Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [11]
Quantity, not quality, was the construction crews’ rallying cry, and the “Khrushchevki,” or Little Khrushchevs, as the dwarfish blocs quickly became known, howled when the winds blew in from the Urals. They suffered from shifting foundations and perennially creaky plumbing. Their gas lines exploded and their roofs leaked. But they met Kremlin quotas, and Khrushchev was immensely proud of them. Just the other month, he had taken Sergei on a tour of the cement factory that made their prefabricated parts.
On this day, Sergei was also accompanying his father on an inspection tour. The favorite of Khrushchev’s four children, Sergei, at twentyone, already stood a head taller than his dad, whom a French official once described as a “little man with fat paws.” (Khrushchev himself poked fun at his diminutive stature, joking that he was as wide as he was tall.) Sergei had his mother’s looks, blond hair and blue eyes. Nikita had darker, vaguely Asiatic features, though what little hair remained on the elder Khrushchev’s head had long ago turned white, leaving only a narrow band to warm his bald pate. Unlike his father, whose loquacious, self-deprecating sense of humor made him a favorite at Stalin’s court (and lulled his enemies into a false sense of superiority), Sergei was a serious, studious lad, on his way to fulfilling his father’s dream of becoming an engineer. The elder Khrushchev had had only four years of formal schooling before beginning his apprenticeship, at the age of fourteen, as a metalworker in a prerevolutionary Ukrainian coal mine owned by a Welsh millionaire. “After a year or two of school, I had learnt how to count to thirty and my father decided that was enough,” Nikita Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs. “He said that all I needed was to be able to count money, and I would never have more than thirty rubles to count anyway.”
Khrushchev’s lack of education was a sore point, a source of embarrassment and frustration—not only to him but to the party as well. The leaders of the revolution had been learned men: Trotsky, Bukharin, the lawyerly Lenin. Even Stalin had studied in a seminary before finding Marx. But in the Soviet version of upward mobility, the next generation of Communist Party functionaries had risen from the bottom of the proletariat, sons and daughters of the peasantry suddenly catapulted into the twentieth century, as Khrushchev himself conceded with remarkable candor. “We weren’t gentlemen in the old-fashioned sense,” he wrote in his memoir, recalling his wartime stay at the estate of a Polish nobleman. “It became impossible to enter the bathroom. Why? Because the people in our group didn’t know how to use it properly. Instead of sitting on the toilet seat so that people could use it after them, they perched like eagles on top of the toilet and mucked up the place terribly. And after we put the bathroom out of commission, we set to work on the park grounds.”
Throughout his late twenties and thirties, Khrushchev had struggled to better himself, attending the Rabfak high school equivalency programs offered to rising party functionaries and enrolling in special courses at the Stalin Industrial Academy for promising technocrats. But party business always interfered, and he never