Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [34]
3
TRIALS AND ERRORS
The Pandora’s box that Nikita Khrushchev had pried open during his secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress would explode in his face eight days later.
On the morning of March 5, 1956, the continuous blaring of car horns pierced the crisp mountain air over the ancient Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Sirens echoed through the steep cobblestone streets, bouncing off the fifth-century facades of ancient buildings, and the sound rippled down through the valley’s orchards, ravines, and steaming sulfur springs below. Near the Palace of Labor, a new and unappealing Soviet structure, a crowd of about 150 people marched down the middle of the road. Their heads were uncovered in a show of respect and bereavement, and they carried red wreaths and large portraits of Joseph Stalin with the corners draped in black crape. It was the third anniversary of the Great Leader’s death, an event previously marked by solemn processions throughout the Soviet Union.
But on that day only the Georgians commemorated the passing of their native son. In the rest of the empire there was an official and insulting silence: no ceremonies, no tributes, no mass rallies—just persistent and disturbing rumors that Stalin had been discredited as a brutal tyrant. In Tbilisi, the puzzlement turned to indignation. The Georgians were a fiercely proud people, one of the first nations on earth to have adopted Christianity back in AD 337. Tiny as their mountain enclave was, two of their own, Stalin and Beria, had ruled the endless and chaotic landmass of Russia and had presided over the largest expansion of the Slavic empire since Catherine the Great. Under Stalin, Georgian had become the unofficial second language of a global superpower, and ambitious apparatchiks in Moscow affected soft, slurry Georgian accents. Now, unsettling reports were circulating that Stalin’s memory had been besmirched, that the “Great Son of the Georgian People” had been denigrated. In Tbilisi, this caused grave patriotic concern.
The following day, something strange happened. The mourners returned for a spontaneous, unsanctioned march. This time there were one thousand people, and they carried portraits of Lenin in addition to Stalin. The mood was different as well, recalled Sergei Stanikov, the local correspondent for the Moscow daily Trud, or Labor. Stanikov, a loyal party man, smelled a story. In twenty years of covering Georgian politics, he had never witnessed a spontaneous rally. No one demonstrated in the Soviet Union without permission. Stanikov followed the crowd as it squeezed through the narrow, musty streets and made its way to Georgian Central Committee headquarters at Government House. Was it true, the mourners demanded, what was being said about Stalin in Moscow? “A meeting was held at 4 o’clock in which I was present,” Stanikov wrote in a secret report. “Comrade Mzhavanadze [the first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party] informed us that he would soon acquaint us with the letter regarding the Cult of Personality.”
Unsatisfied with this vague and discouraging response, the mourners returned in even larger numbers the next day. At noon, students from Stalin University, the Institute for Agriculture, and the Polytechnical Institute walked out of their classrooms and joined the growing mob on Rustaveli Street. “Dideba did Stalins” the crowd chanted defiantly in Georgian, “Long live Stalin.” The students were angry. Georgians had a reputation for their fiery temperament; their hospitality knew no bounds, as evidenced by their elaborate twenty-one-toast protocols during brandy-filled banquets for foreign guests, and neither did their anger at perceived slights. A car was overturned. Someone threw a rock at the City Council Building. The chants