So I built a workshop there!

President Zelensky visited the Malyshev plant in Kharkov and is in shock. And is terrified.

Well, it’s clear - I discovered cold shops there, they informed him that one tank was allegedly released since 2009, and in Soviet times they produced 900 tanks a year, but the plant even exists. But my “Hammer and Sickle” was smashed to hell by an iron woman on chains - I saw it when I was still allowed to go to Ukraine, and the land was sold to Vietnamese for the market. Seeing how they ruined my factory, I even dropped a tear and swore for a long time and mercilessly.

So it was still lucky that the Malyshev factory.

But it was like that.

At the end of 1960, I was dragged into my team by a welder Zakhar Zolotarenko. More precisely, his son Volodka: I somehow studied at the same school for a short time, and then we were friends.

The senior Zolotarenko called welding, his name was Zakhar, and his criminal click was Zorka Zolotoy, the senior Zolotarenko learned welding at the White Sea Canal.

Then Zakhar served time, went out, tied up with criminal friends, found a couple - a young girl Masha, taught her how to weld, and together they made a big family. Volodka was an average child, and he also had two sisters - the oldest and the youngest. Until now, I smell them dozens of times warmed up borscht, but sixty years have passed. Although warmed up in a huge pan, the borscht was tasty and with meat.

Zorka Zolotoy himself was carried away by Ukrainian history and somehow told me that I was supposedly a descendant of the colonel of the Zaporizhzhya Sich.

The older Zolotarenko looked “don’t come - I’ll kill you!”, He was a serious man, he and his wife made good money, and Zorka Zolotoy spent all his money on tomes on Ukrainian history. Of course, Zorka did not live up to the Bandera revolution - even then he was sixty years old, otherwise he would go to ideologists.

Our whole team was that gang. When we walked into their work-room, everything in tarpaulin, rattling with chains, the workers of the military factory looked at us with hostility. We beat them several times. They somehow caught a member of our brigade, a gypsy, for stealing cutlets and schnitzels in the canteen, and we ran to the rescue - they scattered from us in horror, like from the SS battalion. Nevertheless, we drove the gypsy out of the brigade: we were severe, but fair.

How did we work?

The height of the workshop was thirty meters.

On the ground we connected three concrete sections with reinforcing steel welded by the Zolotarenko family ... If the reinforcement did not climb into the hole, then we hammered it with a hammer by force, replacing each other.

In Russia, then everything was done with a hammer. But it still stands.

Having thus fastened the ceiling together with three reinforcing bars, we lifted it with cranes, Zorya Zolotoy, groaning, climbed up and welded the ceiling to the plates of the pillars already prepared for this.

Volodka and I were supposed to appear at work about an hour or half an hour before the whole brigade, as we cleaned all these fittings and plates, knocked down scale and rust with chisels, so that welders could work.

Now let’s leave the past - and this is what information I just received from Kharkov at the Malyshev plant. I quote:

“Young people for the plant are being recruited through military enlistment offices, and hard workers, technicians, and designers are being tested.

Their machine park is mainly of the Soviet period; new equipment is rarely purchased.

The documentation is in paper form. They have a minimal amount of computer equipment. Still, imagine using a culman.

The territory and infrastructure are untidy. Even the mice are running.

The workshops are not heated - whoever can and is heated.

With one tank, apparently, it was meant that there was one new tank for the UVS. Last year, a contract was signed with Thailand for the supply of 49 new BM Oplot-T tanks and two BREM-84 Athletes.

T-64 tanks are regularly repaired. A single overhaul of the T-84 tanks is also being done.

It is more profitable for the Ukrainian state to carry out modernization than to buy new combat vehicles. For the price of one new, ten can be upgraded. The state is poor.

They make engines and components for the T-80UD and Al-Khalid tanks for Pakistan.

For a long time we agreed with Turkey on a contract for engines for the Turkish Altay tank. Do not agree.

Salaries are scarce. There is an outflow of competent specialists. ”

So it goes. Zelensky must have walked along with the companions in the workshop that I had been building with my comrades. And the mouse saw. Runs on paper documentation, which just nibbled.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.