by Nigel Cliff
The showdown took place at a Presidium meeting held late on June 18, 1957, a date chosen because many Khrushchev loyalists were absent from Moscow then. Malenkov immediately disputed Khrushchev’s right to preside and moved that Bulganin assume the chair. Most of those present were taken by surprise, but unease at Khrushchev’s behavior was widespread, and the vote carried. Malenkov bitterly accused Khrushchev of undermining collective leadership by making up policy on the hoof and demanded that he resign. In the heated debate that followed, the plotters labeled Khrushchev’s agricultural policies (including his authorization of limited private production) a “rightist deviation” and his foreign policy “Trotskyist and opportunist.” His tomfoolery was summed up by his mania for planting corn, a crop that was unsuited to many Soviet regions. It was time to hit the brakes on de-Stalinization, before the entire system flew apart.
Over Khrushchev’s strenuous objections the plotters moved to vote on dismissing him as first secretary. The motion carried seven to four, but to their surprise, the flinty-eyed rustic refused to budge, declaring the action illegal on the grounds that some Presidium members had not been notified of the meeting. He insisted on putting the matter to a vote by the full Central Committee, but his opponents refused, knowing full well that Khrushchev had packed it with his own people. Bulganin had stationed guards around the building, but a Khrushchev ally got word out to some Central Committee members who were in Moscow. Eighteen or twenty arrived, forced their way past the guards, and delivered a petition demanding a Central Committee plenum.
Uproar broke out in the Presidium chamber, and some of the missing members returned to find their colleagues deadlocked. Khrushchev’s supporters, meanwhile, summoned Central Committee members from the provinces and foreign embassies; Georgy Zhukov, now minister of defense, flew many in on military planes. Three hundred nine made it to Moscow in time; at least a third owed their positions to Khrushchev. The plenum opened four days after the first showdown and turned into an eight-day-long attack on the plotters. Speakers vied to accuse them of factionalism and complicity in Stalin’s purges, reviling them as murderers, criminals, and sadists whose hands dripped with innocent blood. “Only you are completely pure, Comrade Khrushchev!” Malenkov bitterly retorted. “Didn’t you sign death warrants in Ukraine?” Kaganovich asked rhetorically. “All of us together aren’t worth Stalin’s shit!” Khrushchev screamed. “You are young! We will correct your brains!” barked the increasingly senile Voroshilov, the ceremonial head of state, jumping up and waving his arms. Yet by the end he, too, had denounced the plotters, as had Bulganin. When Zhukov appeared and added his voice, Malenkov and Kaganovich confessed their guilt; only Molotov doggedly held out. Dubbed the Anti-Party Group, they were removed from their jobs and expelled from the Presidium and the Central Committee.
Khrushchev had lately made a habit of turning up with his friend and ally Mikoyan, now deputy premier, to the National Day parties thrown by foreign embassies. When the next one came round, he made a beeline for the gaggle of Western correspondents, to boast that his opponents were alive and being found employment for which they were qualified. Show trials belonged to the past, but their jobs had been chosen with a sense of humor. Molotov, Stalin’s globetrotting foreign minister, was dispatched as ambassador to landlocked Outer Mongolia. Malenkov, an electrical engineer, became manager of a hydroelectric plant in eastern Kazakhstan; though life there was limited, Stalin’s intended successor was later said to be happier away from the pressures of the Kremlin. Kaganovich, the master builder of Moscow’s glorious Metro, was sent to run a cement plant east of the Urals. Voroshilov and Bulganin were reprimanded but stayed in their posts. Khrushchev rewarded Zhukov by making him a full member of the Presidium, but he was scared of the war hero’s popularity and power. Four months later he sent him on a tour of the Balkans and sacked him for “Bonapartism” while he was away.
Now, beyond doubt, Khrushchev was first among equals. It was still not enough.
ON JULY 28, a month after the ructious plenum, the World Festival of Youth and Students took over Moscow. Its political bias was evident from the list of previous host cities (Prague, Budapest, East Berlin, Bucharest, and Warsaw), and its joint organizers, the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students, were known in the West as Kremlin fronts. Still, thirty-four thousand young people from one hundred thirty countries arrived in the broiling Soviet capital for two weeks of music and sport, among them sixteen hundred Britons and one hundred sixty Americans who consisted of rebels traveling against State Department advice and a roughly equal number of CIA plants. Three million Muscovites came out to welcome them as they paraded on trucks to Lenin Stadium for the opening ceremony. As the Americans waved the Stars and Stripes, the crowds strained past the police lines, bombarding the visitors with souvenir pins and candy and shouting the festival slogan Mir i druzhba!—“Peace and friendship!” The locals were supposed to meet foreigners in groups, under KGB or police supervision; one young Soviet journalist whose father had just returned from the Gulag panicked as a truckload of Italians laughingly pulled her aboard. Yet the operation spun out of control, and Moscow’s youth was soon reveling in unprecedented and virtually unfettered contact with Westerners. The Soviets asked for news about émigrés such as Stravinsky, and the visitors asked why Moscow was so poor and shabby even though it had just been given an expensive face-lift. In the sunny evenings, they clustered on the broad pavements of Gorky Street, the main drag known to Americophiles as “Brodvay,” and engaged in passionate discussion. Many Muscovites repeated the old line that the United States was in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were gearing up to achieve world domination in a terrible new battle. They could not understand why the West was so antagonistic toward them. “Why should anyone want to oppose the Soviet Union?” an interpreter asked an American journalist; the Communist Party was so clearly correct on all international questions that it was hard to imagine another viewpoint.
To the authorities this novel exchange of opinions was alarming, not least because they had a major problem with disaffected youth. In Stalin’s last years, the USSR had experienced a sharp rise in juvenile delinquency, ranging from mass slacking to violent and sometimes lethal assaults in schools. At first it was blamed on a long-standing Tarzan cult, which inspired otherwise normal Soviet youngsters to swing yodeling from trees and through upper-story windows while sporting shaggy haircuts and dressing “like parrots”; then on Western-style fashionistas, who wore zoot suits, bell-bottoms, and risqué ties and who spoke only English (or, in the case of two educated hooligans who created a disturbance in the Hotel Moskva, English and Latin). The party youth organization Komsomol had recently declared war on the hipsters, who were known in Russian as stilyagi, together with “aristocrats and other loafers and hooligans,” going so far as to suggest they should be sent to labor camps. Yet during the festival the stilyagi were far from alone in gaping at the visitors’ blue jeans, which became smoking hot items on the black market, or obsessing over American cosmetics, gadgets, cars, and cigarettes. Nor were all the youngsters who flocked to jazz bands out to cause trouble, despite the common saying “Today you’re playing jazz and tomorrow you’re going to sell out your motherland.” Millions listened to Willis Conover’s nightly jazz program on the Voice of America, mocking budget-busting efforts to jam it, and the outlawed music was so popular that when the first American exchange students arrived at Moscow University, they “told wild tales of Russian youth lusting to trade dormitory sex for jazz and pop recordings.” After a concert by a British jazz group at the festival, one young Russian sneaked backstage past the KGB guards and recited like a mantra the names of American jazz legends; in return he got his first professional lesson on the saxophone, which Stalin had banned as an enemy instrument, and for the duration of their stay he posed as the sixth member of the quintet. Naturally, Western music did not win the festival song contest: that honor went to a sentimental ditty called “Moscow
Nights.” To the surprise of its authors, who had originally written it as “Leningrad Nights” and who thought it was a bit of nonsense, it also won the overall first prize and was on everyone’s lips.
As events reached a climax, the streets filled with Muscovites and foreigners dancing the jitterbug and holding hands in front of banners of Lenin. Brief, torrid affairs broke out between Russian girls and foreign men, especially black men. The dark fields and woods near the visitors’ hotels on the edge of the city filled with furiously copulating couples. Trucks equipped with searchlights and manned by surly Komsomol marshals in identical rough boiler suits revved up to catch them in the act and arrest the women, but in regimented Moscow, a city of hierarchies and lonely people, the lure of exotic foreigners was too strong, and the festival was followed nine months later by what was awkwardly called the “inter-baby boom.”
Ignoring the U.S. government’s dire warnings, forty-one Americans boarded a train, as a brass band played and a thousand Muscovites held out flowers, and set off on a three-week, all-expenses-paid tour of Communist China. That handy bit of propaganda could not disguise the fact that the festival was an unmitigated disaster for Khrushchev. Young people coupling in the undergrowth were not what he had meant by peaceful coexistence. Worse, many Soviet youths appeared drawn to the West by disaffection as much as by positive attraction. Their apathy toward Communist ideals and their cynicism about the achievements of socialism were profoundly shocking to men and women schooled in the revolutionary class struggle.
KHRUSHCHEV WAS determined not to put up the shutters, but he could ill afford to court ridicule again. Luckily the Ministry of Culture had a suggestion that was both reassuringly decorous and virtually guaranteed to impress Soviet genius on citizens and foreigners alike. The idea, which probably originated with the Union of Soviet Composers, was to hold a high-profile music competition in Moscow.
With musicians such as Emil Gilels wowing the West, classical music had become prime evidence in the Soviets’ triumphalist case that their political system was the perfected culmination of everything that had gone before. Khrushchev was no aesthete—he complained of seeing Swan Lake so often that the mere prospect made him feel sick—but nor had it crossed his mind to cut arts spending. The Soviet republics supported 503 permanent year-round theater companies, 314 middle schools of the arts, 48 higher schools, and 43 advanced conservatories and theatrical and art institutes, while the Ministry of Culture had direct charge of 900,000 arts workers. Many were employed in the famously tough system of music training that funneled children as young as seven to specialist music schools, where the best were prepared for eight years’ further study at a conservatory. These incubators of excellence were famous for producing fast, brilliant pianists, who were considered unbeatable. Violinists were equally strong, and the two instruments were natural choices for the upcoming contest. The shackles of socialist realism had finally fallen from Soviet composers after the Secret Speech, and many Russian and Soviet masterpieces were chosen for the program—including some that were seldom if ever heard abroad, which, intentionally or not, made life harder for foreign participants.
The proposal was taken to the Central Committee, which was persuaded not so much by the cultural benefits as by the propaganda prospects both at home and abroad, and raised no objections. As for the competition’s namesake, in a country that was still deeply wedded to its heritage, it could only be Tchaikovsky, whose name now adorned the Moscow Conservatory where the composer had so unhappily taught.
The first international competition to be held on Soviet soil was always going to be newsworthy. The catalyst that would make it potentially explosive was about to take off from a top-secret site thirteen hundred miles southeast of Moscow.
• 6 •
The Red Moon
AT 10:27 p.m. Moscow time on October 4, 1957, the desert of Kazakhstan was cold, silent, and dark.
At 10:28 there was a loud hiss and a dull roar, as if tectonic plates were shifting deep underfoot. A fiery glow flickered across the flat scrub and dunes, unmasking a hundred-foot-high monster held by four restraining arms. Flames spilled out of a pit in the sand, and smoke plumed into the air. There was a bright flash, and the roar grew deeper and more deafening than a thousand bass drums. The glow dipped and then intensified to a dazzling white as incandescent gases jetted up in columns. The roar and the drumming mixed with a hellish crackling that seemed to come from the center of an incinerating forest, and a blinding point of light rose above the ground. From the heart of the inferno, the behemoth sprang free and shuddered into the night sky riding a column of fire. Two hundred eighty tons of Russian metal, kerosene, and liquid oxygen were heading for space.
The bulbous missile with its four flanking boosters soared aloft at nearly four miles a second. One hundred sixteen seconds after launch the boosters jettisoned, drawing a fiery cross thirty miles high as they fell aside. The central core flexed and barely slowed its journey toward the heavens. At four minutes and fifty-five seconds it shuddered again as the liquid propellant ran out and the engine shut down. It was a second early and five miles lower than intended, but momentum carried the craft another hundred miles through the atmosphere and into the blackness of space.
Twenty seconds later, pneumatic pistons nudged the nose cone away from the spent rocket. It sprang off to reveal the payload: a metal sphere the size of a beach ball, polished to shine like a star. Four spidery antennae whipped into position, and Sputnik 1, the rocket casing, and the cone began their maiden orbit around Earth.
It had taken just over five minutes for the Space Age to begin, and it began in the Soviet Union.
As the little orb headed to the East Coast of the United States, Americans were settling in to watch the premiere of a winsome suburban sitcom called Leave It to Beaver. On the news the big story was Eisenhower’s decision to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to escort nine black children to an all-white high school.
“We are bringing you the most important story of this century: mankind’s breakthrough into space,” the NBC radio announcer cut in. As word spread, families and neighbors drifted outside and stared at the evening sky. Astronomers peered through telescopes. The telemetry signal from the 184-pound ball was designed to be picked up by anyone with a shortwave receiver, and a ham radio station at Columbia University was first to broadcast the eerie sound: a chirpy whoo-whoo-whee-whee, gratingly repeated over and over again.
Visionaries had foretold the day when man would defeat gravity and leap above the earth’s atmosphere. Now the dream was a reality, and a new epoch had dawned for humankind. Yet, to Americans’ utter incomprehension, it had not dawned in the United States. It was as if the eeriest episode of Science Fiction Theatre had come to life, and the next day panic set in. Time and again America’s leaders had boasted that theirs was the Number One Nation, light-years ahead of the Reds in technology. There was no chance of the Russians smuggling a suitcase bomb across U.S. borders, went one joke, because they were still working on the suitcase. Now Americans were laughing out of the other side of their mouths, and the headlines were bold, tall, and brutal:
REDS WIN SPACE RACE WITH MAN-MADE MOON
SIGHT RED BABY MOON OVER U.S.
ORB SPANS U.S. 7 TIMES A DAY
Pundits compared the moment to Columbus’s discovery of the Americas or the splitting of the atom. Politicians thundered that Sputnik was a devastating blow to national prestige and security and proved that America was fast becoming a second-rate power. “What went wrong?” puzzled one television intellectual. “How did a nation of backward peasants forge so dramatically ahead of us in the race to space?” The unspoken fear: if central planning could achieve such wondrous feats, perhaps communism really was the wave of the future.
In an age of civil defense and air-raid sirens, when schoolchildren practiced crouching under desks or in dark basements while clasping their heads to keep their skulls from flying apart, people needed no help to be afraid. Men and
women interviewed on the news asked the same question: if the Russians had Sputnik, what else did they have up there? The answer came four days after the satellite launch, when the USSR detonated an enormous twenty-megaton thermonuclear bomb. “This is a weight that our current rocket can carry anywhere,” Soviet radio declared. “Our Sputnik proves to the world that we have the first ICBM, the ultimate weapon.”
The moat of oceans that had kept Americans safe from mass destruction through two world wars had been leapt over in a single fiery burst. Bombers and submarines, they heard, were useless against missiles that could turn New York into a “slag heap” within half an hour of the enemy’s pressing a button. “If Russia wins dominance of this completely new area,” an air force general told a congressional committee, “well, I think the consequences are fairly clear: probable Soviet world domination.” A poll revealed that 70 percent of Americans believed a nuclear war would happen and that, when it did, at least half the population would be killed.
The news was about to get worse. “In a masterpiece of propaganda timing,” NBC reported thirty days after the first launch, “the Soviet Union announced it had launched a Sputnik number two, carrying a live dog. This is reportedly history’s first space traveler.” Moscow was talking about going all the way to the moon. From there, Communists could control the planet. How long before soldiers were sent up to attack America from outer space? Soon the airwaves filled with reports of strange objects sighted above Los Angeles and other cities.
