Peter Dmitrievich Grushin - Later Career

Pyotr Dmitrievich Grushin was one of the most famous, talented and most secret designers of aviation and rocket technology in the USSR, who has done an incredible amount to preserve the safety of Soviet skies and those of 60 countries of the world. Over Vietnam, Grushin’s missiles shot down 1,500 American aircraft, which shaped the end of the war. His missiles shot down an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft near Sverdlovsk and over Yugoslavia, the F-117 stealth plane. His missiles for air defense systems - S-200 and anti-aircraft missiles for S-300 received high recognition. Grushin life is a chronicle of the creative and heroic path of rocket engineers and aviators of the USSR.

In the 1950s, Grushin, who had dreamed of creating airplanes all his life, had to deal with the very opposite - the development of anti-aircraft guided missiles designed to destroy aircraft. World War II demonstrated the enormous combat power of aviation. The fight against aircraft required the use of qualitatively new means, including guided missiles. At the same time, work began on their creation in Germany, the United States, and several other countries. However, the first results were very modest, and therefore Grushin was practically at the origins of the creation of this type of weapon of the 20th century - one of the most difficult.

In June 1951, Grushin was appointed the first deputy of S.A. Lavochkin. At that time, Lavochkin Design Bureau was engaged in an extremely difficult and responsible business: it created a missile for the first Russian anti-aircraft missile system S-25 Berkut, intended for the defense of Moscow. The work was conducted at a pace, almost higher than in the war years. Stalin, who personally set the task in the summer of 1950, demanded that "an air defense missile be made in a year." And the rocket appeared exactly at this time. Her tests began. However, the creators of its guidance and control system from KB-1 - the head organization of the C-25 - took much longer. The problems confronting KB-1 turned out to be of a qualitatively different level and required, as a matter of fact, the creation of a practically new industry. Pyotr Grushin received his latest and last appointment at the end of 1953. The Special Design Office No. 2 (later - MKB Fakel) became a new place of work. Position: Chief Designer - Head of Design Bureau. The place allocated to the new organization on the outskirts of Khimki near Moscow was well known to Grushin. Here, even before the war, his Oktyabrenok flew; here, he himself learned to fly at the aerospace club of the Moscow Aviation Institute.

The new appointment also had a downside - from now on it practically disappeared from the field of vision of aviation specialists and aviation experts. The case entrusted to Grushin required the adoption of precisely such measures of secrecy. Even his name became one of the biggest secrets of the country and was no longer associated with the success of its science and technology. Up to the end of the 1980s, information about Grushin in encyclopedias and dictionaries ended with the words that "he then worked independently and with great success."

Creating the collective of his design bureau, Grushin began, of course, not from virgin lands. It was based on missile specialists from the Moscow KB-1, which became the main “customer” of the new KB missiles, as well as the workers of the OKB-293, M.R. Bisnovat, located on this Khimki area before the winter of 1953 in the creation of rockets in the new design bureau, there were many already well-known designers, engineers, and production organizers, such as D. L. Tomashevich, N. G. Zyrin, E. I. Kinetsky, V. N. Yelagin, G. E. Bolotov . There were many such as EI Afanasyev, GF Bonzik, whose talents and abilities were fully revealed in the work here. And every year young specialists came to a top secret organization, graduating from the best institutes of the country, where in those years, rocket engineers were trained. Literally from the first day of work, OKB-2 received priority in their choice, therefore, only the best and most talented came here. Over time, many young specialists became associates of their teacher and leader. Like PDD Grushin, they completely gave themselves to the assigned work. It was in the Grushinskaya "school" that the future chief designer, V.V. Kolyaskin, and the general designer, VG Svetlov, began their path in rocket production.

The “breakdown of the pen” for OKB-2 was the development of a 1D rocket for the S-75 mobile anti-aircraft missile system created in KB-1. These missiles eventually became a sort of hallmark of the Grushin Design Bureau. The highest efficiency of rockets at their minimum cost and ease of operation; reasonable combination of original solutions with already well-established; the implementation of manufacturing technologies based on the most popular, mastered construction materials and high-performance methods for their processing — all this predetermined the future run-up of the Grushin missiles.

The first OKB-2 anti-aircraft missile was put into service in December 1957. A year later, its creators received high awards: Grushin was awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labor, OKB-2 was awarded the Order of Lenin, dozens of employees of the enterprise received orders and medals. The leaders of the country N.S. Khrushchev and L.I.Brezhnev came to the company especially for the presentation of awards on December 30, 1958.

The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft of the Grushinsky rockets had to be confronted more than once - in the sky over Cuba, China, and Vietnam. The victory, as a rule, remained for the rocket.

But in Vietnam, they had a chance to encounter not only U-2. The war that began there in the summer of 1964, according to the plan of overseas strategists, was to be another triumph of American weapons, and above all - aviation. The American pilots were assigned the task of “bombing the Vietnamese into the Stone Age”. And it was successfully carried out, in any case, until Soviet anti-aircraft missiles appeared on Vietnamese soil. Already the first C-75 bout with the American Phantoms, held on July 24, 1965, marked the beginning of an unprecedented military competition. The competition, the main result of which was not only thousands of downed American aircraft, but also the fact that the Americans were forced to abandon the massive bombardment of Vietnam and sit at the negotiating table.

By the end of that war, a new S-125 missile system appeared on Vietnamese land, also equipped with missiles made at the Grushin Design Bureau. Distinguished by their small size and weight, they became not only part of ground-based air defense systems, but also one of the main means of naval anti-aircraft defense. Grushin always sought to expand the circle of customers for their missiles. Creating any of the missiles, he assessed the possibility of their use on ships or in the Ground Forces. That is why so rich are the biographies of his missiles, which have always had enough “hot spots”: in Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa or in Europe. It was in the sky of Yugoslavia in March 1999 that Grushin’s rocket put an end to the fate of one of the notorious American “invisible” aircraft - the F-117A.

With a huge talent of the designer and engineer, Grushin also had a unique intuition. This allowed him to confidently go against the established views, boldly move forward and direct the team of her (and not only her) design bureau to implement original ideas. Successes of Grushin in the creation of rocket weapons are constantly marked by the highest awards. In the winter of 1966, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU; in July of the same year, he became an academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In those years, he was the only one of the developers of military equipment, who achieved such a high rank. High recognition of his personal contribution gave considerable advantages, which Grushin made the most of to achieve success in his work. His missiles for the S-200 air defense systems, the Osa self-propelled complex and the Storm and Osa-M ship complexes created in the 1960s, were important components of the country's air defense, its army and navy for several decades. In the same years, Grushin’s missiles became part of the anti-missile defense system of Moscow and the Moscow Industrial District.

The new generation of Grushin’s missiles, the development of which began in the second half of the 1960s, required not just higher performance, but also new capabilities. This work, which took almost fifteen years of the designer’s life, was truly the highest take-off of Grushin, once again making the whole “rocket world” stand still in amazement.

The rocket, designated 5V55, was intended for use as part of land and ship-based anti-aircraft missile systems of the new generation, united by the S-300 designation. Its creation brought to the forefront not only technical characteristics, but also previously unknown requirements for its maintenance with a minimum number of personnel and the amount of equipment to reduce the cost of its life cycle. Rockets not only in words should have been "ammunition" in the composition of the complexes. They were supposed to become cartridges in the literal sense of the word - not demanding for themselves any benefits in the form of routine checks, comfortable storage conditions, temperatures, humidity, which were previously relied upon by them as particularly complex technical products.

Here again, the rejection of the usual and the courage to make decisions was required. But by this time Grushin already had a “school” - a team of like-minded people who owned a unique experience in rocket affairs. And the result of the work of this team could only be a victory. Grushin had no right to another result.

The rocket for the S-300 absorbed the most promising solutions, design and production technologies. It was from her that modern computers entered the practice of designing missiles. Grushin was literally fascinated by them, gave them constant attention. In all available ways for him, he mined the necessary computer designers and designers, who eventually became the basis for computer-aided design systems and allowed to “figure out” thousands of different variants of the created rockets as soon as possible. Another fundamentally new direction in the work of "Torch" was the introduction of a unique integrated system of ground testing of missiles.

In 1981, for the creation of a rocket for the S-300, Grushin was awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labor for the second time. And his last award - the seventh Order of Lenin - Grushin received in 1986 for the creation of the 9M330 rocket. Today, the self-propelled Tor complex of the Ground Forces and the ship’s Blade, which use it, have no analogues in the world today.

During his life, Peter Dmitrievich Grushin did an incredible amount to preserve the security of our country's sky and sixty other countries of the world. By the standards of the turbulent 20th century, Grushin lived an incredibly long life — almost 88 years. And forty of them were given to Fakel, which became under his leadership one of the leading rocket companies in the world.

Entirely immersed in work, he nevertheless remained at the same time an earthly man - with an extremely wide range of interests, very sensitive and vulnerable, able to see living people around him. That is why after Grushin was not only the "Torch". Back in the mid-1980s. the extraordinary deed of Grushin became known throughout the country, who donated the “academic” savings he had accumulated over several decades to the construction of the House of Young Technicians in Khimki. “With this, I paid tribute to my youthful hobby — model airplane modeling, and I really want the young people of Khimki to have a decent place for such activities,” Grushin commented on his decision. And today, the name of Grushin is inherently not only from the name of the enterprise he headed, but also from Petrodvorets.

On September 25, 1991, on the order of the last USSR Minister of Aviation Industry, A. P. Systsov, he was relieved of his post of general designer and appointed adviser to the leadership of the Fakel ICB. Grushin, who gave all his imaginable and inconceivable forces to the Cause, became an adviser. Such an event would have been almost unbelievable for Soviet times.

Grushin ceased to be a secret rocket engineer without any noise. The fact that they can now talk about their leader, as well as about the business in which they were engaged behind the fence, was learned by the employees of “Fakel” in the usual way for the early 1990s. It was then that the first publications in magazines and national newspapers began to appear, from which they learned that all past decades they were the best in the world, leaders, and pioneers.

In the last period of life, when all conceivable and inconceivable peaks of creativity and recognition were reached, Grushin, as noted by many, became kinder, much more tolerant of human handicaps. More and more often, it was necessary to talk about affairs not in his office, but in the hospital, in a sanatorium, at a dacha in Bakovka, situated near Moscow.

He lived and worked in the city of Khimki. The life path of Peter Dmitrievich ended November 29, 1993. Literally two days before his death at the Tsentrnauchfilm film studio produced the first copy of the film about him and about the company, which he led for 38 years. When he first appeared in the lenses of the movie cameras in the summer of 1993, Grushin could no longer afford to pronounce long monologues, reflections, and stories about what had been lived and made. But, as the strictest and wise teacher, he found an opportunity to put in him an assessment of himself, of what he lived: "Life is very beautiful!" He was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow (section 10).

Twice Hero of Socialist Labor: By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (marked “secret”) of July 25, 1958, for exceptional services to the state when performing a special task (for creating a 1D rocket (B-750) for the C-75 air defense missile system), Grushin Pyotr Dmitrievich was awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labor with the award of the Order of Lenin and the Hammer and Sickle Gold Medal. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (marked “secret”) of April 20, 1981 for outstanding achievements in the development of science and technology (for creating the 5V55 rocket for the S-300 SAM) Grushin Pyotr Dmitrievich was awarded the Order of Lenin and the second Gold Medal “Sickle and Molot” ". 7 Orders of Lenin (21.06.1943; 2.07.1945; 1953; 07.25.1958; 1966; 04.20.1981; 1986) Order of the October Revolution (1971) Order of the Red Banner of Labor Lenin Prize (1963) USSR State Prize (1965) Gold Medal named after A. N. Tupolev of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1979)

Grushin created a number of unique aircraft. He glorified the country with anti-aircraft guided missiles that reliably protected the sky of Russia and other countries. Under the leadership of Grushin, the world's first anti-missile was created, which in practice proved the possibility of intercepting a long-range ballistic missile warhead.

Perhaps the most important result of his life was the creation of a unique school of design, construction and production of anti-aircraft missiles and the education on the basis of this school of a remarkable team, which continues the work begun by Grushin to this day. This team was able to resist in the 1990s, in a very unfavorable environment of the transition period of the economy. He was able to survive, and survive with dignity, at a time when the country's leadership abandoned the defense industry, its leading think tanks, to the mercy of fate.