Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [37]
Glushko’s engines were the first hurdle. They had to be almost ten times as powerful as anything ever built before, and required a radically new design. Their success also depended on the ability of Glushko and Korolev to get along, which was no easy task since they had a long and acrimonious history to overcome. Aside from their mutual disdain, these two titans of Soviet rocketry were diametric opposites. Glushko was elegant and regal, with delicate, slightly feminine features, and soft, sensuous Asiatic eyes that hinted at a genetic link to Mongol invaders from centuries past. Matinee-idol handsome, he took great pride in his appearance. His suits were handmade of imported black-market fabrics. His shirts were cut and starched in the latest Western style. And he wouldn’t be caught dead in the Bulgarian and Polish shoes favored by party high-ups. He fussed over his hair and neatly manicured nails, and selected his silk ties carefully.
Korolev, on the other hand, never wore a tie unless he had to, favoring black leather jackets, and he looked like a heavyweight boxing coach who had taken a few punches on the chin. His thick fingers were nicotine-tinged, and his shirts were wrinkled and often stained with soup. His thinning black mane had a will of its own whenever he forgot to slick it down, which was frequently, and it could safely be said that he didn’t give much thought to his appearance.
Glushko loved the ballet and classical music, and he enjoyed long, languid meals at Moscow’s few fine restaurants. Korolev had no interests outside of rockets and viewed food as fuel. “He ate very quickly,” a fellow OKB-1 engineer recalled. “After finishing the food on his plate, he would wipe it clean with a piece of bread, which he subsequently put in his mouth. He even scooped up the crumbs and ate them. Then he licked all his fingers. The people around him looked on with amazement until someone volunteered that this was a habit he had developed during his years in prison and in labor camps.”
No one who had ever gone through the gulag emerged physically or psychologically unscathed. Though the Chief Designer rarely spoke of it, the Great Terror had left indelible marks on both his body and his soul. Even decades later, he could remember the minutest details of his arrest in 1938: the rasp of the needle on the gramophone that kept churning its spent record while the men in black ransacked his apartment; the sound of the trolleybus bells ringing six stories below; the hushed whimper of his three-year-old daughter, Natalia, as she clung to her terrified mother.
At the Kolyma mines, the most notorious of Stalin’s Siberian death factories, his days had started at 4:00 AM, in sixty-below-zero darkness that lasted most of the year, conditions that killed a third of the inmates each year. The criminals administered justice in Kolyma, beating the political prisoners mercilessly if they dropped a pickax or spilled a wheelbarrow or missed their quota. They stole their food and clothes, and pried out the gold fillings the greedy guards had overlooked.
Within a few months of his arrival at Kolyma, Korolev was unrecognizable. He could barely walk or talk; toothless, his jaw was broken, scars ran down his shaven head, and his legs were swollen and grotesquely blue. Scurvy, malnutrition, and frostbite had started their lethal assault and he seemed destined to die.
And yet, like millions of other purge victims, he still held out the hope that Stalin himself would realize that a terrible mistake had been made and free him. “Glushko gave testimonies about my alleged membership of anti-Soviet organizations,” Korolev wrote Stalin in mid-1940, naming several others he claimed had borne false witness against him. “This is a despicable lie. . . . Without examining my case properly, the military board sentenced me to ten years. . . . My personal circumstances are so despicable and dreadful that I have been forced to ask for your help.”
Korolev’s mother also petitioned Stalin directly. “For the sake of my sole