I was a new cub reporter and had been given the assignment of photographing a "good fellow". When I entered the excavator plant in Voronezh I really did not know where to begin.
We sat down on a length of rail. The middle-aged foreman lit a cigarette and was silent. He raised his head now and then to examine the shop, as if this were the first time he had ever seen the huge place.
The excavator assembly shop had a fascinating life of its own. A pneumatic hammer rattled away like a machine-gun in a far corner. The clutching hand of the crane transported huge cogwheels, shafts that had not yet turned dark and black ingots from one end of the shop to the other.
The foreman seemed to have forgotten all about me, but I could see he was thinking hard. "I'm trying to decide which of the boys to recommend. There's quite a few. You must have heard about them assemblying an excavator in their spare time as their contribution to the Youth Festival. Nearly every one of them does more than his quota. Nikolai Sitnikov has-been doing over two hundred per cent every day. He's probably the one you'll want to photograph."
I confessed that Sitnikov's name had been mentioned at the Komsomol Committee.
"Come on, I'll introduce you. Wait a minute, though. I want to have a few words with this fellow. Come over here, Victor," he said to a thin youth dressed in clean blue overalls. "Why'd you stay on till the end of the shift again?"
I could see they'd been over this ground before.
"You know it's against the rules! Wait till I write and tell your mother. He's not eighteen yet," the foreman said to me when the boy went off to put his tools away," and that means he's supposed to work a short day. If I don't keep an eye on him he stays on the full eight-hour shift, and sometimes even ten. I keep telling him he's not fully grown and he'll ruin his health. After all, there's a reason why there's a law. You know, after what happened once I said to myself: 'I wish I had a son like that.' There's not much to say about him. He graduated from a trade school last year. His mother has seven children. They lost their father. Anyway, he'd been here for about four months, and I was going home after a Party meeting late one evening. I saw a boy pleading with the watchman at the entrance. He was saying, 'Let me in! It's important. I work here. I forgot my pass.' It was Victor. 'What are you doing here in the middle of the night?' I said. And the first thing he said was, 'Was there an accident?' After he explained what he meant, we raced right over to the shop.
"Victor had gone to bed, but he couldn't fall asleep. He remembered seeing two melted bits of steel falling under the rollers while the welder was working on them. He didn't say anything at the time, thinking that the welder knew his job and would brush them away. But what if he didn't? What if he was the only one who saw them fall? When they started testing the excavator and turned the cab there'd be an accident. He dressed in a flash and ran clear across town in bitter frost".
We were working on a rush order for Czechoslovakia at the time, and an excavator was to be tested that night. We were just in time.
"Another fellow might have decided it wasn't his team's work and it wasn't his fault, so why bother? But Victor came running. It's good to work with fellows like him. Oh, yes, you were going to take pictures. Who should I call? Victor? Well, you'll have to hurry. There he is, by the door, ready to leave."