Red Moon Rising

by Matthew Brzezinski

  At the Kolyma mines, the most notorious of Stalin’s Siberian death factories, his days had started at 4:00 AM, in sixty-below-zero darkness that lasted most of the year, conditions that killed a third of the inmates each year. The criminals administered justice in Kolyma, beating the political prisoners mercilessly if they dropped a pickax or spilled a wheelbarrow or missed their quota. They stole their food and clothes, and pried out the gold fillings the greedy guards had overlooked.

  Within a few months of his arrival at Kolyma, Korolev was unrecognizable. He could barely walk or talk; toothless, his jaw was broken, scars ran down his shaven head, and his legs were swollen and grotesquely blue. Scurvy, malnutrition, and frostbite had started their lethal assault and he seemed destined to die.

  And yet, like millions of other purge victims, he still held out the hope that Stalin himself would realize that a terrible mistake had been made and free him. “Glushko gave testimonies about my alleged membership of anti-Soviet organizations,” Korolev wrote Stalin in mid-1940, naming several others he claimed had borne false witness against him. “This is a despicable lie…. Without examining my case properly, the military board sentenced me to ten years…. My personal circumstances are so despicable and dreadful that I have been forced to ask for your help.”

  Korolev’s mother also petitioned Stalin directly. “For the sake of my sole son, a young talented rocket expert and pilot, I beg you to resume the investigations.”

  But their letters, like the countless other pleas of assistance with Siberian postmarks that reached the Kremlin daily, went unanswered. What saved Korolev, ultimately, was Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the sudden drastic need for skilled military engineers. Transferred to one of the special Sharaga minimum-security technical prison institutes that Beria had set up to exploit jailed brainpower, Korolev slowly recovered, until, at war’s end, he was released and sent to Germany to parse the secrets of the V-2.

  Glushko had also been in the camps, and Korolev had worked for him when they were sent to the same Sharaga. He too had been told, or had somehow come under the impression, that Korolev had denounced him during the purges. After all, everyone talked and named names after a few days with the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB. Korolev himself had signed a written confession of guilt, following one of the bloodier sessions of his interrogation. And so perhaps it was true, even likely, that he had implicated others under duress. Neither man would ever truly know, though each would harbor his suspicions. Such was the fate of the children of a revolution that ate its own and spread complicity like a soul-sapping disease.

  In America, the blacklists that had cost scientists and Hollywood writers their careers or promotions during McCarthy’s rampage had led to lifelong grudges. Here the betrayals had cost people their freedom and lives, their families and possessions. And yet, when it was all over, the denouncers and denouncees were all thrown back together to coexist peacefully as if nothing had happened. No Westerner could ever hope to understand this peculiarly Soviet condition, this enforced amnesia.

  Had Glushko and Korolev forgotten, or forgiven each other? Or had they simply buried their simmering recriminations and resentments beneath a thin veneer of civility?

  Another factor complicating their reconciliation was the persistent rumor that Korolev had engaged in a long-running affair with Glushko’s sister-in-law. The alleged romance—a source of contention among contemporary Russian historians—had predated the purges and apparently resumed in 1949, as the Chief Designer’s first marriage was falling apart. Whether Glushko knew about it, or how he felt about his brother’s deception and humiliation at the hands of his rival, is not a matter of the historical record. The only thing clear amid the unanswered questions was that Korolev and Glushko needed each other and had to find a way to work together.

  Korolev now outranked Glushko, which probably didn’t help heal the old wounds, for the one characteristic the two men shared was pride. Both were intensely egotistical and ambitious and fiercely competitive by nature. In manner and demeanor, however, they were different in almost every other respect. Korolev was coarse and crude, capable of violently profane tirades during which he would scream, shout, and dismiss employees with threats of extended sojourns to Siberia. Boris Chertok recounted witnessing one such outburst. It occurred in 1945, when the two were in Germany, scouring for V-2 technology. As war booty Korolev had procured a shiny red Horche two-seater sports car, which he drove at breakneck speed, terrorizing passengers and pedestrians alike. “Sergei Pavlovich,” Chertok had pleaded, “your Horche is beautiful, but it’s not a fighter plane, and we are in a populated area, not the sky.”

  “But I have both a driver’s license and a pilot’s license,” Korolev had retorted confidently. Sure enough, a few days later Korolev rammed a vehicle from the Soviet carpool just outside Chertok’s headquarters. “Korolev flew into my office extremely upset and demanded I immediately fire the German driver, and send Chiznikov [the Russian officer in charge of transportation] into exile for not keeping order in his motor pool.”

  Korolev’s anger, however, never roiled for long. His temper subsided as quickly as it flared, and he would return a few hours later with sheepish good cheer, as if nothing had happened. (Chiznikov, for instance, was never banished for vehicular disorderliness; instead, Korolev promoted him and recruited him to work at OKB-1, where he liked to boast to impressionable young engineers: “I’m not afraid of anyone in the whole wide world—except Korolev.”)

  Glushko, conversely, never betrayed emotion or raised his voice in anger. But he held bitter and enduring grudges and worked mercilessly behind the scenes to exact revenge on those who crossed him. He was a formidable adversary, and like Korolev he knew how to work the system. Neither man was much for compromise. And theirs was an uneasy partnership destined to explode.

  The first hurdle the pair faced in the wake of the Presidium visit was rocket power. To fling a five-ton thermonuclear warhead 5,000 miles, Korolev had calculated that he needed more than 450 tons of thrust. This represented a tenfold increase over the R-5 intermediate-range ballistic missile, whose RD-103 booster had already strained the limits of single-engine capacity. (Glushko had experimented with a mammoth 120-ton thrust engine, the RD-110, but the project had been abandoned.) To meet Korolev’s vastly increased power requirement, the R-7 would have to be powered by five separate rockets, bundled like a giant Chinese fireworks display. But that still left Glushko with combustion chamber problems. Even with five supercharged furnaces sharing the load, they would still be too big and unwieldy, subject to destabilizing power fluctuations. The solution was the RD-107, an engine with a single turbo pump that simultaneously fed fuel and oxidizer to four regular-sized combustion chambers. The combined output of the twenty combustion chambers—four in each of the five boosters—would meet Korolev’s thrust specifications. The clustering of the peripheral boosters around the central rocket would make the R-7 ungainly in appearance with a bulging thirty-five-foot-wide base that resembled the skirt of a hefty babushka, but the RD-107s were far more efficient than previous-generation motors. With recast combustion chambers, shaped like cylinders rather than the standard flared mushroom mold popularized by the V-2, they would ignite kerosene, which burned hotter than the alcohol-based propellants the Germans and Americans used.

  In addition to generating more lift, the five-booster configuration solved another serious design concern. The Soviets had never designed a multistage rocket before, and Glushko refused to guarantee that the upper stages—so critical to achieving orbital velocity—would work. But if the central R-7 engine block was designed to operate longer, the four peripheral boosters could be jettisoned in flight to lighten the load, while the central core kept firing in what was effectively a one-and-a-half-stage compromise.

  The solution, however, created its own new snag. Because the larger central engine now worked longer, about four minutes in total, the heat-resistant graphite steering vanes Glushko had fixed t
o the exhaust nozzles could not be employed. They were rated to withstand the intense heat for only two minutes before burning up, and without them the R-7 could not be steered. A pitched debate broke out over how to fix the problem. Korolev favored using small gimbaled thrusters, mini-combustion chambers on swivels to provide steerage. But Glushko was violently opposed to the idea of anyone tinkering with his engines. (This was a man who so hated outside interference that he once famously drove several hundred miles with the handbrake engaged rather than heed a passenger’s advice to release it.) Already with the R-7, he was making a significant concession by using kerosene and liquid oxygen propellant rather than his favored mix of nitric acid and dimethyl hydrazine. And now Korolev was demanding even more significant alterations. A shouting match ensued, with Glushko hotly refusing to budge. If the Chief Designer wanted the damn changes, he’d have to make them himself.

  Friction was also posing serious difficulties at the working end of the R-7. At the speed the missile would travel, none of the nose cones in Korolev’s inventory could withstand the heat that would be generated during the 24,000-feet-per-second atmospheric reentry. And without that thermal protection, the warheads would be incinerated, rendering the ICBM useless.

  The problems mounted. Tests showed that the standard support blocks used to prop up rockets at launch would not support the mammoth R-7, which at 283 tons weighed more than any object that had ever been flown. A huge gantry rig with the rough dimensions of the Eiffel Tower had to be specifically built. So did an enhanced new guidance system, because the almost tenfold increase in the R-7’s range magnified minute trajectory inaccuracies by hundreds of miles at the point of impact. And then there was the nagging issue of postimpulse boost, the unwanted thrust from fuel remaining in a rocket’s plumbing system after the engine shut down. With small rockets, extraneous fuel amounted to only a few gallons that burned off harmlessly without affecting trajectory. But with a missile the size of the R-7, the amount of propellant left over in the feed lines was significantly larger. The residue could keep the engines firing for as much as a full second after shutdown and push the missile hopelessly off course at the critical aiming point.

  All these were normal glitches, typical in the creation of any major new weapons system. Korolev, however, had promised Khrushchev an impossibly tight schedule: to have the R-7 ready for flight testing in January 1957. Khrushchev, in turn, had started chopping military spending for conventional forces in anticipation of the ICBM becoming Russia’s main line of defense. He had halted the construction of costly aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers, infuriating his admirals, and had cut back on the production of long-range bombers, outraging his air marshals. If Korolev didn’t deliver, he could be jeopardizing the security of the Soviet Union, to say nothing of risking the Presidium’s collective wrath. Khrushchev may not have been a butcher like Beria, but the men around him were, and they would have no hesitation making their displeasure known.

  The Chief Designer began to sweat. He could not have forgotten the telephone call he had received from Beria in 1948 after the R-l had suffered several setbacks. “I’ve been sent the protocol of the latest tests,” Beria said, his childlike voice barely a whisper. “Another failure. And again no one is to blame. Some people are soliciting an award for you—but I think you deserve a warrant!”

  Korolev had frozen in fear. “We are doing our work honestly,” he stammered. But Beria had no interest in excuses. “Do you understand about the warrant?” he hissed, hanging up.

  Already the R-7’s delays were piling up, and now Glushko had seriously bad news. Static firing tests of his new engines showed the boosters were not performing to expectations. Thrust was not the issue. In terms of brute force, Glushko’s motors had generated 396.9 tons of lift, which translated to a better than expected 490.8 tons in the vacuum of space. The trouble was in the all-important realm of specific impulse, the ratio that calculated how many pounds of thrust were produced per each pound of propellant consumed per second. It was the aeronautic equivalent of the automobile industry’s gas-mileage ratings, which determined the fuel efficiency of different cars. The specifications for the R-7 had called for a specific impulse of 243 at sea level and 309.4 in space. But Glushko’s engines had come up short, at 239 and 303.1 respectively, a serious enough setback to warrant an official communiqué to the Kremlin. “At present time, we are completing static testing of the rocket,” Korolev glumly informed the Central Committee in the fall of 1956. “Preparations for the first launch of the rocket are experiencing substantial difficulties and are behind schedule. The current results of the stand tests give us solid hope that by March of 1957 the rocket will be launched. After small modifications, the rocket can be used to launch an artificial satellite with a small payload of scientific instruments of about 25kg.”

  Couched in the soothing verbiage of “solid hope,” Korolev was effectively warning Khrushchev that not only was he going to miss his January deadline, but the R-7 probably wouldn’t be ready in March either. What’s more, instead of the 2,200-pound advanced satellite package he had promised, the R-7 would manage to carry only a meager fifty-pound payload into space because of its poor fuel efficiency.

  The reality check, Korolev well knew, was not likely to sit well with the impatient Presidium. Fortunately for the Chief Designer, Khrushchev and the Central Committee were preoccupied with other, far more urgent matters.

  • • •

  On the morning of June 28, 1956, workers in the western Polish city of Poznan declared a general strike. It was the first labor unrest in the Soviet bloc, and by early afternoon the walkout had turned into the largest anti-Communist rally since the war. One hundred thousand people, a third of Poznan’s population, crammed Adam Mickiewicz Square, waving banners that read DOWN WITH DICTATORSHIP and, in a play on Lenin’s most famous revolutionary slogan, WE WANT BREAD, FREEDOM, AND TRUTH.

  As Kaganovich and Molotov had feared, the ill winds of liberalization let loose by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization decree had blown westward from the snowcapped Caucasus to the plains of Poland. Only Poland wasn’t an isolated and inaccessible mountain republic with a few million inhabitants. It was smack in the middle of Europe, the anchor of the new Warsaw Pact defense league designed to counter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and by far the largest of the Kremlin’s foreign holdings. It was also a very reluctant Soviet vassal, a nation with a powerful peasant class that refused to collectivize, an activist Catholic Church that could not be brought to heel, and a thriving black-market economy that was capitalist in every respect but name. It had been the unruly Poles who had leaked the contents of the secret speech to Israeli intelligence and the CIA, and it was Poland, more than any other Soviet satellite state, that had taken Khrushchev’s reformist message to heart. The thaw in Poland had actually begun shortly after Stalin’s death, but Khrushchev’s encouraging speech had accelerated the process, giving Poles new hope for democratic freedoms. Censorship in the media melted away, people grumbled publicly, and dissident officials who had been imprisoned or expelled from the Polish Communist Party were officially rehabilitated.

  In Poznan, trouble had been brewing for weeks. Residents were unhappy with working conditions, housing and food shortages, and low pay. When they marched in protest, the crowd’s anger quickly found an outlet in the secret police headquarters on Kochanowski Street. Tens of thousands of people, some armed with bats, pipes, or cobblestones ripped from the road, laid siege to the security service building. A shot rang out from one of the upper windows, and thirteen-year-old Romek Strzalkowski fell dead. After that, things got ugly. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the Soviet Union’s military overseer for Poland, ordered tanks and ten thousand troops into Poznan. This time, the official body count was seventy dead, three hundred wounded, and seven hundred arrested.

  By October, Rokossovsky was massing troops outside Warsaw and the Soviet embassy was sending distress signals to Moscow. “The Poles were vilifying the Soviet Union, and
were all but preparing a coup to put people with anti-Soviet tendencies in power,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. The Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party was now itself in open revolt. Poland’s Communist leaders wanted to oust their Moscow-backed first secretary and replace him with Władysław Gomułka, whom Stalin had jailed for “nationalist deviation.” Khrushchev was shocked. His rehabilitation program never envisioned actually putting former political prisoners into positions of high authority, never mind as heads of state. But the residents of Warsaw were arming themselves, preparing to repel Rokossovsky’s troops. On the morning of October 19, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and a visibly agitated Molotov flew to Warsaw. “From the airport we went to the [Polish] Central Committtee,” Khrushchev recalled. “The discussion was stormy…. I saw Gomulka coming toward me. He said, very nervously, ‘Comrade Khrushchev, your tank division is moving toward Warsaw. I ask that you order it to stop. I’m afraid that something irreparable could happen.’”

  Khrushchev halted the tanks and accepted Gomułka’s leadership. “A clash would have been good for no one but our enemies,” he reasoned. Faced with the imminent prospect of armed intervention, Gomułka, in turn, promised to keep Poland in the Soviet orbit. They had gone to the brink, but catastrophe had been narrowly avoided. Two weeks later, under almost identical circumstances, no one would be so lucky.

  • • •

  South of Poland, in Hungary, a crisis had been building since October 23, when students in Budapest began demonstrating in solidarity with Gomułka’s defiance. Quickly the protests spread, as factory and office workers joined the revolt. The crowds marched on the main radio tower to broadcast their grievances, what they called their Sixteen Points: more freedom and food, less police interference, fewer travel restrictions, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.