Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [58]
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Sergei Pavlovich Korolev did not grow up dreaming of rockets or the stars. Space had never captivated the stocky, solitary youngster during the formative years he spent in lonely isolation at his grandparents’ estate in prerevolutionary Ukraine. “Sergei was about three when our family disintegrated,” his mother, Maria Balanina, recalled. A bitter divorce and prolonged custody battle had split the Korolevs in 1911, and Maria, an unusually headstrong woman, had left her only child with her parents while she completed her university degree. Few women of the era pursued higher education, and Maria, a dark-haired beauty with porcelain features, a wasp waist, and impressively plumed bonnets, juggled her dueling parental and academic responsibilities with a fiery determination she would pass on to her famously obstinate son.
The two lived mostly apart. During the week Maria studied French and literature at the Ladies College in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, while nannies and tutors cared for Sergei. On weekends she made the two-hour trip home to Nezhin, a small town along the bustling trade route that linked the czarist and Hapsburg empires. Her parents were wealthy merchants; in a photograph, one of their two stores sits at the foot of a four-spire church, occupying a low, block-long structure that resembles a turn-of-the-century strip mall. As a side business, the family had a small but highly successful brine operation that had applied to receive the coveted imperial seal as the official purveyor of pickles to the court of Czar Nicholas II.
Though young Sergei did not want materially, he lacked companionship and the freedom every child desires to roam. “He didn’t have any friends of his own age, and never knew children’s games,” his tutor, Lidia Mavrikievna Grinfeld, recalled. “He was often completely alone at home and . . . would sit a long while on the upper cellar door and watch what was happening in the street.” Moreover, the gates to the family estate were always locked because Korolev’s grandparents worried that his estranged father, whom he was not permitted to see, would try to kidnap him. “I felt I needed to keep him at home,” Maria later explained. “He was so impressionable and thin-skinned and I had to teach him how to better cope with reality.”
Locked away in his splendid isolation, Korolev built giant dollhouses and cried frequently. But the seclusion apparently instilled in him a self-reliance and vigorous imagination that would serve him well later in life. In the summer of 1913, when Korolev was six, an event occurred that would leave a lasting imprint on the melancholy child. “A poster appeared on the market square that announced that Pilot Utochkin would perform a flight for the public,” Maria recalled. No one in Nezhin had ever seen an airplane before; automobiles, at the time, were rare. “People were very excited. Some didn’t believe man could fly like a bird. The entire city turned out for the spectacle.”
Perched on his granddad’s stout shoulders, little Sergei watched rapt as the small four-winged contraption careened down the dusty fields, bouncing fifty feet in the air before wobbling back to earth near a convent a few miles away. The sight of such a display of freedom stirred a powerful urge in the sheltered young boy, and he couldn’t stop “babbling” when he got home.
“Mother, can you give me two new bed-sheets?”
“What for?”
“I will tie them to my arms and legs and climb to the top of the smokestack and fly.”
“You’ll kill yourself.”
“No, birds can fly.”
“But birds have rigid wings.”
Thus, according to family legend, was Korolev’s passion for flight ignited. His juvenile aspirations, though, were still relatively modest and did not yet soar beyond the clouds: he simply wanted