When reported back to Moscow, the catch and surpass pledge pushed his most serious opponents over the edge. Molotov and Kaganovich did not hide their anger at the first leadership meeting after Khrushchev returned from Krasnodar. They bitterly reminded him that there was no basis for believing that the Soviet Union could surpass the United States in meat production anytime soon, let alone within three years.30 “You talk too much!” Khrushchev later recalled their yelling at him.31
Khrushchev’s big political mistake was to engage the prestige of the entire country without warning the rest of the Kremlin. His actions had annoyed more than the Stalinists. Even his protégés believed that before setting a Soviet goal, Khrushchev should confer first with the Presidium and then with the economic planners at the Central Committee. Like the industry reforms, the May 22 speech was yet one more reminder of Khrushchev’s willfulness and tendency to go it alone, and dangerously so, if left to his own devices.
Oblivious of the fact that his actions were causing serious disquiet in the Presidium beyond his stalwart opponents, Khrushchev incautiously mixed self-promotion with his crusade to lift the morale of the average Soviet citizen. He decided to have himself awarded a Lenin Prize for the virgin lands program. It had only been two years since the last time that Khrushchev had received a Lenin Prize, the highest award that the Soviet state bestowed on one of its citizens. The Stalinist trio of Molotov, Kaganovich, and Malenkov did not formally oppose the award, but each suggested when the issue was discussed at a Presidium meeting in April 1957 that probably the timing was not right. “We do not have the cult of personality,” said Kaganovich, “and [we] should not give a cause [for thinking so].”32
Serious preparation to remove Khrushchev began after this inept attempt at self-congratulation. Predictably, Molotov led the cabal against him. Molotov had never got over the fact that this upstart had outplayed him in 1955 and 1956, costing him his preeminent role in designing Soviet foreign policy. Malenkov’s and Kaganovich’s opposition also stemmed from old slights, especially the Khrushchev power grab of 1955.
What made the situation dangerous for Khrushchev, however, was that these three bitter men were soon joined in opposition by other full members of the Presidium who had actually benefited from the events of 1955 and 1956 but were reacting to the Khrushchev of 1957. These men—Nikolai Bulganin, Maksim Saburov, and Mikhail Pervukhin—had come to mistrust Khrushchev, whom they regarded as an erratic, willful man who was allergic to consensus building. Khrushchev had strong ideas on things about which he knew something—party work and agriculture, for instance—and strong ideas on subjects like foreign and military policy that he was just learning about. Left unchecked, Khrushchev’s energy tended toward recklessness. The nuclear era was just not the right time to have a man with a short fuse atop a superpower.
By June a rough head count showed that a majority of the Presidium agreed that Khrushchev had overstepped his bounds and needed to be demoted from the position of first secretary. Only six votes of the eleven full members were required to overturn the leader, and the conspiracy had eight.33
Khrushchev, it appears, was caught off guard by the plot. Although one of the complaints of the anti-Khrushchev group was that his loyal henchman, the current KGB chief, Ivan Serov, had established surveillance over the membership of the Presidium, Khrushchev’s first clue that something was up came in the form of an invitation from Bulganin to an unscheduled meeting of the Council of Ministers on June 18.34 Three days earlier Khrushchev had observed some open criticism of his position during a Presidium discussion of Soviet purchases of machine tools from the socialist bloc.35 But that was not much of a warning, and he left the meeting unconcerned. In fact the open criticism was a sign of the confidence of the plotters. At one point Voroshilov suggested putting off any decision on the matter “until the next meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee,” which all the conspirators knew as code for the post-Khrushchev era.
At first Khrushchev tried to beg off going to Bulganin’s meeting, saying that he was tired and had a meeting in Leningrad later in the day. But Bulganin insisted.
Once Khrushchev reached the Kremlin he found that a formal session of the Presidium had been called without his knowledge. The only topic on the agenda was his future as party leader. Stunned, Khrushchev listened as the conspirators informed him that he would have to cede his prerogative as chair of the Presidium to Bulganin for this extraordinary meeting. Mikoyan, who had not been brought into the conspiracy by the plotters, joined Khrushchev in objecting, but they were voted down.
No Soviet leader had ever survived politically the loss of a no-confidence motion in the Presidium. In January 1955 Georgi Malenkov, the first to suffer this fate, had accepted the outcome and relinquished his positions. Khrushchev, however, refused to resign when the vote went against him on June 18, 1957. He gambled that there was a huge Soviet party apparatus outside the walls of the Kremlin that was beholden to him and that these regional and local officials could keep him in power. Khrushchev had single-handedly rebuilt the party’s confidence after the shattering years of Stalinist repression. He had promoted officials from every region, thus cultivating protégés and instilling loyalty even in the men whom he had not brought to Moscow with him. Thanks to the recent agricultural successes, which had created a better political climate in the countryside, these regional leaders believed that their loyalty had been rewarded. Meanwhile Khrushchev had created good relations with the military by working with Marshal Zhukov to wash away the stain of the Stalin years, during which most of the Soviet general staff had been purged. He had assiduously supported the posthumous rehabilitation of revered civil war veterans like Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who had been murdered in the 1930s.
Khrushchev called in all these chits at once. The Soviet Air Force put special planes at the disposal of regional party secretaries so that they could fly to Moscow for a special session of the Central Committee. By the end of June 20, 107 of the 130 full members of the committee were in Moscow, and 57 had signed a petition demanding the convening of a plenary session to discuss Khrushchev’s future. The signatories supported his position that the Presidium alone could not remove a first secretary of the party.
He knew he had the votes if he could move the decision outside the Presidium. What remained of Malenkov’s political base was in Moscow, Molotov was a man of the past, and most of the other members of the conspiracy were political ghosts. There was one painful exception. His protégé the stylish Soviet foreign minister and candidate Presidium member Dmitri Shepilov had impetuously added his name to the conspiracy at the last minute. This was quite a blow to Khrushchev, who had worked closely with Shepilov when the latter was the editor of Pravda. As Shepilov become more immersed in foreign affairs, Khrushchev had welcomed his role in bringing Nasser closer to Moscow. If Khrushchev survived this coup, Shepilov would have to go, and his deputy, Andrei Gromyko, would then become Soviet foreign minister.
Khrushchev did not have to wait long to see his analysis proved correct. By June 22 it was all over. The vote in the Central Committee went against the coup plotters, who had no choice but to withdraw their effort.36
He showed compassion for his opponents. The four leaders of the plot—Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Shepilov—were demoted off the Presidium. But they were neither shot nor arrested. Their principal allies, all of whom eventually recanted their opposition to Khrushchev, suffered less dramatic declines. Bulganin was permitted to stay on the Presidium, but he eventually lost the title of premier or chairman of the Council of Ministers. Pervukhin was shifted from the Presidium to the post of Soviet ambassador to East Germany. The venerable Marshal Voroshilov was too popular with the Soviet people to punish. He was allowed to stay put, though Khrushchev rarely listened to him.
In the aftermath of their miscalculation, two of the old Stalinists, Molotov and Kaganovich, pathetically begged for their lives. Perhaps because they had once planned to kill Khrushchev, both men ass
umed that he would execute them for their sins. “Comrade Kaganovich,” Khrushchev is said to have told one of them over the telephone, “your words confirm once again what methods you wanted to use to achieve your vile aims…. You wanted to kill people. You measure others by your own yardstick, but you are mistaken. We adhere to Leninist principles and will continue to do so…. You will be able to work and live peacefully if you work honestly like all Soviet people.”37 And Khrushchev kept his promise.
FOR THE WEST whatever meaning the failed coup against Khrushchev might have for assessments of political stability in the Soviet Union was swept away less than four months later. The Soviet Union’s unexpected achievement of launching the first satellite into space seemed to change the balance of power in the superpower competition. Instantly a country that could not produce enough meat, butter, and coal to satisfy the needs of its own people had a claim to being technologically superior to the United States.
Sputnik Zemlya (“companion of Earth”), or Sputnik for short, started the space age and with it the superpower space race. In the mid-1950s the United States and the Soviet Union each undertook to put a satellite in space sometime during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957, which coincided with heightened solar activity between July 1, 1957, and December 31, 1958. In early 1957 the chief Soviet designer, Sergei P. Korolev, suggested accelerating the Soviet military program to build an intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7, and to use it to propel a satellite into space in the fall of that year.38 It took five failed launches before an R-7 with a dummy warhead blasted off successfully from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Central Asia in August 1957. This was itself a great triumph for Khrushchev, who had placed his faith in the future nuclear-tipped missile, although military deployment of the R-7 was still some years away. Korolev, who was more interested in the peaceful exploration of space than in the destruction of any targets on earth, pushed to use the R-7 to place the first man-made satellite into orbit.
Weighing just over 184 pounds, cylindrical with splayed antennas that looked like the popular tail fins on cars of the day, Sputnik had no purpose other than to orbit and make a sound. It carried a battery that would allow it to emit a deep beep, beep, beep to radio operators in the countries that it flew over. Despite later fears in the West that these beeps were encrypted messages to Soviet agents, they actually carried no information.39 Their power would be purely symbolic.
The R-7 carrying Sputnik was originally supposed to go up on October 6. There was nothing magical or ideologically significant about that day. The Presidium certainly knew about the forthcoming launch, but because the chance of failure was high, no propaganda campaign was prepared in advance. The Soviet people were not to be told anything about Sputnik unless the launch succeeded. At the last moment, Korolev decided to move up the launch two days.40 A conference on the IGY had just opened in Washington, D.C., and a paper given on September 30 by an American scientist had worried Korolev that the Eisenhower administration might be only days away from sending up its own satellite. On launch day, Khrushchev was scheduled to be coming through Kiev on his way home from his southern retreat at Pitsunda and made no plans to make the long detour eastward to attend the launch at Baikonur.41
KOROLEV HAD BEEN mistaken to believe that the Eisenhower administration was on the verge of beating them into space. Eisenhower had a very detailed space policy, and it did not include the necessity of being first into space. The U.S. president’s ideas about space travel were interwoven with his concerns about intelligence gathering over the Soviet Union. The failure of his efforts to gain Soviet approval of his Open Skies proposal had led to a risky U-2 spy aircraft program that made him uneasy. He could never get over the sense that each U-2 mission constituted an act of war, even if these high-altitude flights were only pinpricks into the sovereignty of Soviet airspace. He longed for the day when spy satellites, seemingly beyond Soviet sovereign airspace, could carry the burden of this surveillance.
Eisenhower’s sensitivity to the question of a country’s sovereign airspace also affected how he managed the U.S. effort to build satellites. In the mid-1950s the international legal status of space was still undetermined. Theoretically, a country’s claim on sovereignty might conceivably be extended into the cosmos, a farfetched notion a decade later, but when Eisenhower approved the first spy satellite program, it was still possible that the nations of the world might carve up space as they had Earth’s atmosphere. Eisenhower wanted to prevent that from happening and hoped instead to establish the principle that a nation’s satellite could orbit over another country without its permission.
The president believed that it would be easier to sell this idea that space vehicles could freely orbit Earth if the first U.S. satellite project was both open to public scrutiny and presented as having peaceful purposes. He assigned this public satellite initiative to the U.S. Navy, which called it Vanguard and kept it at arm’s length from the army and air force’s secret efforts to build an intercontinental ballistic missile. It is now believed that had Eisenhower let the army’s rocket specialists, who included the notorious Wernher von Braun, who had built V-2 rockets for Hitler, manage the program, a U.S. satellite could have been propelled into space in 1956.42 The decision to make Vanguard public also had the unintended consequence that millions of Americans quickly came to believe that the United States would be the first to put a satellite into space. By early 1956 National Geographic magazine had already crowned Vanguard “history’s first artificial earth-circling satellite.”43 If there was any talk of a space race with Moscow, it usually involved the conviction that the Soviets would take second place.
On Friday, October 4, 1957, the popular cultural milestone was supposed to be the premiere episode of a new situation comedy, Leave It to Beaver. The White House was not expecting any major international development. The president had left for his farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, intent on playing his fifth game of golf in a week. Then came the beeps. The R-7 carrying the Soviet satellite took off from Baikonur just after 2:00 P.M., eastern standard time. Every ninety-six minutes and seventeen seconds Sputnik orbited Earth, and by evening in the U.S. Northeast, ham radio operators were hearing its sound. Just after 8:00 P.M. those without ham radios got to hear the sound for the first time as the National Broadcasting Company aired a Sputnik tape on its radio network.
While American scientists immediately hailed Sputnik as an achievement for humanity, the media and many citizens saw it as the opening shot in a new and frightening phase in the Cold War. What the New York Daily News called “Khrushchey’s Comet” not only called into question the supremacy of American science but also suggested that Sputnik would be the first in a series of Soviet military achievements.44 Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who was at his Texas ranch on October 4 and had walked outside in the hope of seeing the shiny tin ball, called for immediate hearings on the threat posed to U.S. security. “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space,” said Johnson, “like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses.”45
The White House tried unsuccessfully to allay these concerns. Being first in space had never been a litmus test for Eisenhower, who remained confident that the military’s scientific team would provide him with ICBMs and a reliable spy satellite soon.46 At a press conference he told the American public that there was no reason to fear because the Soviets had “put one small ball in the air.”47 His chief of staff added that Sputnik was no more than “one-shot in an outer-space basketball game.”48 But what was later recalled as “a wave of unreasoning hysteria” would not go away.49 Within a year Eisenhower had signed bills strengthening the teaching of science and foreign languages in schools and universities and he had authorized Wernher von Braun’s team to enter the space race. On January 31, 1958, Explorer 1 was placed into orbit by an army Jupiter missile.
The public reaction in the United States and throughout the world, where Sputnik was hailed in all languages, was intoxicating for Khrushchev
. The Soviets were now touted as being ahead in rocket science, something they had only dreamed of before. If that were not enough to please Khrushchev, because of Sputnik, the Americans were second-guessing themselves, complaining about their own weaknesses. The initial reporting on Sputnik in Pravda had been restrained. But after watching the excitement abroad, the Kremlin decided to give the achievement banner treatment in the October 6 edition. Khrushchev also invited Korolev to a meeting of the Presidium on October 10. After hearing the rocket designer’s report on Sputnik, the Presidium voted to award him the Order of Lenin. There was no grumbling about this Order of Lenin’s being undeserved.50
THE CELEBRATION over Sputnik hid from public view a messy settling of scores in the Kremlin. A matter of hours before Sputnik was launched, Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet defense minister, had left Moscow on a previously scheduled three-week tour of Albania and Yugoslavia. His departure was the cue for Khrushchev to set in motion the removal of this popular World War II hero from the Presidium. For three years the two men had been political allies against the hard-line Stalinists. In 1955 Khrushchev had enlisted Zhukov in his struggle to undermine Molotov’s opposition to a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West. Most recently Zhukov had helped Khrushchev keep his job by instructing Soviet military transports to ferry Central Committee members to Moscow so that they could vote to overturn the Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov, and Shepilov coup attempt. But by October 1957 Khrushchev wanted him out on charges of trying to usurp the role of the Communist Party in Soviet national security.
Although the immediate catalyst for this crisis remains muddy, the origins are clear. Despite their agreement on the threat posed by Molotov and an acquaintance that stretched back to the Ukraine, where Zhukov had been military commander when Khrushchev was regional party chief, these two Kremlin stars had irreconcilable views on the role of the party in the Soviet military. Since becoming a candidate member of the Presidium following the Twentieth Party Congress in early 1956, Zhukov had worked to diminish the position of the political officers, the old political commissars, in the military. Responsible for ensuring the ideological reliability of the officer corps, the commissars represented party control of the military, and the marshal’s lack of respect for them as an institution was troubling to men like Khrushchev who put the CPSU first. Zhukov also raised suspicions by allowing to pass into disuse defense councils at the republic level, which were staffed and dominated by the local party elite. There were rumors that among the troops he liked to deprecate the party’s representatives, likening them to old cats “that have lost their flair.” Moreover, in his public speeches the defense minister seemed to be intentionally vague about the subordination of the military to the party.51
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