• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As October edged toward November, pushing Medaris farther out on his limb, only two things could happen, he felt increasingly certain. Either Vanguard would fail, in which case the government would have no choice but to turn to ABMA as its last resort. Or he was going to face a full court-martial, a dishonorable discharge, and possibly prison. It never occurred to him that Nikita Khrushchev might provide a third option.

9

SOMETHING FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Dwight Eisenhower wasn’t the only one caught off guard by Sputnik. Nikita Khrushchev had also initially underestimated its hefty political payload.

Before October 4, Khrushchev had been only partly paying attention to the proceedings at Tyura-Tam. “Just another Korolev launch,” he later conceded, recalling that an aide had needed to remind him that the Chief Designer, in a fit of paranoia, had moved up the date by two days. Since the R-7 had already proved itself on two successful trials, there was no longer any great sense of urgency as to the rocket’s viability. Its temporary incarnation as a space launcher, while intriguing from a scientific and competitive point of view, was not critical to the missile’s main mission as a weapon. The stakes, therefore, were not so high, at least as far as the first secretary was concerned.

Khrushchev also had some pressing earthly problems to contend with. Like Korolev, he had fallen prey to paranoia and fear of rivals, both real and imaginary. In the weeks that followed the summer’s failed hard-liner putsch, he had become increasingly convinced that another coup was in the works, and that once more dark forces were aligning to depose him. His nagging doubts festered, so that by the time Korolev rolled out the R-7 for his space shot, Khrushchev had decided to act on his suspicions. But he had to tread cautiously and spring the subtlest of traps, because his perceived challenger this time was not a party rival or a Stalinist holdover but the head of the Soviet armed forces, a soldier with the nation at his feet and the world’s largest army at his command.

Marshal Georgy Zhukov, hero of the Great Patriotic War, conqueror of Berlin, savior of Moscow, and Khrushchev’s rescuer during the June coup, had simply grown too powerful. The man whose popularity had so intimidated Joseph Stalin that the old tyrant had not dared have him killed was once more impinging on the balance of power within the Kremlin. Nor, it seemed, could he help himself; he was just too large for life, and he kept threatening to overshadow his civilian masters.

To ordinary Russians, Zhukov was a legend, a Soviet Patton and MacArthur rolled into one deliciously gruff and outsize package. Arrogant and abrasive, he had a soldier’s disdain for politicians, a seaman’s penchant for profanity, and a marine’s storm-the-beaches attitude toward bureaucracy. Like Khrushchev, he had been born poor and humble from illiterate peasant stock, and he had spent a childhood laboring in factories instead of classrooms. His real education had come on the battlefield, starting at the age of seventeen. Marked for early promotion in the new Red Army because of his proletarian roots and daring cavalry charges during the October Revolution and the civil war that followed, Zhukov had pioneered the use of tanks on his rapid rise. It was those innovative tank tactics that had first brought him to Stalin’s attention in July 1939. In one of his infamous fits of paranoia, Stalin had just butchered forty thousand officers, including most of his general staff, and Japan had exploited the resulting vacuum and disarray in the Soviet High Command to seize Mongolia, an unofficial Soviet dominion. Dispatched to repel the invaders, Zhukov routed the Japanese so soundly that they sued for peace and signed a nonaggression treaty that in time would protect the USSR from having to fight on two fronts. Impressed, Stalin summoned the young general to Moscow in 1940 to lead the German side in war games that simulated a Nazi invasion. Once more, Zhukov routed