Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [59]
In 1916 Sergei acquired both a father figure and the opportunity to nurture his growing obsession with aircraft. Maria remarried that year, to a kind and gentle railway engineer, and the family later relocated to Odessa, where Korolev’s new stepfather, Grigory Balanin, had been appointed to a senior position at the harbormaster’s office. Odessa was a rough-and-tumble port city of palm trees and prostitutes, smugglers and sailors. It had always enjoyed an exotically lawless reputation in czarist times as an entrepreneurial haven with an unusually cosmopolitan makeup; Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Italians, Russians, and Ukrainians mingled easily with the resident representatives of virtually every Mediterranean seafaring culture. The city changed hands several times during the Bolshevik revolution, and a French detachment supporting the czar’s White Army was still stationed there when Maria, Sergei, and Balanin moved into a three-bedroom apartment overlooking the Black Sea. Reds, Whites, and Ukrainian nationalists began block-by-block battles for control of the ravaged town. Korolev’s school closed during the worst fighting, and food was in short supply. “Hunger, chaos, a city filled with refugees,” Maria recalled. “There were homeless children living in lobbies and courtyards, and the authorities changed frequently.”
But there were also military aircraft, a squadron of plywood hydroplanes enticingly anchored within view of Sergei’s balcony, separated from the harbor traffic by a fence of barbed wire. For the young Korolev, the proximity was irresistible. He would swim out past the jetty, his mother wrote, and “hang onto the barbed wire for hours, as if mesmerized, watching with interest what was going on there. Once a mechanic shouted to him: ‘Well, what are you hanging around for? Why don’t you give me a hand? Can’t you see I’m having difficulty with this motor?’ That was all Sergei needed. He quickly crawled under the wire. Soon they got used to seeing him around in the detachment.”
When the civil war finally ended in 1921 and classes resumed, Korolev found himself drawn to mathematics and drafting, a subject introduced by the new Soviet government. Still shy from the years of home schooling and the disruptions of war, Sergei did not socialize much. “He was not interested in small talk like the other kids,” according to his daughter, Natalia. Sports were never really interesting to him either; he joined the gymnastics team only because “he felt it was important to stay fit to become an aviator,” said his daughter.
Discipline seemed to come easily to the fifteen-year-old future Chief Designer. “6:00AM Rise,” he recorded in his 1922 daily planner. “6:15: calisthenics; 6:30: Breakfast; 7-8:00AM Swim in the Sea; 8:30-1PM: School . . .” The morning swim, of course, was a euphemism for hanging out at the seaplane base, where by now he had become such a fixture that the pilots took him up regularly for rides. Prudently, he did not share this bit of potentially unsettling intelligence with his mother, though Maria suspected her son was up to something after he blurted out one day, “Oh Mother, if you could only see the clouds from the top.”
It was in his senior year in 1924 that Sergei Korolev finally began to bloom. He joined an amateur aviation club, started to come out of his shell, and developed a belatedly healthy interest in girls. He was particularly smitten by a classmate of Italian ancestry, Ksenia Vincentini, a fiery brunette who would become a prominent surgeon and his first wife. Korolev also designed his first airplane as part of his drafting class graduation project, a glider that he ambitiously called the K-5, as in Korolev Five. The four earlier versions