dances I met a girl called Lyuda. She worked as a nurse in the medical unit's dental surgery — a pretty girl with a great mane of chestnut hair. We danced and larked about with the whole gang. Romance, in a word. I told her I worked in the instrumentation and controls shop*, and she told me all sorts of funny stories from her work at the dentist's. She'd somehow got wind that our instrumentation shop used hydrogen peroxide — an excellent bleaching agent for hair — and she'd long dreamed of turning herself into a blonde. It was fashionable at the time, and there was no hair dye to be had in the shops. Lyuda turned out to be a practical sort of girl, and proposed a barter: half a litre of peroxide for half a litre of medicinal spirit. How could I possibly refuse? Not that I had the slightest use for the spirit myself, but it was a chance to keep seeing her!
The very next day I asked the lads to fill a flask with peroxide for me, and promised to bring it back full of spirit. Lyuda and I fixed a date. During my lunch break I smuggled the long-awaited "present" out through the checkpoint. Our next date was set for a couple of days later, when I was to get the flask back with something different inside it. She was presumably hoping to dazzle me with her new "blonde" look; for my part, it was simply one more excuse to see her. A couple of days later I rang the medical unit, but for some reason she didn't come to the phone. I assumed she must be busy, and decided to drop in without an invitation.
There was a queue outside the dentist's surgery. I sat myself down modestly on a chair and waited. At last the surgery door opened, and a nurse came out into the corridor in a white coat and cap. I didn't recognise her at first. She, though, spotted me at once, stopped, and beckoned me over with a nod. We moved off to the window together, and, without a word, she pulled off her white cap…
Her hair was a pale green!... Without a word she took hold of her fringe in one hand and, opening her hand right in front of my nose, showed me a clump of ragged green hair.
"What the hell did you bring me?!"
"You asked for peroxide…"
"What concentration?!!"
"I don't know — it's pure peroxide! Maybe ninety per cent or more."
"They told me it shouldn't be more than thirty… Well? How do you find me now?"
"Like a nuclear war. Sorry."
She put her cap back on without another word and went back into the surgery. We never saw each other again.
 
A Rocket for the 8th of March
"Caprolactam" plant, Shop 33. 1985.
The 7th of March, a Thursday, was a short working day ahead of a long weekend — you could get away home early for once. The first shift finished at half past two, with the second-shift workers arriving together on the electric train. The shop's engineering and technical staff* gathered in the superintendent's office to draw up orders for each shift. No small matter — three whole days without anyone keeping an eye on the place!
We'd already grown used to the idea that all sorts of mishaps tend to happen at weekends, and generally at night, with the duty controller sending out a flying squad to collect the repair crew and engineering staff — but you always want to believe things will turn out for the best. And on this particular day, on the eve of the holiday, it seemed as if nothing could possibly spoil the coming weekend.
At around three in the afternoon there was a tremendous bang, as if some enormous balloon had burst, followed by the crash of some huge object hitting the ground. The walls shook, and the windows in the office shattered with a ringing crash. Instinctively covering our heads with our hands, we froze for a few seconds in shock. Someone cried out:
"Fucking hell! Lads, tell me that's not ours?!"
We shot outside like bullets. Right there on the road leading to our amenities building, some twenty metres from the fence around Shop 31, lay a mangled fifty-cubic-metre tanker, wreathed in flame, with some liquid spilled around it and burning.
How on earth had a thing that size managed to fly over the fence?! And on the other side of Shop 31's fence, a proper blaze was raging. People poured out of the neighbouring buildings to gawp at the spectacle. Someone had already called the fire brigade, and their engines were already coming into view down the road. We had no idea how we could help, and were milling about uselessly along the fence line with the rest of the crowd of onlookers, until the plant's production manager, Chelyshev, stopped us in our tracks:
"Stop!!! Everybody back! Get as far away as you possibly can. There are three more tanks just like that one, full of chlorobenzene*, still in that fire! They could go up any minute!"
At that, people finally grasped the real danger, and began scattering from the scene. Having run, by my own reckoning, to a safe distance, I looked back and was staggered by what I saw. Several powerful jets of water were already fighting to beat down the flames, but at least one tank was still ablaze. And at the very moment everyone stood frozen, braced for the explosion, a fireman climbed straight up onto that burning tank and put the fire out with a jet from his hose. A genuine hero — he'd averted a catastrophe.
But what had actually happened in Shop 31? What lay behind this terrifying incident?
That morning, the morning shift had been due to transfer chlorobenzene from a railway tanker into one of Shop 31's empty storage tanks. They'd assembled the line, hooked up the pump, and the transfer had begun. This procedure normally took three to four hours, but this time it was running slower than usual. The first shift was already drawing to a close; the women in the shop had already been congratulated on the holiday, and everyone had had their tea and sweets. Time to start getting ready for home. The transport shop's dispatcher was eager to collect the empty tanker, only to find that it hadn't emptied at all. They began hunting for the cause. First they suspected the pump, but the discharge pressure was perfectly normal. Then they suspected a blocked line or the gate valves… and finally realised that the vent* on the receiving tank must be blocked or frozen. The duty fitter climbed up onto the tank to loosen the flange on the vent*, using ordinary spanners that were to hand, rather than the special non-sparking ones — who had time to run to the workshop for those? Everyone wanted to get off home!
According to the official version the investigation settled on, excess pressure had built up in the tank because the vent line was blocked, and a spark may well have been struck while the vent line was being stripped down with the wrong tool for the job.
The next day I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who told me how, the previous evening, he'd been riding the tram past "Caprolactam" into town and had seen, through the window, a fireball suddenly go soaring up beyond the plant fence. He and his mate had joked: "Looks like the Caprolactam lads have launched themselves a rocket into space…"
As it turned out, they really had — "cosmonaut" and all.
 
Glossary
Air cooler (vozdushny kholodilnik) — process equipment for condensing vapours. It is cooled by air.
Aluminium chloride (khloristy alyuminiy, AlCl₃) — a chemical substance. Under normal conditions, it is a finely divided white or slightly yellowish powder. It reacts vigorously with atmospheric moisture, releasing hydrogen chloride (HCl), and burns the mucous membranes if inhaled.
Blower (gazoduvka) — a pump for moving gases.
Carbon monoxide (ugarny gaz, CO) — a colourless, odourless gas. Explosive when mixed with air. Does not support respiration. Deadly if inhaled.
Chemical protective gear (khimzashchita) — a set of special clothing, fully insulating the body and protecting against thermal and chemical burns.
Chlorobenzene (khlorbenzol) — an organic solvent; a liquid, and a "blood poison", capable of penetrating into the bloodstream through the skin.
Condenser (kondensator) — here, an apparatus for condensing aluminium chloride from the gas phase into a solid.
DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) — a very effective insecticide, i.e. a substance used against insects. Insoluble in water, so that once sprayed over fields, forests or marshland it remains on the surface for a long time — which is also its great drawback: once it enters the soil and waterways, it goes on exerting its poisonous effects for years afterwards. Popular magazines and environmentalists' statements reported high concentrations of DDT not only in inland waters but along ocean coastlines; one publication noted that traces of it had even been found in the livers of dolphins. Reports like these caused a worldwide stir, and eventually led to a ban on DDT production.
Deodorise (dezodorirovat) — to remove an odour.
District Mining Inspectorate (RGTI, rayonnaya gorno-tekhnicheskaya inspektsiya) — a regional body responsible for inspecting mining and mining-related industrial operations.
Drums (barabany) — special barrels for accumulating product.
Engineering and technical staff (ITR, inzhenerno-tekhnicheskiye rabotniki) — a shop's engineers, supervisors and other technical staff, as distinct from its operators and fitters.
Fitting (shtutser) — a pipe fitting for connecting pipework, vessels, valves and other components.
Gas-rescue squad (gazospasalka) — a dedicated unit tasked with rescuing people in the event of serious gas contamination.
Gasholder (gazgolder, also tank-gazgolder) — a large-volume vessel for storing gas.
Hopcalite filter (gopkolitovy filtr) — a special filter, screwed on in addition to an ordinary chlorine filter, for absorbing carbon monoxide.
Hydraulic-transport flume (lotok gidrotransporta) — a channel using a powerful jet of water to carry material along.
Injector (inzhektor) — a device for creating rarefaction, or vacuum.
Instrumentation and Controls (KIPiA, kontrolno-izmeritelnye pribory i avtomatika) — the shop responsible for a plant's measuring instruments and automation systems.
Jacket (rubashka) — the outer casing of a vessel, into which a heating or cooling medium is fed.
Kaolin briquettes (kaolinovye briketa) — briquettes made from kaolin, a white clay containing aluminium oxide.
"Kerosinka" (lit. "the little kerosene stove") — the nickname for the unit recovering silicon tetrachloride from off-gases by circulating kerosene through it, after the humble household kerosene stove or burner many Soviet kitchens relied on before, and sometimes alongside, gas and electric rings.
Khalkhin Gol — a localised armed conflict in 1939 near the Khalkhin Gol river, between the USSR and Mongolia on one side and Japan on the other.
Liquid seal (gidrozatvor) — a device using a liquid barrier to keep a product from contacting the air.
LTP (lechebno-trudovoy profilaktoriy, "treatment-and-labour facility") — in the USSR, a form of compulsory institutional treatment for drug addiction and alcoholism.
"Monkey" (martyshka) — shop-floor slang for a gas mask.
Off-gases (abgazy) — gases produced during the manufacturing process; some are recycled, while the rest are stripped of harmful impurities before being released into the atmosphere. Off-gas line (abgaznaya liniya) — the pipework carrying them.
"Oshparka" (lit. "the scalder") — absolute, water-free ethyl alcohol.
Phosgene (fosgen, COCl₂) — a highly toxic gas, historically used as a chemical-warfare agent and, in this industry, as a chemical feedstock. A gas under normal conditions; it becomes a liquid below 8°C.
"Pomoyka" (lit. "slop bin" or "midden") — a whitewashed communal bin structure serving a courtyard of flats, where households tipped food and kitchen waste; regularly dusted with bleaching powder to control the smell.
Product line (produktovaya liniya) — pipework for transporting the finished product.
Pump lines (nasosnye linii) — the pipework around a pump.
Rectification column (rektifikatsionnaya kolonna) — a column-type apparatus for the fine purification of liquids from impurities.
Reflux (flegma) — the portion of distillate returned to the first tray of a rectification column.
Regime (rezhim) — in Soviet administrative usage, the internal system of security, access control and pass control at an enterprise; a "deputy director for personnel and regime" oversaw staffing together with this security and access-control function.
Rogatka (lit. "slingshot") — a heavy lever-wrench used for turning the handwheels on large industrial valves and gate valves.
Safety Meeting (TB, tekhnika bezopasnosti) — a formal meeting on occupational safety.
Silica gel (silikagel) — a gel-like substance (mSiO₂·nH₂O), formed by the reaction of silicon tetrachloride with water. Dried silica gel is used to absorb moisture; on contact with water it "fumes" heavily.
Silicon tetrachloride (tetrakhlorid kremniya / chetyryokhkhloristy kremniy, SiCl₄) — under normal conditions, a colourless or slightly yellowish liquid.
Sludge (shlam) — here, a fused mass of metal chlorides, chiefly those of iron and titanium.
Steam distribution room (parouzel) — a room for distributing steam.
"Suchok" (lit. "little knot", as in a knot of wood) — raw ethyl alcohol produced by hydrolysing wood cellulose, with a sharp, distinctive smell.
Synthesis reactor (reaktor sinteza) — a vessel for carrying out a chemical reaction.
TDI and HDI (diaminy TDI i GMD) — toluene diisocyanate and hexamethylene diisocyanate. Solid substances, used molten at 120–140°C. [The original groups these under the shop-floor label "diamines", though both are, more precisely, diisocyanates made from the corresponding diamines; that everyday usage is kept here as in the source.]
Toluenediamine, TDA (tolluilendiamin) — a raw material used in producing TDI. Causes eczema and asthma, affects the liver, and destroys red blood cells. This entry has been reconstructed from the English-language exhibition materials previously published alongside this book — see "A Note on This Translation".
Traps (lovushki) — here, vessels for catching and collecting aluminium chloride.
Vent (vozdushka) — a pipeline connecting a piece of equipment to the atmosphere, used to relieve excess pressure.
VNKhM (Volganeftekhimmontazh) — literally "Volga Oil-and-Chemical-Industry Installation [Company]": a construction and erection contractor.
 
Translator's Notes
Preface — "the elimination of political illiteracy" was a stock phrase from Soviet ideological education campaigns; it is quoted here for ironic effect, the newspaper in question having served a rather more prosaic purpose than the one that slogan had in mind.
An Accident — Vremya ("Time") was the Soviet Union's flagship nightly news programme. Its closing theme, adapted from a tune by the French composer André Popp, was familiar to every household as the cue that the evening — and, for a night-shift worker, freedom — was over.
Goat — "the old tale of the Enormous Turnip" is a well-known Russian folk tale, also published in English under that title: a chain of family and animals, each pulling the one before, hauls an impossibly large turnip out of the ground.
Queue Up, You Bastards! — Article 33 of the Soviet Labour Code covered dismissal for a single, gross breach of workplace discipline (as opposed to persistent minor infractions), and drunkenness on site was treated as exactly that.
Zmey Gorynych — Zmey Gorynych is the fire-breathing, three-headed dragon of Russian folklore; "zmey" on its own simply means "serpent" or "snake", which is the joke of the old operator's self-introduction. The "boa constrictor out of the cartoon" is a nod to a specific, much-loved character — bespectacled, laconic and endlessly exasperated — from the Soviet animated series 38 Parrots. And "goat" here is not the furnace blockage described earlier in the book (see Glossary) but the domino game nicknamed kozyol, "goat", still one of Russia's most popular pub-table games — the author is knowingly recycling the same word for a second, unrelated piece of shop-floor slang.
A Cure for Athlete's Foot — "the Muppets" renders multfilm, literally "the cartoon", the crew's nickname punning on their being "multi-functional" (multifunktsionalny); "Muppets" keeps both the "multi-" echo and the fond, faintly mocking tone of the original joke.
Hosepipe Hypertension — "kurkuli" (singular kurkul) is old rural slang for a stingy, hoarding smallholder — a peasant too well-off, and too tight-fisted, for his neighbours' liking.
Eagle — this chapter's nickname renders the Russian Orel ("eagle"); the theory that his surname was "simply Orlov" trades on the fact that Orlov, a common Russian surname, itself derives from orel. "The night before the 8th of November" was the eve of the anniversary of the October Revolution, one of the major holidays of the Soviet calendar (the Bolsheviks seized power in what the pre-revolutionary Julian calendar recorded as October, but which fell in November once the Soviet government adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918 — hence an "October" revolution marked every November). "Last Chinese warning" was a well-worn Soviet-era idiom for an empty threat, one repeated so often it lost all force — originally a joke about Beijing's toothless diplomatic protests during Cold War stand-offs with the United States.
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