Korolev was accused of being a member of a counterrevolutionary organization and of committing acts of sabotage. He was interrogated, beaten and threatened that harm would come to his family unless he ‘confessed’ to the fabricated charges of his colleagues. Two of his senior colleagues, Ivan Kleimenov and Georgi Langemak, had already been forced to admit to false accusations against both Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko. Then they were shot. When Glushko was himself arrested, he too denounced Korolev under torture. Several other engineers were also being investigated, and such was the atmosphere of fear and paranoia created by the NKVD that a number of colleagues at the institute felt under pressure to write letters confirming Korolev’s ‘wrecking’ or ‘disruptive’ activities. The absurdity of the charges is highlighted by the science historian Asif Siddiqi, who found that one of the claims was that Korolev had destroyed a rocket plane, yet the very same plane ‘sat quite intact in the hangar of the institute headquarters’. It is a measure of Korolev’s desperation at this stage that, within two days of his arrest, he signed his confession to the Commissar of Internal Affairs on 29 June, admitting to his ‘crimes’, all allegedly carried out with a view to stopping the rearmament of the Red Army with new kinds of weapons.
Korolev had no trial, but he did collect a ten-year sentence in the Gulag. His first destination was the notorious Kolyma camp on the fringes of the Arctic Circle in eastern Siberia. While in a transit prison for a few months, despite his ‘confession’ he repeatedly protested his innocence, writing letters to anyone who would listen, hopeful that his cries for help would be heard: ‘I have never carried out any wrecking activities. I have never been a member of any anti-Soviet wrecking organization, nor have I ever heard or known about such an organization … I have always been loyal in every way to the general line of the party, to Soviet rule and to the Soviet Motherland.’ His mother, Maria Nikolaevna Balanina, was beside herself, and sent many letters to Stalin himself. ‘I implore you to save my only son, a young and talented rocket engineer and pilot,’ she pleaded. Her words fell on deaf ears.
Within a few months, the awful reality of a ten-year sentence for an unknown crime had taken its toll. Korolev confided to Ksenia:
I am so very tired of life. Almost everything that used to give me pleasure in life has gone. It probably hurts you to hear that I have lost all interest in life … I can see no end to my dreadful situation … I will be a stain on your and Natasha’s life. I don’t even know if we’ll be able to live together again, or rather whether I can and should live with you. I am afraid to speak and think about it.
Of all the Gulag camps, Kolyma, a gold-mine camp in eastern Siberia, had the worst reputation. The summers were so brief that the ground barely had time to thaw. Winter days were shrouded in darkness in spite of thick snow. The cold and frost were so terrible they burned the skin on contact. For most, life at Kolyma was brutal and short; thousands of prisoners died each month.
The sequence of events that had led Korolev so inexorably to this hopeless point in his life had begun with an innocent childhood interest in the wonder of space flight – with little thought that such dreams might ultimately cost him his life.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was born on 12 January 1907, near Kiev. A happy child, he was adored by his mother, Maria Nikolaevna. ‘He liked my stories,’ she recalled years later. They ‘flew together on a fairy-tale carpet’ out into space and he would look out enthralled, ‘wide-eyed into the sky’. However, she was intent on further education and joined her sister, eventually training to be a teacher. Leaving her husband, she placed Sergei with her parents. His grandparents gave him everything a child could need but in the quiet, undisturbed routine of an elderly household he was often lonely.
When he was six, his grandparents took him to see the celebrated pilot Sergei Utochkin fly a plane at the local fair and there his enduring interest in flight was born. After his mother remarried, they moved to Odessa where military seaplanes were stationed. At sixteen, Sergei was determined to see the planes at close quarters and would swim across the bay to watch the mechanics at work. It was not long before he was rewarded with his first flight as a passenger, watching the people on the ground become reduced to dots as he soared above them through the brilliant white clouds.
At seventeen, he was studying hard, designing a glider in his spare time and falling in love with his classmate, the pretty but unobtainable Ksenia Vincentini. He had grown strong and athletic, relishing exercise, his body physically expressing his rugged determination. But what people remembered most about Sergei Korolev was his lively intelligence, his dark eyes, absorbed, taking in information. He proposed to Ksenia who refused him: she wanted to study. Korolev was not easily dismissed, however, never doubting eventual success. His confidence, strength of will and single-minded tenacity would not allow him to give up on anything.
Korolev’s fascination with aviation and aerodynamics was firmly established and he studied first at the Kiev Polytechnical Institute and later at the Moscow Higher Technical School. Within a few months of graduating, he was recruited as an aeronautical engineer at Moscow’s renowned Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute. During his years of study he had continued to pursue Ksenia, and in August 1931 they were married in a modest civil ceremony. They were both twenty-four years old. Hours after they were married, Ksenia returned to work.
That same year Korolev began to develop a serious interest in space travel and soon formed a series of professional relationships that would prove crucial throughout his career. He was inspired by one of his colleagues, Fridrikh Tsander, who gave up his job to devote himself to creating an amateur rocket society in Moscow. Their society came to be known (in Russian) as the GIRD – Group for the Investigation of Reactive Motion – and they aimed to build a successful rocket engine. Korolev and Tsander sometimes worked late into the evenings from a wine cellar in a back street in Moscow. These were the years during which Stalin was imposing collective farming on the Soviet Union with dire consequences; food was short; money even shorter. But making money was not the point of their enterprise. Korolev was soon spending all his spare time at the GIRD and the group were attracting to its circle intellectuals such as Mikhail Klavdiyevich Tikhonravov, who shared Korolev’s passion for aeronautics and rocket design and became a close friend. ‘Onwards to Mars, onwards to Mars!’ was their idealistic greeting.
To a man they had been inspired by the ideas of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian village schoolteacher who had risen to become the father of Soviet space science. Writing at the turn of the century, well before Hermann Oberth in Transylvania or Robert Goddard in America – well before aviation was even established, in fact – Tsiolkovsky brilliantly anticipated the era of space exploration. He was the first to recognize that rockets would be the best means of travelling into space and to translate the fundamental principles of physics into detailed calculations. Ever since Isaac Newton had first defined the laws of gravity in the seventeenth century, the relationships between the celestial bodies had been understood. Newton showed how gravitational pull holds the moon in orbit around the earth and the planets around the sun. His calculations revealed that the strength of gravitational pull is dependent on the mass of a body and decreases with the square of the distance from its centre: the effect of gravity diminishes the further an object flies from the centre of the earth.
Tsiolkovsky applied these principles to space travel, showing how, in theory, rockets could be used to escape the earth’s gravity. His calculations showed that because gravity is strong near the surface of the earth, a large amount of thrust is needed to launch the rocket, but once that rocket has gained enough speed and distance from the earth, the engines can stop burning and the vehicle will coast. He theorized that multistaged rockets would be able to reach far out into space. Each stage would be powered by an engine or set of engines, allowing the speed of the rocket to be stepped up drastically. As each stage burned all of its fuel, it would be jettisoned so that the vehicle becam
e progressively lighter and more efficient at higher altitudes. Well before Oberth, who had influenced von Braun, he showed that liquid, rather than solid fuels, would allow controlled combustion and was particularly interested in new fuels such as liquefied hydrogen and oxygen. His ideas were published towards the end of his life and were to influence a generation of future rocket enthusiasts.
Tsander inspired the group to try to turn these ideas into reality, but it was a daily battle against lack of funds and ill health. His own sudden death from typhus in March 1933 was a loss deeply felt by Korolev. He became the natural leader of the group and within a few months, working with Tikhonravov, they successfully launched their first liquid-fuelled rocket, which travelled all of 1300 feet. With this success, they began to attract the attention of other groups, notably a military research laboratory in Leningrad where a small group led by Valentin Glushko was studying liquid-fuelled rocket engines. Like Korolev, Glushko was equally enthralled by the possibility of travelling to space. He had even written to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky describing his all-consuming interest: ‘This is my ideal and my life’s goal. I want to devote my life to this great cause.’
A far-sighted military leader named Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky recognized the value in uniting the two groups, and in the autumn of 1933 succeeded in creating a new scientific institute, known (in Russian) as RNII: Reactive Scientific Research Institute. Korolev, with his natural leadership skills, was appointed deputy director – only to be demoted for falling out with his superior over the direction of research. For several years Korolev, Tikhonravov and Glushko were all working together on different aspects of missile development, Korolev on long-range military missiles and Glushko on liquid-propellant engines. Although their research was focused on military needs, Korolev still found time to write papers, among them ‘Missile Flight into the Stratosphere’ and other space-related research, including the design of a winged rocket. Korolev was happy and his career progressed rapidly. In 1935, he and Ksenia had a daughter, Natasha, and the following year they were able to get their own apartment.
Stalin’s purges were to bring an abrupt end to all this. The underdeveloped Soviet Union of the early thirties was to be dragged into a bright new communist twentieth century. Five-year plans enforced radical changes in agriculture. Peasants were made to give up their land into state ownership. Twenty-five million were forced off the land into industry, which would now be rejuvenated and contribute to the making of a great Soviet Union. Any opposition to such overwhelming change was stamped out mercilessly. Stalin’s suspicious nature saw enemies in his own shadow. In a handful of years, millions of innocent citizens died, arrested on trumped-up charges, confessing under torture and often shot within hours or days of confessing. Punishment and death became an industry. As the crisis deepened no one was safe. ‘Enemies’ were denounced everywhere, in the party and in the Red Army. As the ‘Great Terror’ got underway, Tukhachevsky and eight other colleagues were arrested for treason and shot, including the institute director, Kleimenov, and his deputy, Langemak. Tukhachevsky’s mother, sister and brothers were also rounded up and shot.
It was impossible to escape the fallout. Over a period of a few weeks in early 1938, the finger of suspicion began to point at Valentin Glushko. Rumours that he might not be safe grew rapidly into poisonous allegations that he had had dealings with ‘enemies of the people’ and could no longer be trusted with military secrets. At a critical meeting in March 1938, almost all his colleagues denounced him – although Korolev continued to maintain publicly that Glushko could not possibly be guilty. Despite this, on 23 March Glushko was arrested.
A few weeks later, the NKVD knocked on Korolev’s door.
For the prisoners at Maldyak camp, part of the Kolyma network in eastern Siberia, the day began at 4 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m. when the men would fight to crowd around the stoves which warmed their tents, the steam rising up from their ragged, stinking garments. The diet of cabbage soup and a small ration of bread was barely enough to sustain them. The prisoners were always hungry; they talked of food, they dreamed of food. A brutal system was employed whereby criminals wielded authority as petty functionaries, keeping order in the tents. It was all but impossible to get news from the outside world. Nonetheless, Korolev knew perfectly well who was alleged to have denounced him, as a later letter he wrote to Stalin himself makes clear:
Kleimenov, Langemak and Glushko gave testimonies about my alleged membership of anti-Soviet organizations. This is a despicable lie. There are no facts to prove it, nor can there be … Without examining my case properly the military board sentenced me to ten years’ imprisonment. I was sent to Kolyma … My personal circumstances are so despicable and dreadful that I have been forced to ask you for help …
KOROLEV letter to STALIN, 13.7.40
Korolev also knew of the fate of Marshal Tukhachevsky’s relatives and wondered what had happened to Ksenia and Natasha. It was routine for a prisoner’s family to be punished; even friends and acquaintances were not safe. He hoped his rapid confession may have spared them. A distance so great, seeming to encompass more than a mere physical extent, now separated him from his former life. In his new, freezing world of mindless labour, where surviving each day was a miracle, he had no way of knowing if they had been spared, only the cold certainty that he could not see them. Even if they survived, they might not dare associate with him.
Within a few weeks of his arrival, Korolev was unrecognizable from his former self. The regular beatings meant he had lost many teeth and his gums were swollen and bleeding. Malnutrition had given him scurvy. He could barely walk, his legs were so swollen. He had a broken jaw and a huge scar on his head. It seemed he had been forgotten, left to die in his own private hell, to become a faceless statistic in Stalin’s purges. And yet some small seed of hope refused to die. He could not give up writing letters asking for his case to be reviewed.
‘I am convicted of a crime which I’ve never committed,’ he wrote to the Chief Prosecutor of the USSR:
The charges are all false and made up. I have never been a member of any anti-Soviet organization, never committed sabotage and never heard of anything like that … For 15 months I am kept away from my favourite work, which filled my entire life. I dreamed of creating unique supersonic high-altitude jet planes for the USSR, which would be the most powerful means of defence and an unrivalled weapon. I am asking you to revise my case and clear my name from the weighty accusations as I am not guilty.
Then one day a new prisoner, Mikhail Alexandrovich Usachev, former head of the Moscow Aviation Plant, arrived at the Gulag. He was tall and strong, an amateur boxer, with an imperious manner and an unwillingness to be bossed around by the ‘head’ criminal in the camp. A battle of wills and physical power soon settled the situation in Usachev’s favour, putting an end to the criminal’s favoured status. As his first act of obeisance, the head of the criminals showed Usachev round the camp. In one of the tents he pointed to a pile of dirty rags: ‘a king, a weakling, one of yours,’ he said. To his horror, Usachev recognized Korolev, who was ‘extremely weak, sick and almost breathless’. Usachev discovered that the leader of the criminals had deliberately set out to starve Korolev because he obstinately refused to bow to his will.
Korolev was taken to the camp doctor and given potato juice to combat his scurvy. Once he was a little stronger he returned to work, but this renewed strength brought its own problems. On one occasion Korolev noticed an old man too frail to push his barrow. The ‘criminal’ on guard hit him, taking perverse pleasure in watching him collapse. Too weak to stand, the old man lay helpless on the frozen ground. Unable to contain his anger, Korolev hit the guard. The crowd watched silently, expecting the worst. Incredibly, Usachev’s authority prevailed and Korolev went unpunished.
One cold November morning in 1939, an official came for Korolev. His first thought was that he would now face punishment for striking the guard, and, fearing the worst, he said his goodbyes to everyone. One of the me
n gave him his worn good coat. Korolev made his way to the camp commander to hear instead the news that he had been praying for for months. He was leaving the Gulag and returning to Moscow where his case would be reviewed. A convoluted series of circumstances had led to this stroke of good fortune. The head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, had been arrested and replaced by Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria. Beria had one of the most brutal reputations within Stalin’s inner circle and was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands during the purges and yet he was the one to authorize a review of Korolev’s case. The charge against Korolev was reduced and a retrial ordered.
There was no transport available for Korolev to get to Moscow, so he tried to hitch a lift to the town of Magadan, about one hundred miles away. The lorry driver demanded his coat as payment but when they reached Magadan the last boat had left. There would not be another until the spring. He had no choice but to stay there for the winter. He looked around. Thick snow lay on the ground, brilliant in the moonlight. It was very cold, around 50 degrees C below zero. His clothing was thin. He had not eaten for two days and was desperate for food. And then, he said, some sort of miracle occurred. As he walked though the snow, he saw a loaf of black bread by a well. It was still warm. He thought he was hallucinating. ‘I went up to the well, saw the loaf and shut my eyes. I realized if when I opened my eyes the loaf is not there – I am dead.’ But the loaf was still there. He ate until he was full, and then stole back into the army camp, secretly hid under a bed and slept. In the morning when he woke, he found his clothes were frozen to the floor.
His health deteriorated as he slumped through the winter, doing odd jobs, barely keeping body and soul together. The spring came at last and he reached the mainland and boarded the Moscow train, but was taken off at Khabarovsk, too ill to travel, probably dying of scurvy. Korolev recounts that out of nowhere an old man appeared who took care of him, massaging his bleeding gums with herbs. He sat under a tree in the warm spring sun and could feel his vitality returning. When he opened his eyes he saw a butterfly, a fragile thing, alive and beautiful, and realized that he too, miraculously, was still alive.
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