Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  As proof of the alleged Soviet buildup, two pieces of evidence were presented. The first was a grainy photograph of the serial number stenciled on the fuselage of a Bison that had flown at a May Day parade in Moscow. It revealed a high numeric series, which implied a vast production line. The second proof was an eyewitness account of U.S. Air Force officers observing squadron after squadron of Bisons doing flybys at the Aviation Day air show in Moscow.

  Eisenhower was skeptical, and when Charlie Wilson testified that the intelligence was “very sketchy indeed,” Symington indignantly accused him of “unconstitutionally contradicting patriots” like General Nathan Twining, the air force chief of staff. In reality both the flybys and serial numbers were Soviet ruses to mask the weakness of their bomber program. The Soviets simply used the same squadron of planes to circle the airfield out of eyesight and to pass over the reviewing stands repeatedly. Knowing that American observers would have their telephoto lenses trained on the planes, they fudged the serial numbers to further the impression of an inflated count.

  The ploy, however, backfired and played right into the hands of the air force and its supporters, who saw a perfect excuse to bolster America’s bomber fleet. The truth of the matter was that by the forecast date, the USSR would build only 85 of the 700 new bombers projected by air force intelligence, while the U.S. heavy bomber force would grow to 1,769 planes—a twenty-to-one ratio in America’s favor that hardly called for additional reinforcements. (The Strategic Air Command would add another 1,000 bombers to that already overwhelming superiority by the end of LeMay’s reign.) But in the absence of hard evidence to the contrary, the alarmist air force assertions were accepted. The accuracy of the hyped data was not pertinent, but its potential political value was. The dearth of reliable information on the Soviet Union simply heightened paranoia and made the worst-case scenario easier to swallow. “You’ll never get court-martialed for saying [the Soviets] have a new type of weapon and it turns out that they don’t,” Victor Marchetti, the CIA’s top Soviet military analyst, ruefully remarked. “But you’ll lose your ass if you say that they don’t have it and it turns out that they do.”

  The bomber gap was “fiction,” as Eisenhower well knew. But the president did not challenge Symington’s findings. In fact, many of the air force officers who provided the testimony and information for the hearings were promoted, including the air force’s intelligence chief, Major General John Samford, who was rewarded with the top slot at the newly formed National Security Agency. Nor did Ike veto the supplemental $928.5 million budget increase for LeMay to add six more SAC wings—180 new B-52s—to his armada. Boeing, the principal financial beneficiary of the supplement, immediately started a second production line to fill the order.

  The billion-dollar boondoggle was the price Eisenhower paid to prevent the Democrats from making national security an election issue. He could not appear dovish, especially since his failing health had left him exposed to criticism. Already the New York papers were hinting that the heart attack and Eisenhower’s subsequent stomach surgery for ileitis in early 1956 had debilitated him. Arthur Krock of the New York Times acidly speculated whether Eisenhower’s “frequent changes of scene and recreation imply that he is irked by his heavy and incessant duties.” The president’s penchant for delegation, disdain for detail, and notoriously tangled speaking style (“in which numbers and genders collide, participles hang helplessly and syntax is lost forever,” according to Krock) offered more grist for allegations of mental torpor.

  The growing disenchantment of the press had not yet filtered down to the average voter, who still liked Ike. But, as the historian Fred Greenstein noted, “the much publicized golfing trips, the working vacations, and even the Wild West stories he read at bedtime, which many critics suggested were the outward signs of a passive president with a flaccid mind,” left Eisenhower particularly sensitive to accusations of weakness. And so defense was the one area where his administration had to maintain a strong public posture at all cost. The air force got its superfluous bombers. Money would simply have to be siphoned from less politically essential military programs.

  3

  TRIALS AND ERRORS

  The Pandora’s box that Nikita Khrushchev had pried open during his secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress would explode in his face eight days later.

  On the morning of March 5, 1956, the continuous blaring of car horns pierced the crisp mountain air over the ancient Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Sirens echoed through the steep cobblestone streets, bouncing off the fifth-century facades of ancient buildings, and the sound rippled down through the valley’s orchards, ravines, and steaming sulfur springs below. Near the Palace of Labor, a new and unappealing Soviet structure, a crowd of about 150 people marched down the middle of the road. Their heads were uncovered in a show of respect and bereavement, and they carried red wreaths and large portraits of Joseph Stalin with the corners draped in black crape. It was the third anniversary of the Great Leader’s death, an event previously marked by solemn processions throughout the Soviet Union.

  But on that day only the Georgians commemorated the passing of their native son. In the rest of the empire there was an official and insulting silence: no ceremonies, no tributes, no mass rallies—just persistent and disturbing rumors that Stalin had been discredited as a brutal tyrant. In Tbilisi, the puzzlement turned to indignation. The Georgians were a fiercely proud people, one of the first nations on earth to have adopted Christianity back in AD 337. Tiny as their mountain enclave was, two of their own, Stalin and Beria, had ruled the endless and chaotic landmass of Russia and had presided over the largest expansion of the Slavic empire since Catherine the Great. Under Stalin, Georgian had become the unofficial second language of a global superpower, and ambitious apparatchiks in Moscow affected soft, slurry Georgian accents. Now, unsettling reports were circulating that Stalin’s memory had been besmirched, that the “Great Son of the Georgian People” had been denigrated. In Tbilisi, this caused grave patriotic concern.

  The following day, something strange happened. The mourners returned for a spontaneous, unsanctioned march. This time there were one thousand people, and they carried portraits of Lenin in addition to Stalin. The mood was different as well, recalled Sergei Stanikov, the local correspondent for the Moscow daily Trud, or Labor. Stanikov, a loyal party man, smelled a story. In twenty years of covering Georgian politics, he had never witnessed a spontaneous rally. No one demonstrated in the Soviet Union without permission. Stanikov followed the crowd as it squeezed through the narrow, musty streets and made its way to Georgian Central Committee headquarters at Government House. Was it true, the mourners demanded, what was being said about Stalin in Moscow? “A meeting was held at 4 o’clock in which I was present,” Stanikov wrote in a secret report. “Comrade Mzhavanadze [the first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party] informed us that he would soon acquaint us with the letter regarding the Cult of Personality.”

  Unsatisfied with this vague and discouraging response, the mourners returned in even larger numbers the next day. At noon, students from Stalin University, the Institute for Agriculture, and the Polytechnical Institute walked out of their classrooms and joined the growing mob on Rustaveli Street. “Dideba did Stalins” the crowd chanted defiantly in Georgian, “Long live Stalin.” The students were angry. Georgians had a reputation for their fiery temperament; their hospitality knew no bounds, as evidenced by their elaborate twenty-one-toast protocols during brandy-filled banquets for foreign guests, and neither did their anger at perceived slights. A car was overturned. Someone threw a rock at the City Council Building. The chants also took a more ominous, nationalistic turn. “Long live Georgia, long life to the Georgian people.”

  Local officials dispatched frantic messages to Moscow. They had no experience with civil disobedience and wanted instructions from the Kremlin. This, in itself, was not unusual. In a vertical hierarchy like the USSR, no official who valued his perks—or position—made independent de
cisions without consulting higher authority. The members of the Presidium were so bogged down with the minutiae of running this vast nation that they were currently reading the manuscript of a young writer named Boris Pasternak to decide whether his novel Doctor Zhivago should be banned. (It was.) The Ministry of the Interior told the Georgian officials to publicly read Khrushchev’s proclamation on Stalin’s crimes and the Cult of Personality. That should silence the crowd. But it didn’t.

  As Molotov and Kaganovich had feared, Khrushchev’s precedent of openly criticizing a Communist icon served only to whip Georgians into their own frenzy. It was as if Khrushchev, by his own example, had given citizens license to criticize the regime as well. And now that they had tasted a little freedom to protest, they couldn’t stop themselves.

  The following day, March 8, some eighteen thousand demonstrators filled Lenin Square in Tbilisi, their grievances having grown more wide-ranging. “Provocative speeches of inflammatory, chauvinistic and anti-Soviet nature were read,” Stanikov reported indignantly to his editors, who relayed the breathless dispatches to KGB headquarters. (Stanikov, like other Russian correspondents in Tbilisi, understood that his field reports were not for publication, and the Soviet media made no official mention of the brewing unrest. Journalists simply acted as an extra set of eyes and ears on the ground for the security organs.) “A huge young man with a Tarzan hairdo,” Stanikov continued, “waved his fist in the air, and after a series of accusations against the Party and the government, went on to recall the struggle of the Georgians against foreigners.”

  Stanikov was shocked, and for the first time since the marches began he was also frightened. The demonstration had shifted to dangerously seditious grounds, because the “foreigners” in question were Russians. What had started as indignation over Khrushchev’s denunciation of a hometown hero was rapidly devolving into an independence rally, a cry for autonomy from the Kremlin itself. Stalin, after all, had been the central linchpin to Georgia’s tenuous allegiance to Moscow. Without the reflected glory of the Great Leader, it did not take long for Georgians to remember that they had been forced at bayonet point to join the empire.

  Poets and writers stoked the nationalist flames with fiery readings of Georgian folklore. People waved purple prerevolutionary Georgian flags and sang odes to kings from centuries past. Every vehicle in the city honked its horn in solidarity. Even Stanikov unwittingly caught the liberty bug, feeling free to criticize Soviet authorities in one dispatch. “In my opinion, the public reading of [Khrushchev’s] letter on the cult of personality should have been avoided,” he complained to his bosses, expressing a contrarian view to the party line that, in Stalin’s day, only a fool would have put in writing.

  The situation was spiraling out of control. In Moscow, on the evening of March 8, the Presidium debated what to do. Khrushchev urged restraint; Molotov and Kaganovich wanted order restored immediately. The unrest had started to spread to other Georgian cities. Left unchecked, the madness could infect neighboring regions in the volatile Caucasus and possibly contaminate the entire Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, inflaming the nationalist aspirations of Kazaks, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Tatars, Baits, Moldovans, and western Ukrainians—to say nothing of the Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, and East Germans living unhappily under Moscow’s yoke. The Presidium argued late into the night. And by morning the reports from Tbilisi were increasingly alarmist. “On March 9th unimaginable things were happening,” Stanikov wrote. “Not only the youth, but even adults were going berserk on the streets. Most of the small workshops were closed. The employees of small offices came out on the streets…. The movements of trams, buses and trolley buses were disrupted.”

  The entire city was paralyzed. The sprawling Stalin Coach Works, the huge locomotive factory, shut down. In the early afternoon, the Georgian first party secretary tried to address the agitated crowd outside Government House but was shouted down. No one had ever publicly defied the senior Communist Party representative before. Terrified, he locked himself in his office, surrounded by armed guards. The Georgian Central Committee hotline to the Kremlin burned with urgent pleas for guidance. The local authorities were no longer in control.

  Just before midnight, word reached Moscow that a huge crowd had descended on the main radio and telegraph station in central Tbilisi, demanding to broadcast from the transmission tower. Tanks had deployed around the communications center and were anxiously awaiting instructions. The time for debate was over. Something had to be done now. “This is what the provocation, that was apparently organized by foreign spies and agents, and which was not dealt with in time, led to,” Stanikov reported afterward. “Hooligans put everything into action: knives, stones, belts. There was no way out for the soldiers. Their life was in danger and they were forced into taking defensive action.”

  By the time the T-55 tanks finished “defending” themselves from the onslaught of civilian belt buckles and pocketknives, nine protesters were officially pronounced dead, dozens lay wounded, and thirty-eight alleged ringleaders were arrested. Historians would later increase the body count ten- to twentyfold, though to this day no one knows how many Georgians actually died during the March 9 massacre. One thing was clear, however: Nikita Khrushchev had unleashed powerful pent-up forces with his secret speech. His attempt to breathe a little democracy into the Stalinist corpse had horribly backfired because a little democracy can be dangerous in a totalitarian society. Liberalization is a slippery slope. And dictatorships can easily lose their footing once they loosen the reins. Khrushchev didn’t understand that, and he underestimated the longing for self-determination of the nationalities held captive behind the Iron Curtain.

  His troubles, in fact, were just beginning.

  • • •

  As the winter wore on and the KGB hunted for the “nest of foreign spies” that had incited the Georgian uprising, Sergei Korolev grappled with his own share of difficulties. His problems, like Khrushchev’s, had been mostly of his own making.

  Korolev had fallen into the classic salesman’s trap. During his pitch to the Presidium at OKB-1, he had made wildly unrealistic promises in order to close the deal for the satellite. By showing the Presidium a full-scale mock-up of the R-7, he had left Khrushchev and Molotov with the distinct impression that a prototype of the ICBM was almost complete. But the rocket they had seen was an illusion, little more than a ten-story-tall modeler’s toy. The real prototype was nowhere near ready. The satellite was also hopelessly behind schedule. And the modifications required for the rocket to carry it were not nearly as “minor” as Korolev had breezily suggested. In short, Korolev had conned Khrushchev, a sucker for engineering marvels who could easily “be beguiled by a charismatic scientist promising miracles,” according to his biographer William Taubman.

  Korolev had played on Khrushchev’s intellectual aspirations and educational shortcomings, while downplaying his own limitations. During the Presidium presentation, he had even silenced Glushko, the suave main engine designer, who had emphasized the daunting complexities of making the R-7 operational. “Our guests are not interested in the technical details,” Korolev had interrupted, with a cheerfully dismissive wave. But now that Korolev had to deliver on his promise, those technical challenges were mounting.

  Glushko’s engines were the first hurdle. They had to be almost ten times as powerful as anything ever built before, and required a radically new design. Their success also depended on the ability of Glushko and Korolev to get along, which was no easy task since they had a long and acrimonious history to overcome. Aside from their mutual disdain, these two titans of Soviet rocketry were diametric opposites. Glushko was elegant and regal, with delicate, slightly feminine features, and soft, sensuous Asiatic eyes that hinted at a genetic link to Mongol invaders from centuries past. Matinee-idol handsome, he took great pride in his appearance. His suits were handmade of imported black-market fabrics. His shirts were cut and starched in the latest Western style. And he wouldn’t be caught d
ead in the Bulgarian and Polish shoes favored by party high-ups. He fussed over his hair and neatly manicured nails, and selected his silk ties carefully.

  Korolev, on the other hand, never wore a tie unless he had to, favoring black leather jackets, and he looked like a heavyweight boxing coach who had taken a few punches on the chin. His thick fingers were nicotine-tinged, and his shirts were wrinkled and often stained with soup. His thinning black mane had a will of its own whenever he forgot to slick it down, which was frequently, and it could safely be said that he didn’t give much thought to his appearance.

  Glushko loved the ballet and classical music, and he enjoyed long, languid meals at Moscow’s few fine restaurants. Korolev had no interests outside of rockets and viewed food as fuel. “He ate very quickly,” a fellow OKB-1 engineer recalled. “After finishing the food on his plate, he would wipe it clean with a piece of bread, which he subsequently put in his mouth. He even scooped up the crumbs and ate them. Then he licked all his fingers. The people around him looked on with amazement until someone volunteered that this was a habit he had developed during his years in prison and in labor camps.”

  No one who had ever gone through the gulag emerged physically or psychologically unscathed. Though the Chief Designer rarely spoke of it, the Great Terror had left indelible marks on both his body and his soul. Even decades later, he could remember the minutest details of his arrest in 1938: the rasp of the needle on the gramophone that kept churning its spent record while the men in black ransacked his apartment; the sound of the trolleybus bells ringing six stories below; the hushed whimper of his three-year-old daughter, Natalia, as she clung to her terrified mother.