• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 562 0

news agency claimed. Laudatory telegrams from leaders of various fraternal nations were published to show the awed reverence of the Communist bloc. Photos and footage of the racism in Little Rock were once more disseminated to drive home the stark contrast between Soviet innovation and American oppression. The campaign was relentless, and it was just as effective as the media blitz in the United States that had turned audience indifference to terror—only in reverse. Ordinary Russians, who days earlier had neither heard of nor cared about satellites, were suddenly space converts overwhelmed with national pride and a newfound sense of security and superiority.

The name Sergei Pavlovich Korolev was notably absent from the triumphant barrage of state television, radio, and print reports. Nor were the names Glushko, Pilyugin, Barmin, or any of the other top designers and engineers ever mentioned in the same breath as PS-1, which by then had also acquired the generic moniker Sputnik with Russian audiences. The public face of the Soviet space program in fact belonged to a man who had nothing to do with rockets or satellites. Leonid Sedov, a technocrat and expert in gas dynamics, was the Academy of Sciences’ representative at the IGY and various other international conferences. His chief recommendation as Soviet spokesman appeared to be a fluency in English and German, a polished delivery, and a talent for obfuscation. Sedov had become something of a celebrity since October 4, particularly in the West, where his snide remarks on America’s moral decline made all the newsreels. “The average American only cares for his car, house, and electric refrigerator,” he lectured during one speech. “He has no sense of national purpose, nor is he receptive to great ideas which do not pay off immediately.” Meeting Ernst Stuhlinger after a speech at the Eighth Congress of the International Astronomical Federation in Barcelona, Spain, on October 8, Sedov was less flip but just as smug. “We could never understand,” he lectured, according to the security memorandum Stuhlinger filed with ABMA’s counterintelligence bureau detailing his contact with the Communist official, “why your people picked such a strange design [Vanguard] for a satellite carrier. Why did you try to build something entirely new instead of using one of your excellent military engines? You would have saved so much time, not to mention troubles, and money. Why did Dr. von Braun select this other design?”

Stuhlinger appeared both puzzled and frustrated at the mistake in identity. “Dr. von Braun?” he replied to Sedov. “He did not decide this. He is not a member of the Vanguard Committee; in fact he is not even a consultant or adviser on the American Vanguard satellite.” Sedov no doubt relayed this nugget of intelligence in his own debriefing report to the KGB, along with reassurances that his German-American interlocutors had never inquired about Korolev, whose secret identity was presumably still safe. It was unlikely that Sedov himself would have inadvertently passed on any classified information. Famous as he was becoming as the spokesman for Russian rocket science, he apparently knew so little about the actual workings of missiles that on a visit to Tyura-Tam, he astounded Korolev by asking where the satellites were placed on the R-7’s central booster. (On top, Korolev had dryly replied.)

If the Chief Designer resented talking heads like Sedov stealing his limelight, he did not say so. “People in the Soviet Union did not complain during that era,” Sergei Khrushchev laughed when asked if Korolev found the enforced anonymity grating. Korelev’s daughter, Natalia, however, recalled her bitter disappointment when the Nobel committee wanted the name of the scientist responsible for Sputnik so they could award him the Nobel Prize in Physics. It is the collective achievement of Soviet science, the Swedes were told. “I remember walking in Red Square,” Natalia Koroleva recounted decades later, “and seeing all these banners, and celebrations, and I wanted to shout, ‘My father did this.