Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [155]
In October 1964, while Khrushchev was vacationing at his dacha on the Black Sea, the decision was made to oust him. In the Central Committee, 197 of the 200 full members supported the secret vote of no confidence, selecting Leonid Brezhnev as first secretary in his place. Given a generous pension, a small staff, and the use of a large apartment and dacha, Khrushchev lived out his retirement peacefully. The virtually illiterate peasant who freed the Soviet Union from Stalin’s terror and turned the USSR into an unlikely beacon of technological progress was the first leader in Russian history not to have died or been murdered in office. His son, Sergei, fulfilled his father’s dream of earning a doctorate and became a rocket scientist. Eventually, he moved to America, where today he is a senior fellow at Brown University.
Under Brezhnev, cosmic conquests would lose priority and momentum in the Soviet Union. Moscow still aimed for the moon, the ultimate bragging ground, but the effort did not have the same intensity or urgency as the post-Sputnik rush to paint the heavens Red. Focus steadily shifted toward military missile expenditures, as funds dried up and the economic crisis that the CIA had long predicted worsened. In addition to its agricultural woes, Soviet industrial growth began to slow dramatically in the mid-1960s, actually contracting in many cases, and resources became increasingly scarce. With the milestones in the space race growing ever more ambitious and costly, the Kremlin’s cautious new bosses preferred to spend on security rather than prestige.
In 1965, for the first time since its inception, OKB-1, Sergei Korolev’s design bureau, began suffering budget shortfalls and cutbacks. The Chief Designer’s star also began to fade. Khrushchev, his devoted patron, was gone, and Brezhnev did not have the same obsessive commitment to upstaging the Americans. Other missile makers were on the rise, landing big military orders, while Korolev’s giant new Lunar rocket, the N-1, was mired in technical and financial problems. What’s more, his quarreling with the imperious Valentin Glushko over the type of fuel to use on the 400-foot-tall N-1 had reached a point where the two were no longer on speaking terms, and not even Khrushchev could reconcile their differences. “I did everything I could to patch up their friendship,” the Soviet leader recalled, “but my efforts were in vain.” Worse, for the hypercompetitive Korolev, the United States was making very real strides with its proposed equivalent to N-1, the Saturn, and by the mid-1960s the Americans were poised to overtake him.
It was perhaps fortunate that Korolev died when he did, on January 11, 1966, before things began to unravel in earnest. Officially, the cause of death was complications during routine surgery to remove a tumor from his intestinal tract. But his colleagues said he worked himself to death. Korolev’s heart gave out during the operation. It had always been weak and had grown weaker in the last few years of his life, forcing frequent hospital stays. In the end, the gulag and the relentless pressure that he imposed on himself finally took their toll. The hard-driving Chief Designer was fifty-nine years old.
Buried in the Kremlin wall near Lenin’s tomb with all the pomp and ceremony of a national hero, Korolev was at last accorded the recognition he so richly deserved. He never realized his dream of putting a man on the moon, and as a weapon maker his most lasting contribution to the world’s arsenals would