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leather jackets—obediently walked over to the full-scale R-2 model. It closely resembled the R-l, except that it was nine feet longer and of a slightly wider girth, which allowed it to carry extra fuel, doubling its range to nearly 400 miles. The R-2, Korolev explained, was a hybrid: a half-Russian, half-German elongation of the original V-2. It could go farther and faster, climb higher, and carry a heavier payload than its predecessor. Alas, it could not land much more accurately, despite all the 15,000-ruble bonuses offered to captive German engineers to improve the gyroscopic and radio beacon guidance systems that had been developed in Germany during the last year of the war. Still, the R-2 represented a major technological leap in the field of structural design, where the Soviets had learned how to build a much stronger rocket, able to withstand far greater stress loads, without significantly increasing the width and weight of the materials used to build it.

At this, the Presidium members also nodded knowingly. But Molotov and Kaganovich seemed distracted, while Bulganin appeared lost in his own private universe. Perhaps they had also heard the lecture before, or perhaps they were still mulling over the consequences of Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress. Barely two days had passed since the dramatic address had so shocked and staggered its audience that, in the words of one participant, “you could hear a fly buzzing” in the stunned silence that permeated the Great Kremlin Palace. Khrushchev had spoken for nearly four uninterrupted hours, and his listeners had turned either deathly pale or beet-red with anger. When he was done, there was not the usual standing ovation, which was typically thunderous and prolonged, because in Stalin’s day no one dared to be the first to stop clapping and sit down. The cheering could last five palm-aching minutes until the “boss” signaled that he was satisfied. But Khrushchev, at the Twentieth Party Congress, had done the unimaginable: he had publicly attacked Joseph Stalin. Stalin, he said, had abused his authority and had ruined millions of innocent lives. Stalin was a murderer, a liar, and a thief, who had stolen the communist ideal and perverted it with his paranoid quest for power.

An audible gasp had echoed throughout the palace hall, as if there suddenly was not enough air to breathe. Even to think what Khrushchev had uttered aloud was considered heretical in the Soviet Union, punishable by excommunication to Siberia or outright execution. What Khrushchev had done was tantamount to the pope assembling the College of Cardinals to denounce Christ. Stalin had been a demigod, as much revered as feared. At his funeral, such was the outpouring of grief that one hundred people had been trampled to death by the mobs of mourners that had descended on Red Square to view his body lying in state next to Lenin. His victims sent tearful tributes from prisons. Grown men sobbed inconsolably on the subway. Only the Presidium members shed crocodile tears. As the Great Leader slipped in and out of consciousness, they had denied him medical attention to hasten his demise. They had hovered over his deathbed like ghouls, falling to their knees when his eyes flickered open, retreating to scheme in dark corners when they closed. When at last he drew his final strained breath, the relief on their faces was clear. They had survived the Terror.

But now Khrushchev’s speech had put them all in danger again. They had warned him not to do it; it would open up a can of worms that might consume them all, they said. “If now, at the fountain of communist wisdom, a new course is set which appears to deviate considerably from that of the Stalin era,” the CIA noted in an April 1956 analysis of the speech, “repercussions are likely to occur which may be of great moment. . . . It may set in motion forces extending far beyond the contemplation of the collective leaders of the CPSU.”

Khrushchev told his fellow Presidium members that 7 million Soviet citizens would soon be returning from Stalin