 Aircraft mechanic in retirement.
Writer.
Documentalist.
Expert in The Alaska-Siberia WWII Air Route.
Based in Yakutsk.
Related interview:
A CHRONICLER OF OUR PAST TIMES
By Elena Mironenko,
Yakutsk Vecherny Newspaper
Published on Feb. 2, 2007.
Do you remember the phrase “well-known in narrow circle of people”? It is usually said with a note of irony and with some kind of superiority. However, talking about our today's interlocutor Ivan Negenblya we do not put any note of irony and we do not treat this person inattentively. On the contrary, we are eager to get acquainted with him.
It is very difficult to introduce him in few words. Who is he? Is he a documentary writer who has published 27 books about the history of aviation? Is he an aviator who has been repairing airplanes for about 20 years? Is he a tourist who has already tried to find the monster in Labynkyr lake in sixties? But it would be better to let Ivan Negenblya tell of himself?
- Ivan Efimovich, I am eager to ask you a question – what does your surname mean?
Ivan Efimovich expressively threw hands out and exclaimed:
- I don't know! It is surely a Ukrainian word. But the surname Negenblya is met only in our village Poltavshina. My father didn't remember his parents so I couldn't learn where this rare surname came from. Once my friend phoned me 10 years ago. Buying a ticket in the booking-office in Krasnodar she read the same surname on the badge of a cashier. I phoned her from Yakutsk and we had a talk. Unfortunately, she did not tell something interesting of our common surname because she inherited it from her husband.
- And did you inherit love to airplanes too?
- No I didn't. On the contrary, what was happening around me made me treat airplanes with wariness. As you know I was the child of war times. We lived in the village which was situated near the railway roundabout. Our and German planes bombed our village very often. My first memories connected with bombing in the night. I remember how my mother would pull me off bad when I was sleepy and we hid together in cellar. I became a plane operating mechanical engineer by accident thanks to my uncle. He offered me to enter just this Kiev Institute.
- As a mechanical engineer can you enplane what is happening with planes which get into the state of emergency almost every month?
- Incidentally, planes got into the state of emergency earlier too. For instance, in seventies a plane got broken in Yakutia. There were 50 people on its board. In eighties a plane crashed near Nurba and again its crew did not survived after the catastrophe. The thing is that at those times one could not find out what had happened neither in newspapers nor even on TV. Except cases when a foreigner was on the board. In that case the State was forced to deem that an accident had happened. But neither then nor today to blame a technician and an engineer in poor-qualified maintenance of plane is impossible. Up to now after each examination of a plane which is being made ready for flight an engineer writes “the flight is permitted” and puts a sign. Nobody wants to let out unready plane and then to be jailed.
- You certainly got to Yakutia by distribution. Many Ukrainians departed Yakutia after working off the determined time. And why did you stay?
- Everything dragged me down here. I became an inveterate tourist. My friends and me went to taiga, ratted down rivers, we tried even to make discoveries. Once I read about the expedition of searching a monster in Labynkyr lake organized by “Komsomolka”. I got a burning desire to go there. People came from Moscow to see this lake and we living near it hadn't ever seen this miracle. And I decided to go there. I assembled 8 friends, spoke on the telephone with the collective farm of the district to give us a guide and horses. And I moved there.
- Did you succeed to see the monster?
- No, I didn't. Although we believed we would hardly find it as local inhabitants did too. But the lake was very wonderful, it was large and severe, its water was very clear. You can't imagine how big pikes were there.- Ivan Efimovich begins to throw out his hands trying to show the size of pike, which he has seen. – I didn't see so big pikes any more.
- Did your wife go hiking with you?
- No, she didn't. But she never prevented me from hiking. It's funny that on my wedding my friends made my fiancée sign a receipt according to which she was obliged to permit go hiking every summer. Then I shared my summer vacations first with my family then with my friends in taiga. At times we didn't go out of the forest a whole month and didn't meet any person. How wonderful time it was!
- Your children probably felt lack of your attention?
- But then my grandson doesn't. My daughter was a student in the Institute, when she gave birth to her son. She couldn't leave her study, that's why she brought her child to us after the discharge from the maternity hospital. But my wife worked. So it was me who had to bring up Misha from a week to school age.
- And how does it come out that a technical aviator and a hike-amateur suddenly begins to publish books one after another?
- On the whole I had a special, I could say, trembling attitude to books. That's why I couldn't even imagine that I was a writer. Surely I had to make some articles in newspapers if only I was a secretary of Komsomol committee. But I began to write seriously after I left my job on account of sickness. When I wasn't able to go, at first, they felt sorry for me, sympathized with me, but I said that everything was all right, because I could be occupied with my hobby. So, I began to write at first for local publications and then to publish my own books.
- It is one thing to write detective stories and novels staying home and another thing to write historical books. How did you manage to collect documents for historical investigations?
- I invited interviewers to my house, asked questions about the history of aviation in Yakutia. At that time I got interested with the American “land-lease”, military planes supply to Soviet Union from Alaska across the Bering Strait . Then I had got helpers in library “Book 03” , in national archive. I exchanged letters with many veteran drivers of American planes, looked for information in Moscow archives. I tried to tell not only how the Alaska-Siberia highway worked during the Great Patriotic War II but also to remember every pilot, who sacrificed his life for victory. Today we are horrified with events happening in the Baltic States , when people served to Fascists are heroes and they are called as the strugglers for liberation. But we, yakutians, are not better than they because we haven't ever celebrated an anniversary of making the Alaska-Siberia highway even in republican level. The most part of republican population worked there, almost all women and children built aerodromes, worked in house holding of air drivers ranks. It is the 65th anniversary of the ALSIB this year. Will you remember even if those people who drove airplanes in hardest conditions and died here? I'm not sure but I'm trying hard to make you remember it.
10 pilots of air driving rank died just near Yakutsk , their names are Vasily Loktinov, Nikolai Chervyakov, Boris Pivovarov, Michael Kolomitkin, Ivan Timoshenko, Michael Smirnov, Fyodor Ponomarenko, Leonid Deribin, Ivan Popov, and Gregory Khurmanetz. They all buried in Viluy graveyard. A son of one of them tried to find the grave of his father few years ago. He didn't succeed because wooden gravestones which were over the pilots graves rotted long ago. Now one of tasks of Ivan Negenblya is to find out those graves anyway.
- Especially that almost in all localities, where such events had happened, memorial plates were fixed long ago. In America pilots, who served in air driving ranks, were regarded as national heroes. By the way, an American and me in co-authorship published an album dedicated to the ALSIB highway. In fact, nearly no Russian saw this album because it was sold only in America for 35 dollars each.
- By the way, have you become a well-off person, who published so many books?
- No, of course, I haven't, because, firstly, my books are published in thousand copies and only people, who are interested in the history of World War II buy them. Secondly, our publishers work with the rule “you publish, you pay”. That's why, if I didn't have such sponsors as SUE “Yakutsk Airport”, “SakhaAvia” airlines and others, my books wouldn't have hardly been published.
- Don't you really get royalties?
- Why not? I do. But I got very little money for the book, materials to which I have collected for 2 years. So, everything that I did and do till now is based on the complete enthusiasm.
Translated by Zhenya Popova, YSU student. |
