Red Moon Rising Sputnik and the Rivalries That Ignited the Space Age - Matthew Brzezinski [9]
But Frau Grottrup got her horses, her BMW, a pair of cows for fresh milk, even her insistence on a Soviet officer as a riding companion. She got whatever she wanted because back in Moscow Stalin was furious that no other senior German scientists had come over to the Soviet side, and he was demanding that something be done. “We’d even hatched a plan to kidnap von Braun,” Chertok reminisced, but the abduction efforts proved amateurish, as one U.S. intelligence report recorded: “One day, a group of men in American Army uniforms entered the schoolhouse in Witzenhausen. They began a friendly conversation with several members of the team and suggested they all go into the village for a few drinks. However the Germans were suspicious of the English they spoke—it was neither American English nor British English. The Russians left without captives.”
What the Russians lacked in subtlety and senior scientists, they compensated for with an excess of Red Army zeal for pillage. As the Soviet-controlled part of Germany was systematically dismantled and shipped east, the crucial missing blueprints began turning up in the unlikeliest places: behind woodpiles, in toolsheds, in the homes of former factory directors, and in partially destroyed attics. Among the trove of documents, one set of plans particularly caught the Soviets’ attention. It was a proposal for the design of a far more powerful version of the V-2, the one-hundred-ton-thrust A-10, which was to have gone into development once Hitler’s European adversaries had been vanquished. The A-10 was a long-range two-stage rocket that had one purpose: to strike New York and Washington.
In Moscow, where the notion of a new war, a cold one, was already taking shape, Stalin himself quickly seized upon the idea of the A-10. “It would be an effective straitjacket for that noisy shopkeeper, Harry Truman,” he advised his top officials. “We must go ahead with it, comrades. The problem of the creation of transatlantic rockets is of extreme importance to us.”
1
THE REQUEST
February 27, 1956
One after another, the big ZIS limousines pulled away from the curb. Black and burly, their whitewall tires not yet soiled by slush, the armored behemoths glided gently through the snow—three-and-a-half-ton dancers in a synchronized automotive ballet.
From Central Committee headquarters on Staraya Square, the chrome-fendered procession headed east past Gorki Street and slipped under the shadow of one of the Gothic skyscrapers that Stalin had ordered built after the war. Seven of the sinister high-rises dominated the Moscow skyline, and they rose in stone layers like fifty-story wedding cakes decked in dark granite icing. On the Ring Road, another Stalinist creation, an eight-lane motorway that surrounded the city center in an asphalt moat, the dozen limousines and chase cars turned north, breezing past block after block of leviathan government buildings that heralded the new Moscow.
The old mercantile city had been branded with Stalin’s indelible stamp; it was now a metropolis of bronze bas-reliefs of giant steelworkers with bulging forearms, of cast-iron tributes to collective farmers brandishing sixteen-foot scythes, of statues of Lenin six stories high. Monumental and monochromatic public works had risen on the trampled foundations of prerevolutionary pastel palaces. The gilded cathedrals of old were gone—ripped down or buried under layers of soot—and in their stead rose hulking cement fortresses whose towering porticos paid architectural tribute to the insignificance of the individual in the one-party state. Red banners hailing the Twentieth Party Congress draped the gray edifices, though the plenum had ended tumultuously two days before. GLORY TO THE WORKERS, they proclaimed. PEACE TO THE PROLETARIAT. Beneath the propaganda placards, long lines of shoppers formed outside food