Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  Whether the conspiracy was real or whether it was a figment of Khrushchev’s inflamed imagination would become a matter of historical debate. (Not even Sergei, with the benefit of hindsight and a half century’s distance, would be able to unequivocally support his father’s suspicions.) That Khrushchev, after his brush with insurgency, had become more prone to seeing potential plots was perhaps understandable. That Zhukov had grown far more powerful than any other soldier in the Soviet era was also undeniable. But had he actually harbored mutinous ambitions? And had he really wanted to rule Russia? On that score, the historical jury is still out, and even Khrushchev would later wonder if he had jumped the gun.

  Zhukov’s lapse in reporting the saboteur schools might have been an innocent omission, or simply a pretext for Khrushchev to launch a preemptive strike against an ally whose growing influence was becoming too dangerous. Whichever the case, by late September he had decided to remove Zhukov before the defense chief could remove him. “His unreasonable activities leave us no choice,” Khrushchev told his loyalists in hushed meetings. The only remaining question was how to do it without tipping his hand and risking a military revolt. Zhukov could not be approached head-on. He needed to be isolated, cut off from contact with his subordinates, and lulled into a false sense of security. And all this had to be accomplished so subtly that he would never see the ax coming.

  The answer lay in foreign travel. Zhukov had been invited to Washington. Why not go to Yugoslavia instead, Khrushchev suggested. Andrei Gromyko, the new foreign minister, would be in Washington anyway, and the uppity Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito needed some hand-holding ahead of the big pan-Communist summit in Moscow that was coming up in a few weeks to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Zhukov could take one of the brand-new battle cruisers (one of the few that had survived the scrap heap), it was further suggested, to impress the Yugoslavs, and he could visit Albania as well.

  And so, on October 4, the unsuspecting defense minister was somewhere in the Adriatic, stuck on a slow boat from Tirana, his radio communications restricted, while Khrushchev hastened to Kiev to seal his fate. Ostensibly, the Ukrainian stopover was routine, a chance for the boss to meet with regional party officials, listen to their petitions for funds, and discuss economic policies. Somewhat less routinely, Khrushchev was also there to observe tank maneuvers and to meet with senior officers from the Kiev Military District, one of Zhukov’s former commands. Select members of the brass from Moscow had flown in for the impromptu talks, most notably Rodion Malinovsky, the deputy defense minister, whom Khrushchev still trusted.

  Whether the timing of the visit with military commanders was purely coincidental would also become a topic of historical speculation. No record was kept of what was said during the maneuvers. A few days later, however, a small and unobtrusive squib would appear on the back page of Pravda. Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, it would announce in the smallest of print, had been “relieved of his duties.” Rodion Malinovsky was assuming his responsibilities.

  On the night of October 4, the matter of Zhukov’s removal was either not yet resolved or still a closely held secret, because Sergei Khrushchev, who had joined his father in Kiev, had no inkling of the preemptive countercoup. Sergei had seen little of his father over the past several months. He had just gotten married, was busy with his dissertation, and had hopes of soon going to work for Korolev. He was beginning to make the transition from favored son to an adult with his own independent life and family, vacationing separately for the first time that summer and no longer living at home. Apparently Nikita missed Sergei’s company, because he had called him the day before, suggesting he hop on a plane and meet him at the Marinsky Palace in Kiev, where Khrushchev would be making an unexpected detour on his way to Moscow from his seaside dacha in the Crimea.

  The palace crowned Kiev’s highest hill, offering postcard views of the Dnieper River and the gilded, green domes of the one-thousand-year-old Pecherskaya Lavra Monastery on one side, and, on the other, the more foreboding sight of the new gray granite government buildings built by German prisoners of war. Inside, beneath pendulous chandeliers, pastel ceilings, and ornate millwork, Sergei sat, bored, as he waited for his father to finish his seemingly endless meetings. The evening sessions had run well past ten, in the customarily rambling fashion of official Soviet delegations, so that the air in the Marinsky Palace dining hall had grown stale with cigarette smoke, and the crystal ashtrays around the long dining table were beginning to overflow. Among the smokers were Khrushchev’s closest supporters, and it was probably also not a coincidence that he had chosen to be with the chieftains from his former power base—he had served as Stalin’s Ukrainian viceroy—on the day he was orchestrating the removal of the man he judged to be his final rival.

  In the palace’s convivial atmosphere, Khrushchev could cast a reassuring and proprietary eye on men whose careers he owned: the suddenly ever-present Rodion Malinovsky; Aleksei Kirichenko, the powerful Ukrainian party boss who had accompanied Khrushchev to Korolev’s design bureau in February 1956, when the Chief Designer had requested permission to launch a satellite; Leonid Brezhnev, the dimwitted but trustworthy loyalist, who was actually neither but found it expedient to play the part. Khrushchev had just put Brezhnev in charge of missile and defense matters at the Presidium, a reward for his (literally) swooning support during the botched coup. The post seemed largely ceremonial, since the first secretary still made all the important decisions himself. But it sent a signal that the bushy-haired young political commissar from Dnipropetrovsk was on the rise; and, just as important, that loyalty paid off.

  It was Khrushchev, not Brezhnev, who shortly after 11:00 PM was summoned away from the meeting on a missile-related matter. An aide, Sergei Khrushchev recalled, whispered in his father’s ear that he had a phone call. “I’ll be back,” Khrushchev announced, leaving the room. He returned a few moments later, a broad smile creasing his tired features. He said nothing, though, and for some time sat silently, staring at his fingernails in a distracted manner as he listened to reports on the beet harvest and coal stockpiles for the coming winter. After a few minutes of fidgeting, however, he could no longer restrain himself and raised his hand for silence.

  “Comrades,” he said, addressing the assembled Ukrainian Central Committee members. “I can tell you some very pleasant and important news. Korolev just called.” (At this point Khrushchev acquired what his son would later describe as “a secretive look.”) “He’s one of our missile designers. Remember not to mention his name—it’s classified. So,” Khrushchev continued, “Korolev has just reported that today, a little while ago, an artificial satellite of the Earth was launched.”

  The Ukrainians stared blankly, not quite sure what to make of this news. Obviously, the boss was pleased, but about what few could tell. Most people in the room had never heard of a satellite before. “Everyone smiled politely, without understanding what had just happened,” Sergei recalled. Khrushchev, perhaps sensing the perplexity of his provincial underlings, felt compelled to explain. “It is an offshoot of an intercontinental missile,” he said.

  This additional intelligence did not appear to make the visibly confused local party bosses any wiser, so once more the Soviet leader elaborated. As Sergei described the scene:

  Father began talking about missiles. He spoke of how the appearance of ballistic missiles had radically altered the balance of forces in the world. His audience listened in silence. They seemed completely immersed in his account, but their faces revealed their indifference. They were used to listening to Father, regardless of the subject. The Kiev officials were hearing about missiles for the first time and clearly didn’t understand what they were.

  Missile doctrine might have been above the pay grade of the regional party hacks but, ironically, it was Khrushchev who had missed the point. Despite his unusually prescient grasp of rocketry’s role in modern warfare, he had completely failed to recognize Sputnik’s s
ignificance as a propaganda weapon. “He had viewed the satellite primarily in military terms,” Sergei conceded. For the Soviet leader, Sputnik had been a milestone in the ICBM race, not a milestone in human history. That mankind had just broken the bounds of gravity, and made its greatest leap—to quote CBS’s Eric Sevareid—from the primordial mud, was completely lost on the missile-obsessed Khrushchev. Which may have explained why the lead story in Pravda on the morning of October 5 was incongruously titled “Preparations for Winter” and tallied food and fuel stockpiles for the coming cold season, while Sputnik was relegated to a terse two-paragraph news brief.

  “We still hadn’t realized what we had done,” Sergei Khrushchev remembered. It would take the world to tell them.

  • • •

  For Sergei Korolev, it would also take a while for the magnitude of his accomplishment to sink in. There had been little time to celebrate after the launch: a few rounds of vodka and congratulatory speeches in the middle of the night, followed by intensive calculations and worries as the first day of the space age wore on. PS-1, as everyone at Tyura-Tam still called the satellite, was up, but how stable was its orbit? This the anxious scientists could not immediately determine, because their tracking stations were arrayed only on Soviet territory and thus could measure only a small fraction of the satellite’s elliptical orbit. Sputnik would have to make at least a dozen full revolutions before anyone could tell with certainty whether it would stay in orbit or come crashing back to earth.

  Every celestial body suffers from what is known as orbital decay, a gradual loss of speed and altitude that brings the object either closer to or farther from its center of gravity. Decay can be imperceptibly slow, as in the case of the moon, which falls a few inches away from the earth every year, or catastrophically abrupt, like a meteor getting sucked in by the pull of gravity. Sputnik could thus stay in orbit for a day, a week, a month, a year, a millennium, or a million years, depending on that all-important rate of degeneration.

  From Sputnik’s first few rotations, Korolev’s team had been able to ascertain the satellite’s basic parameters: its apogee, perigee, speed, inclination, and duration of each orbit. The tiny sphere was hurtling on a 25,000-kilometer-per-hour (15,625-miles-per-hour) roller-coaster ride around the planet, crossing the equator every ninety-six minutes at a sixty-five-degree angle as it climbed to apogees (peaks) of 947 kilometers (587 miles) above sea level like a surfer on a wave and then plummeted to perigees (depths) of 228 kilometers (141 miles) as it fell to the bottom of a trough before rising again. But each time Sputnik hit a trough was like slamming on the brakes, because the atmosphere, even at that height, was still thick enough to cause friction. At such relatively low points of the orbit, fluctuations in the earth’s gravity due to differences in the shape and mineral composition of the globe, which is not a perfectly round sphere, could also adversely affect decay. Sputnik’s perigee was too low because of the malfunction during liftoff, which had resulted in an early engine cutoff. The question was, How much ground was it losing? If PS-1 fell back to earth within a few days, Korolev’s triumph would be short-lived, his record tainted, his masters in Moscow unhappy. Frantically, his mathematicians ran the numbers, trying to predict Sputnik’s life span. Finally, early in the afternoon of October 5, they came up with an estimate: two to three months. (The exact number would turn out to be ninety-two days.) Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Sputnik was safe, as far as the record books and politicians stood. Korolev and his chief designers could at last relax and go home to celebrate in earnest.

  Until then, there had been no time for reflection. “We were all too focused on our jobs, concentrating on the execution of the operation, to think about the meaning of the event,” recalled Vladimir Barmin, the designer of the Tulip launchpad. Boris Chertok described feeling a similar sensation of relieved exhaustion rather than euphoric wonder on finally hearing that the space barrier was broken. “It was late. We went to bed,” he wrote, with uncharacteristic brevity, of getting the news at OKB-1 headquarters in Moscow, where he had been recovering from his illness. “We thought the satellite was just a simple device,” he added, “and that the importance of the launch had been to test the R-7 again and gather data.”

  Of all the engineers, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and military personnel who had been involved with Sputnik, literally several thousand people, it seemed that only the erudite Mikhail Tikhonravov, the Latin-spouting creator of PS-1, understood that the world had changed forever on October 4, 1957. “This date,” he said, “has become one of the most glorious in the history of humanity.”

  The men responsible for the satellite would begin to grasp the importance of their feat only when they boarded their special flight from Tyura-Tam to Moscow on the night following the launch. Most of the exhausted engineers had passed out shortly after takeoff, Valentin Glushko and Mstislav Keldysh slumbering in their elegant and neatly pressed suits, while Korolev, shifting uncomfortably in his trademark black leather jacket and turtleneck sweater, stared wearily at the dim cabin lights. As soon as their big Iliushin-4 prop jet had leveled off over the orange Kazakh desert, the pilot, Tolya Yesenin, came rushing out of the cockpit. “The whole world is abuzz,” he gushed, grasping the Chief Designer’s hand and pumping it furiously. Korolev sat up, startled. He had been so preoccupied during the past twenty-four hours that he had had little contact with anyone outside Tyura-Tam other than Khrushchev, and had no idea that word of the launch had spread so far, so wide, so fast. Abuzz? The whole world? Really? Korolev couldn’t contain himself. He jumped out of his seat and made straight for the flight deck to use the plane’s radio. When he returned some minutes later, he was unusually ebullient and emotional.

  “Comrades,” he cried, rousing his sleepy colleagues. “You can’t imagine what’s happening. The whole world is talking about our little satellite. Apparently we have caused quite a stir.”

  • • •

  Much like Korolev, it was not until the night of October 5, and only once he had returned to Moscow from his maneuverings in Kiev, that Nikita Khrushchev began to realize what a tremendous victory he had just scored against the United States.

  Throughout the day, Soviet embassies and KGB stations around the globe had been busy compiling foreign press clippings and political reactions to Sputnik. By the next morning, the reports had been translated, cabled to Moscow, sorted, and slotted into the thick folders Khrushchev received with breakfast every day at his government mansion in Lenin Hills. The files—green for foreign press clippings, red for decoded diplomatic traffic, blue for agency reports—must have made savory reading. “The achievement is immense,” declared Britain’s Manchester Guardian. “It demands a psychological adjustment on our part towards Soviet society, Soviet military capabilities, and perhaps—most of all—to the relationship of the world to what is beyond. The Russians can now build ballistic missiles capable of striking any chosen target anywhere in the world. Clearly they have established a great lead in missile technology.” “Myth has become reality,” crowed France’s Le Figaro, commenting gleefully on the bitter “disillusion and bitter reflections of the Americans who have little experience with humiliation in the technical domain.”

  Khrushchev leafed through the stack of diplomatic dispatches with increasing relish. “A turning point in civilization,” the New York Times declared, “that could only be achieved by a country with first rate conditions in a vast area of science and engineering.” An Austrian paper opined that “in contrast with the first steps in the atomic age which began with 100,000 deaths, mankind can rejoice without destruction on the conquest of cosmos by the human spirit.” China’s main daily hailed Sputnik as a “validation of the superiority of Marxist-Leninist technology.” Radio Cairo declared that “the planetary era rings the death knell of colonialism; the American policy of encirclement of the Soviet Union has pitifully failed.”

  Khrushchev was astonished by the reaction. It was as if, overnight, his nation had been vaulte
d to a preeminent position atop the global hierarchy. The Soviet Union, in the eyes of the world, had suddenly become a genuine superpower, not just a backward and brutish empire to be feared because of its sheer size, territorial ambitions, and aggressive ideology but a true and equal rival of the United States, a beacon of progress that deserved respect for its technological prowess and forward thinking. “With only a ball of metal,” as the historian Asif A. Siddiqi would succinctly put it, “the Soviets had managed to achieve what they were unable to convey with decades of rhetoric.”

  The turnaround, the KGB reported, had profoundly shaken America’s allies in both tangible and esoteric ways. The European Assembly in Strasbourg censured the United States for falling behind the Soviet Union. In Tehran, the shah’s CIA-sponsored government “considered the satellite such a blow to U.S. prestige,” according to a diplomatic assessment, “that they displayed uneasy embarrassment in discussing it with Americans.” In Mexico, editors had begun requesting Soviet rather than U.S. scientific source material, while Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party had taken Sputnik as a cue to begin “agitating” against further deployment of U.S. conventional armed forces. As the U.S. Information Agency would itself concede, in an October 10 memo, “Public opinion in friendly countries shows decided concern over the possibility that the balance of military power has shifted or may soon shift in favor of the USSR. American prestige is viewed as having sustained a severe blow, and the American [domestic] reaction, so sharply marked by concern, discomfiture, and intense interest, has itself increased the disquiet of friendly countries and increased the impact of the satellite.”