Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [62]
Khrushchev was stunned. For all his finely tuned political instincts, his decades of climbing the party ranks, and the considerable survival skills he had honed at Stalin’s court, the coup had taken him completely by surprise. And this was a coup, there was little doubt. It followed the exact same script Khrushchev had himself written four years earlier to get rid of Beria: the sudden session, angry accusations, arrest. Any moment now, Khrushchev could expect some ambitious KGB or army general to burst into the room with handcuffs. That was how Georgy Zhukov had earned his promotion first to deputy defense minister and then to defense minister and had received candidate Presidium membership. Now Zhukov’s predecessor, the crusty Stalinist soldier Kliment Voroshilov, declared Khrushchev “unbearable” and unfit to be party leader. Kaganovich called him a cow “knocking about the whole country” with his rash economic and de-Stalinization policies. When the young Leonid Brezhnev—a candidate Presidium member Khrushchev had rescued from the relative obscurity of the Naval Political Department—rose in his patron’s defense, Kaganovich turned viciously on him. “Leonid Ilyich barely had time to utter the first words,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “Kaganovich, his mustache bristling, loomed over him. The last words Brezhnev heard were something like this: ‘You like to talk. You’ve forgotten how you were relegated to the [NPD]. We’ll chase you back there soon enough.’ Leonid Ilyich faltered, started to clutch the back of his chair, and sank slowly to the floor. A doctor was summoned. Guards carried the unconscious [Brezhnev] to an adjacent room.”
The insults continued, even from within Khrushchev’s own camp. “You’ve become the expert on everything—from agriculture to science to culture,” charged Dimitri Shepilov, the Pravda editor Khrushchev had appointed foreign minister to replace Molotov, who had held the post for nearly three decades. “Someone who’s illiterate can’t govern a country.”
Khrushchev was ousted as first secretary of the Communist Party by a margin of seven to three, excluding his own vote. But the expected arrest never materialized. For three days and three nights he stayed in the Kremlin waiting for the final ax, as the hard-liners celebrated. But the coup leaders had made a critical mistake: they had not arrested Khrushchev. “They couldn’t,” explained Sergei Khrushchev, “as long as Father retained the loyally of two key people: Zhukov and KGB chief Ivan Serov. He had appointed both of them, and they both knew that if he was replaced so would they.” Without the backing of the military and the secret police, Molotov and the other conspirators could not risk jailing Khrushchev. “I’m sure they planned on doing so later,” Sergei Khrushchev said, “once they were in complete control.”
The delay bought Khrushchev badly needed time. He knew that with the exception of the hard-liners, most members of the Central Committee backed him. He was a man of the people who traveled widely in the provinces, unlike his Stalinist cronies, and most rank-and-file representatives of the Communist Party approved of his liberal reforms. If he could just reach them. With Serov’s help, Khrushchev hatched a countercoup, and the two began secretly mobilizing the three hundred elected members of the Central