Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [41]
Couched in the soothing verbiage of “solid hope,” Korolev was effectively warning Khrushchev that not only was he going to miss his January deadline, but the R-7 probably wouldn’t be ready in March either. What’s more, instead of the 2,200-pound advanced satellite package he had promised, the R-7 would manage to carry only a meager fifty-pound payload into space because of its poor fuel efficiency.
The reality check, Korolev well knew, was not likely to sit well with the impatient Presidium. Fortunately for the Chief Designer, Khrushchev and the Central Committee were preoccupied with other, far more urgent matters.
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On the morning of June 28, 1956, workers in the western Polish city of Poznan declared a general strike. It was the first labor unrest in the Soviet bloc, and by early afternoon the walkout had turned into the largest anti-Communist rally since the war. One hundred thousand people, a third of Poznan’s population, crammed Adam Mickiewicz Square, waving banners that read DOWN WITH DICTATORSHIP and, in a play on Lenin’s most famous revolutionary slogan, WE WANT BREAD, FREEDOM, AND TRUTH.
As Kaganovich and Molotov had feared, the ill winds of liberalization let loose by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization decree had blown westward from the snowcapped Caucasus to the plains of Poland. Only Poland wasn’t an isolated and inaccessible mountain republic with a few million inhabitants. It was smack in the middle of Europe, the anchor of the new Warsaw Pact defense league designed to counter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and by far the largest of the Kremlin’s foreign holdings. It was also a very reluctant Soviet vassal, a nation with a powerful peasant class that refused to collectivize, an activist Catholic Church that could not be brought to heel, and a thriving black-market economy that was capitalist in every respect but name. It had been the unruly Poles who had leaked the contents of the secret speech to Israeli intelligence and the CIA, and it was Poland, more than any other Soviet satellite state, that had taken Khrushchev’s reformist message to heart. The thaw in Poland had actually begun shortly after Stalin’s death, but Khrushchev’s encouraging speech had accelerated the process, giving Poles new hope for democratic freedoms. Censorship in the media melted away, people grumbled publicly, and dissident officials who had been imprisoned or expelled from the Polish Communist Party were officially rehabilitated.
In Poznan, trouble had been brewing for weeks. Residents were unhappy with working conditions, housing and food shortages, and low pay. When they marched in protest, the crowd’s anger quickly found an outlet in the secret police headquarters on Kochanowski Street. Tens of thousands of people, some armed with bats, pipes, or cobblestones ripped from the road, laid siege to the security service building. A shot rang out from one of the upper windows, and thirteen-year-old Romek Strzalkowski fell dead. After that, things got ugly. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the Soviet Union’s military overseer for Poland, ordered tanks and ten thousand troops into Poznan. This time, the official body count was seventy dead, three hundred wounded, and seven hundred arrested.
By October, Rokossovsky was massing troops outside Warsaw and the Soviet embassy was sending distress signals to Moscow. “The Poles were vilifying the Soviet Union, and were all but preparing a coup to put people with anti-Soviet tendencies in power,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. The Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party was now itself in open revolt. Poland’s Communist leaders wanted to oust their Moscow-backed first secretary and replace him with Wadysaw Gomuka, whom Stalin had jailed for “nationalist deviation.” Khrushchev was shocked. His rehabilitation program never envisioned actually putting former political prisoners into positions of high authority, never mind as heads of