Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  The cold war had suddenly taken on a new and, from Khrushchev’s perspective, eminently more appealing dimension. It was now the specter of Soviet supremacy rather than American dominance that haunted the global arms race. Moscow, for once, held the high moral ground in this new phase of the contest because Sputnik, as opposed to Hiroshima, could be touted as a purely peaceful and scientific achievement. That must have been the most delicious irony for Khrushchev. He had tried, and failed, to rattle the world with his announcement in August boasting of a deadly new weapon that would raise the scale of mass destruction to unprecedented levels. People had simply shrugged. Korolev, on the other hand, had placed a tiny transmitter on top of an R-7 and managed to put the entire planet on notice with its innocuous little beeps. “It will generate myth, legend, and enduring superstition of a kind peculiarly difficult to eradicate,” the USIA memo accurately predicted, “which the USSR can exploit to its advantage.”

  The Soviet leader smiled. He had read enough. He may have lacked the formal education and erudition to intuitively grasp the historic context of man’s ascent to the heavens, but he was too well grounded a politician not to recognize opportunity when it knocked. “People all over the world are pointing to the satellite,” he exclaimed, as if struck by a revelation. “They are saying the U.S. has been beaten.” Pushing aside his breakfast, and all previous thought of the dearly deposed Zhukov, Khrushchev sprang into action. Get me Korolev! he ordered.

  • • •

  By the time the Chief Designer arrived at Khrushchev’s Kremlin office on Thursday, October 10, the propaganda apparatus of the Communist Party of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics had been marshaled and unleashed for the benefit of its citizenry. Pravda and every other Soviet mass medium now single-mindedly pursued the glorious twin topics of space and satellites, trumpeting the proud and limitless promise of Soviet science. “World’s First Artificial Satellite of the Earth Created in Soviet Union,” Pravda’s October 6 issue hailed in a page-wide banner headline. “Russians Won the Competition,” the paper boasted the next day, in equally bold print. Western newspaper articles from publications usually reviled as corrupt capitalist organs were duly reprinted on front pages to reassure the Soviet citizenry that the world thought as much of Sputnik as the ITAR-TASS news agency claimed. Laudatory telegrams from leaders of various fraternal nations were published to show the awed reverence of the Communist bloc. Photos and footage of the racism in Little Rock were once more disseminated to drive home the stark contrast between Soviet innovation and American oppression. The campaign was relentless, and it was just as effective as the media blitz in the United States that had turned audience indifference to terror—only in reverse. Ordinary Russians, who days earlier had neither heard of nor cared about satellites, were suddenly space converts overwhelmed with national pride and a newfound sense of security and superiority.

  The name Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was notably absent from the triumphant barrage of state television, radio, and print reports. Nor were the names Glushko, Pilyugin, Barmin, or any of the other top designers and engineers ever mentioned in the same breath as PS-1, which by then had also acquired the generic moniker Sputnik with Russian audiences. The public face of the Soviet space program in fact belonged to a man who had nothing to do with rockets or satellites. Leonid Sedov, a technocrat and expert in gas dynamics, was the Academy of Sciences’ representative at the IGY and various other international conferences. His chief recommendation as Soviet spokesman appeared to be a fluency in English and German, a polished delivery, and a talent for obfuscation. Sedov had become something of a celebrity since October 4, particularly in the West, where his snide remarks on America’s moral decline made all the newsreels. “The average American only cares for his car, house, and electric refrigerator,” he lectured during one speech. “He has no sense of national purpose, nor is he receptive to great ideas which do not pay off immediately.” Meeting Ernst Stuhlinger after a speech at the Eighth Congress of the International Astronomical Federation in Barcelona, Spain, on October 8, Sedov was less flip but just as smug. “We could never understand,” he lectured, according to the security memorandum Stuhlinger filed with ABMA’s counterintelligence bureau detailing his contact with the Communist official, “why your people picked such a strange design [Vanguard] for a satellite carrier. Why did you try to build something entirely new instead of using one of your excellent military engines? You would have saved so much time, not to mention troubles, and money. Why did Dr. von Braun select this other design?”

  Stuhlinger appeared both puzzled and frustrated at the mistake in identity. “Dr. von Braun?” he replied to Sedov. “He did not decide this. He is not a member of the Vanguard Committee; in fact he is not even a consultant or adviser on the American Vanguard satellite.” Sedov no doubt relayed this nugget of intelligence in his own debriefing report to the KGB, along with reassurances that his German-American interlocutors had never inquired about Korolev, whose secret identity was presumably still safe. It was unlikely that Sedov himself would have inadvertently passed on any classified information. Famous as he was becoming as the spokesman for Russian rocket science, he apparently knew so little about the actual workings of missiles that on a visit to Tyura-Tam, he astounded Korolev by asking where the satellites were placed on the R-7’s central booster. (On top, Korolev had dryly replied.)

  If the Chief Designer resented talking heads like Sedov stealing his limelight, he did not say so. “People in the Soviet Union did not complain during that era,” Sergei Khrushchev laughed when asked if Korolev found the enforced anonymity grating. Korelev’s daughter, Natalia, however, recalled her bitter disappointment when the Nobel committee wanted the name of the scientist responsible for Sputnik so they could award him the Nobel Prize in Physics. It is the collective achievement of Soviet science, the Swedes were told. “I remember walking in Red Square,” Natalia Koroleva recounted decades later, “and seeing all these banners, and celebrations, and I wanted to shout, ‘My father did this.’ But I couldn’t tell anyone.”

  “They are well provided for,” Khrushchev said of his nameless missile experts. Their identities, he regretted, had to remain secret for national security reasons. But one day, he vowed, “we shall erect a monument in honor of those who created the rocket and Sputnik and shall inscribe their glorious names in letters of gold so that they will be known to future generations.”

  For now, they would have to make do with medals they could not wear publicly. In addition to the Order of Lenin and Hero of Socialist Labor awarded to all those involved with PS-1, Korolev received an honorary doctorate and was elevated from corresponding to full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Those accolades, however, were fairly meaningless. His chief reward came with his October 10 summons to the Kremlin—and the visit’s tacit recognition of his admission into Khrushchev’s inner circle of court favorites. “Our most brilliant missile designer,” Khrushchev raved, noting that other rocket designers “could not hold a candle to Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.” That status would confer on the Chief Designer a rare and privileged position, and the ability to cut through red tape and circumvent bureaucratic hurdles on his future ventures. Henceforth, he would have a direct line to the Soviet Union’s sole decision maker and could bypass the sort of annoying obstacles that the R-7 State Commission had thrown in his way prior to Sputnik’s launch.

  While Korolev knew he could not take public credit for Sputnik, he was hardly blind to the considerable political capital he had earned with Khrushchev. The Soviet leader was making so much hay from his satellite that he would be hard-pressed to deny him any reasonable requests—and Korolev was not the sort of person to shy away from pressing his advantage. Neither, of course, was Khrushchev, which made them an ideally suited pair.

  The first secretary might have been slow recognizing the propaganda value of the hand Korolev had dealt him, but once he had belatedly realized what kind of cards he held, he had wasted no time capitalizing on his windf
all. He had already summoned James Reston, the New York Times bureau chief, to his Kremlin office so he could communicate directly to the American people. “When we announced the successful testing of an intercontinental rocket,” Khrushchev told Reston, “some American statesmen did not believe us.” The Soviet leader was referring to Charlie Wilson’s famously dismissive comments on the R-7, perhaps even to Eisenhower’s veiled skepticism. “The Soviet Union, they claimed, was saying it had something it did not really have,” Khrushchev went on, revealing a glimpse of his bruised ego. “Now that we have successfully launched an earth satellite, only technically ignorant people can doubt this.”

  The Americans had also laughed, Khrushchev continued in this wounded vein, when the Soviet Union had announced its intention to launch a satellite. Sputnik was up, he chortled, and where was the American satellite—the one the size of a grapefruit? “If necessary, we can double the weight of the satellite,” he boasted, adding that the ICBM it rode on was “fully perfected” and could strike anywhere in the world. What’s more, Khrushchev vowed, growing overly animated as he often did when discussing sensitive subjects, the R-7 would soon go into mass production, and ICBMs would roll out of Russian factories “like sausages.”

  The tirade, duly relayed in all its frightening implications to alarmed American readers, had not been just an outburst of pent-up frustration or even a manifestation of Khrushchev’s notorious inferiority complex. It had been a coldly calculated feint, a bluff designed to deflect attention away from the fact the Soviets were discovering that the R-7 had serious limitations as a so-called ultimate weapon. “Initially, Father believed the mere existence of an ICBM would deter the Americans,” his son explained. But the assumptions behind that doctrine had been shattered during the R-7 tests, when Marshal Nedelin and the military discovered how much time it took to fuel the huge rocket and how difficult it was to hide. War, it was now thought, could still break out because the missile was vulnerable to preemptive strikes and could be destroyed on the launchpad by U.S. bombers, rendering its deterrent value nil. Washington, after all, already knew Tyura-Tam’s exact geographic coordinates thanks to its spy planes, and the R-7 could be launched only from that one location because it was too big to be moved on anything other than railcars and needed a pad the size of several football fields from which to lift off. It also used the wrong kind of propellant, not to mention a staggeringly impractical 250 tons of it, requiring cumbersome fueling infrastructure and hours of wasteful preparation time because its tanks could not be prefilled with liquid oxygen that instantly evaporated. The R-7, in short, could not be hidden, moved, or fired on short notice—making it a sitting duck in the event of a surprise American attack.

  As with many first-generation weapons, its principal value was in its demonstrative effect; the dream of deterrence via an invulnerable ICBM fleet was realistic, if not yet a reality. Already one of Korolev’s rival designers, Mikhail Yangel, was working on a series of successor missiles that addressed the R-7’s flaws. Yangel, a few months earlier, had successfully tested the R-12, an intermediate range missile that used storable nitric acid—Glushko’s preferred oxidizer—instead of slow-loading liquid oxygen. With Glushko’s backing, Yangel was now proposing an expanded intercontinental version of the missile, the R-16, which would be a third the size of the original R-7 and capable of silo or mobile launch on less than thirty minutes’ notice. Glushko, who could not help but envy the political accolades that the Chief Designer was garnering for what was essentially a triumph of his own engines, was lobbying Nedelin to push for the R-16. It would take three to four years for the superior weapon to go from blueprint to deployment phase, but the Americans did not know any of this. For now, at least, the R-7 was still the only ICBM in existence on either side of the ideological divide. And Nikita Khrushchev was not about to let anyone forget that he, and he alone, had exclusive domain over the power to rain destruction anywhere on the planet.

  The point was not just that the Soviet Union possessed this devastating new weapon, but that Khrushchev wielded it personally. The R-7 was his creation—Korolev was merely an instrument of his will—and it was to him that the political accolades ultimately fell, a point that Pravda would hammer home whenever possible. “In his able proposals,” the paper would glowingly note, “there is evidence again and again of the great conviction in the triumph of Soviet rocket technology.” Likewise, Sputnik celebrated his glory (“he participates in the discussions of all the most vital experiments”) and validated his vision (he “directs the development of the major directions of technical progress in the country”); he would invoke the satellite in virtually every speech for months to come. For a leader still deeply insecure about his own authority, Sputnik was a boon. It was the glue that Khrushchev had been looking for to cement his grip on power. Everyone knew that it was his rocket up there causing an international sensation. Everyone would associate his name with one of the greatest technological triumphs of the twentieth century. With luck, he might even ascend to that rarefied pantheon of Russia’s Greats: Peter, Catherine, Stalin. They had been immortalized for their terrestrial conquests; Khrushchev had just expanded that empire into outer space.

  For the embattled Soviet leader, October 4 had augured an astonishing reversal of political fortune: his final rival had been eliminated, forgotten in the furor over Sputnik’s success, and he alone had emerged as the prime beneficiary of the satellite’s conferred grandeur. Khrushchev could now claim credit for making the Soviet Union a genuine superpower, a true technological match for the United States. On the world stage, he was now Eisenhower’s equal. At home, he was untouchable, safe at last from intrigue, schemers, and prospective coup plotters. But still, Khrushchev wanted more. Sputnik could be squeezed for even greater political gains, and he could scale even higher political heights. Korolev, he was sure, could make it happen.

  • • •

  “You know,” said Khrushchev, when the Chief Designer finally arrived at his Kremlin office on the morning of October 10, “when you first proposed Sputnik we didn’t believe you. We thought, ‘Ah, that Korolev, he’s just dreaming.’ But today it’s another story.”

  Khrushchev beamed at his star scientist. He was in exceptionally high spirits. The boss, as Korolev knew, had been cranky of late and easily flew off the cuff. But that morning he seemed completely relaxed, lounging in a sofa chair next to fellow Presidium member Anastas Mikoyan. The wily old Armenian, a survivor of Stalin’s inner circle who owed his political longevity to an utter lack of ambition, also struck an informal pose, nibbling at a bowl of fruit while he stretched his plump legs on an expensive central Asian rug. Tea and juice had been offered along with the easy banter, a sign that Korolev, who had dressed for the occasion in a respectful tie and jacket, was in unusually good standing.

  “Sergei Pavlovich,” Khrushchev continued, “as you know, the October Revolution jubilee is approaching.” Korolev needed no reminder. He would have had to have been blind not to notice the frenzied preparations for the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik uprising. Moscow’s main streets were getting a makeover in anticipation of the parades and ceremonies that would mark four decades of communism, and construction crews were busy repaving roads, repainting buildings, and scrubbing soot from grimy facades. Sputnik would be a major theme of the celebration, a symbol of Soviet accomplishment; Khrushchev had commissioned poems lyricizing the “Leap Forward” and had ordered that detailed timetables be published in every major city showing exactly when Sputnik passed over different metropolitan regions. Huge Sputnik banners were erected, commemorative stamps printed—FIRST IN SPACE, they boasted—and millions of spherical, satellite-shaped pins were made for citizens to wear on their lapels. They would bear them proudly because Sputnik had tapped an unusually sensitive nerve with ordinary Russians. Most Soviet citizens knew that life was different in the West, that people in Europe and America enjoyed higher standards of living under capitalism. In that respect, Khrushchev’s inferiority
complex was a national malaise. Sputnik compensated for those persistent feelings of inadequacy and inequality. Muscovites might not have color television sets, fast cars, or fashionable shoes, but Sputnik proved that they weren’t technologically backward after all. “‘Now we are ahead of America,’ I have been told countless times,” reported Tom Margerison, a British science writer on assignment in Moscow, in the London Sunday Times. “In the streets there is immense pleasure and pride in the rocket-engineer’s achievement…. In Red Square I counted no fewer than fourteen models of Sputnik circling a globe…. Their success is more important to the Russians themselves than to anyone else.”

  Sputnik had given Moscow the high moral ground over the West, demonstrating how shallow consumerism should be sacrificed for the good of science and human progress. While it was presented as a monumental triumph, Sputnik in reality helped cover up and justify one of the most glaring shortcomings of communism: its inability to deliver basic material well-being to its citizens. As Margerison acidly put it, “Nowhere else would you find a people who are able to carry out a complex project like launching a satellite, involving the close cooperation of scientists and engineers from many disciplines, yet who prove quite unable to organize efficient butcher shops.” As a substitute for comfort, and as a tool to pacify the masses, now that terror had been rejected, Sputnik was thus invaluable. It exploited pride rather than fear, and it supplanted Stalin’s purges as a way of keeping people committed to wobbling socialist ideals.

  All this must have flashed through Khrushchev’s head as he prodded Korolev. “It’ll be forty years of Soviet power, which is a big milestone. Wouldn’t it be nice,” the Soviet leader asked wistfully, “to have something for the holiday?”