Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [61]
Tsander died of typhus in 1933, but by then Korolev was hooked, spending all his spare time with Tikhonravov, who would become his lifelong collaborator. That same year, the pair launched Russia’s first liquid propellant rocket, the GIRD-09. It weighed forty-two pounds, flew 400 yards, and attracted the attention of the military. By the time of Natalia’s birth in 1935, Korolev’s hobby had become a profession. The Soviet authorities had created the Reaction Propulsion Institute, or RNII, to study the development of missiles, and Korolev was appointed senior engineer.
Then, tragedy. The Great Terror of 1937-38 brought mass arrests and murders, denunciations and deportations. Tupolev and Glushko were imprisoned and charged with sabotage. Korolev’s immediate bosses at RNII were executed; he himself was tortured and handed a ten-year sentence. Told that her father was a fearless pilot away on an important mission, Natalia Koroleva to this day vividly remembers her first memory of meeting her dad. It was at the feared Butyrka prison in 1940, under the supervision of an NKVD secret police guard. “But Father, how could your plane land in such a small courtyard?” she asked.
“Little girl,” the guard interrupted with a laugh. “It’s very easy to land here. Taking off again is much harder.”
• • •
Korolev, in the summer of 1957, was not the only one facing serious problems, whose career and possibly freedom were on the line. For Nikita Khrushchev, the chickens were also coming home to roost. The trouble, this time, began innocently enough with a telephone call. Khrushchev was having lunch at his official residence in Lenin Hills on June 18 when the special government hotline rang. Nikolai Bulganin was on the other end. “Nikita, come to the Kremlin,” he said, according to Sergei Khrushchev. “We’re having a session of the Presidium.”
Sergei Khrushchev recalled being struck by the unusual timing. “The weekly meetings were always held on Thursdays and this was a Tuesday,” he explained. His father also thought the sudden scheduling change strange. “Nikolai, what’s the hurry?” he asked, puzzled. Bulganin muttered something about going over a speech for the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, as the city had been renamed. “We can do that on Thursday,” said Khrushchev dismissively. But Bulganin persisted.
The last speech Khrushchev had made in Leningrad in May had caused quite a stir in the Presidium. Speaking off the cuff, and without prior consultation of his fellow Presidium members, Khrushchev had predicted that the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in meat and dairy production by 1960. “We will bury you,” he had roared in the heat of passion, choosing his words callously, because the world press interpreted the boast not as an agricultural duel but as a threat of nuclear annihilation. Even without the unfortunate reference to mass graves, the challenge was a tall order given that American farmers produced almost three times as much meat per capita as their Soviet counterparts. Apparently, Khrushchev’s competitive spirit, the same insecure desperation to upstage the Americans that Korolev had played upon, had gotten the better of him. But Vyacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich had fumed that Khrushchev had thrown down a rash challenge that put the USSR in a potentially embarrassing bind. There was simply no way the creaky collective farms could triple their current quotas, and the exuberant Khrushchev had set up the Soviet Union to fail.
“Who’s there?” Khrushchev finally asked, growing uneasy. He had been around palace intriguers long enough to sense that something was up.
“Everyone who’s having lunch,” said Bulganin evasively.
The attack on Nikita Khrushchev began the moment he walked into the gilded conference room in the Kremlin’s main administrative building. A dozen pairs of hostile eyes followed his progress as he pushed past the