Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [16]
While the introductions were made, and aides scurried attentively to take their bosses’ overcoats and homburg hats, the younger Khrushchev soaked in the surroundings. Buildings of all sizes dotted the missile complex: dark, grime-covered brick structures, huge rusty hangars, water towers, military-style barracks, and corrugated steel sheds that stored, among other things, 1,500 tons of potatoes and 500 tons of cabbage so that NII-88’s cantina would not suffer from the food shortages that plagued the rest of the country. There was a decrepit, Dickensian feel to the place, so much so that Sergei Khrushchev mistakenly dated the facility’s original construction to the nineteenth century. In fact, it had been built in 1926 by the German firm of Rhein-Metall Borsig to manufacture precision machinery and was later retooled and expanded to produce artillery pieces for the war. Buildings had a tendency to age prematurely under Soviet care.
Inside, the installations were surprisingly clean and modern and gleamed with white paint. The delegation was ushered into one of the largest of these, a brightly lit hangar of imposing dimensions. At the center of the hangar, displayed on large holding rings like precious museum exhibits, lay three rockets. “This is our past,” said Korolev, pointing to the smallest of the reclined missiles. Korolev was a short, powerfully built man, with a muscular neck and the compact frame of a middleweight wrestler. He had thick black hair, slightly graying on the sides, which he slicked straight back over his large forehead with the aid of pomade. He spoke slowly, in a tone that was neither obsequious nor insecure. Korolev was accustomed to dealing with Presidium members; he had even reported to Stalin on several occasions after returning from Germany in 1946 and being named head of the newly created OKB Special Design Bureau at NII-88.
The rocket he pointed to was the fruit of OKB-l’s German labors, an identical replica of the V-2 called the R-l. Everything about it was German: the parts that had gone into it; the engineers and technicians who had been forcibly relocated to Russia to assemble it (it was from them that the CIA eventually gleaned most of its information on the missile complex); even the camouflage scheme, which mimicked that of the V-2. The R-l, Korolev explained, had taken three painstaking years to master. Not until 1948 had Korolev felt confident enough to try to launch it. It flew a few hundred miles—in the wrong direction.
Khrushchev listened attentively, nodding politely. Much of this he already knew. “Father was no longer a novice when it came to missiles,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. That certainly had not been the case when Beria was alive. Beria, much like Hitler’s secret police chief, Heinrich Himmler (whom he even resembled in an effete, murderous way), had tried to dominate his country’s missile programs. Though Beria had not exercised remotely the same degree of control over NII-88 as the SS chief had exerted over V-2 production, virtually all top-level decisions involving Soviet missile development had been made by him and Stalin alone, without the participation of other Presidium members. “We were technological ignoramuses,” the elder Khrushchev recounted in his memoirs, describing the first time he and his fellow Presidium members saw a missile after Stalin’s death in 1953. “We gawked,” he wrote, “as if we were a bunch of sheep. We were like peasants in the marketplace. We walked around and around the rocket, touching it, tapping it to see if it was sturdy enough—we did everything but lick it to see how it tasted.”
The missile they had seen back then was the R-2, and this was the next exhibit in Korolev’s tour of OKB-1. The delegation—Kremlin dignitaries in their somber, medal-bedecked suits, engineers in white smocks, security men from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate in black knee-length