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cause to regret his earlier purge of the officer corps. His remaining commanders were almost exclusively talentless toadies with little experience of warfare or military strategy. Sergei Korolev and many other vital engineering personnel were released from their prison camps so that they could work in aircraft and weapons factories – still under guard. Towards the end of the war Korolev was freed from captivity, with his reputation partially reinstated, and in September 1945 he was allowed to venture into the crumbling German heartland in search of any remnants of Wernher von Braun’s brilliant but infamous V-2 rocket programme that the American forces had not already taken away. Then, throughout the 1950s, with incredible energy and determination, Korolev developed an increasingly sophisticated range of rockets and missiles, while Glushko designed some of the most effective propulsion engines that the world had ever seen.

For a man who had survived a Siberian labour camp, mere administrative battles with competitors or unhelpful officials at the Kremlin must have seemed relatively easy, particularly under the far less oppressive post-Stalinist regime of Nikita Khrushchev throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Korolev was intensely driven, and he established a network of influence far more complex and subtle than anything his rivals in the aerospace sector could muster. By 1956 he was securely in control of his own industrial empire, the heart of which was a secret factory facility in Kaliningrad, just north-east of Moscow, known only as the Special Design Bureau-1 (OKB-1). Here Korolev was the absolute ruler, although he was answerable at Kremlin level to the Defence Ministry under Marshal Ustinov, and also to the vaguely named Ministry of General Machine Building. (In this context ‘general’ meant nothing of the kind; it was a cover word for rockets and satellites.)

In 1961 the Moscow journalist Olga Apencheko described the effect that Korolev seemed to have on those around him, as he strode through the corridors and shop floors of OKB-1, although she carefully avoided naming either him or his factory. As per regulations, she referred to him only as the ‘Chief Designer’:

A dark-complexioned, rather severe-looking man with massive features, the Chief Designer of the spaceship had something more in him than he cared to show. I heard a busy rustle around me whenever he appeared in a room or work area. It was difficult to say what this whisper expressed – awe, respect, a mixture of both. When he entered a workshop everything changed somehow. The movements of the technicians became more collected and precise, and it seemed that even the hum of the machines assumed a new overtone, intense and rhythmic. This man’s energy stepped up the motion of shafts and cogs.3

Yuri Mazzhorin, one of Korolev’s senior experts on guidance trajectories, says that he was ‘a great man, an extraordinary person. You could talk to him about simple as well as complicated things. You’d think his time in prison would have broken his spirit, but on the contrary, when I first met him in Germany when we were investigating the V-2 weapons, he was a king, a strong-willed purposeful person who knew exactly what he wanted. By the way, he was very strict, very demanding, and he swore at you, but he never insulted you. He would always listen to what you had to say. The truth is, everybody loved him.’

Almost everybody . . . Valentin Glushko, an equally driven personality, operated out of his own specialist design bureau. As long as his engines were fitted into Korolev’s rockets, the two men avoided outright confrontation, but these two giants of Soviet rocketry did not get along. The tension between them undoubtedly dated back to the summer of 1938 when, for some reason, Glushko was punished with eight months of relatively mild ‘house arrest’ while Korolev was sent to a prison camp. Presumably Glushko betrayed most of his colleagues, while Korolev kept a costly silence. Mikhail Yangel was another rival, developing missiles strictly for military use from