Red Moon Rising

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 stores, their breath steaming in the cold, while elderly women in fingerless gloves swept dirty snow from the sidewalks.

If Nikita Khrushchev noticed any incongruity between the lofty slogans and the harsh socialist reality of Moscow street-corner life, he said nothing to his driver, or to his son, Sergei, sitting beside him in the backseat. He had said more than enough at the Twentieth Congress, and although six weeks would pass before the Central Intelligence Agency got wind of his secret speech, the Americans would be just as stunned as the 1,500 shocked delegates who had heard him in the Great Kremlin Palace less than forty-eight hours earlier.

Father and son sat in silence, behind the ZIS’s pleated curtains, watching the city stream drably past. Directly behind them, in the lane reserved exclusively for party high-ups, rode the three other Presidium members who had jointly ruled Russia since Stalin’s death three years earlier: Nikolai Bulganin, Lazar Kaganovich, and Vyacheslav Molotov. Behind them, in descending order of importance, rode lesser officials in less imposing ZIMs and Pobedas: Dmitri Ustinov, the armaments minister; Aleksei Kirichenko, a new addition to the Presidium; and the usual entourage of KGB bodyguards and eager aides.

Khrushchev’s car led the convoy, as befitting his new rank as first among equals in the Presidium, as the Politburo was then known. But the men in the rear were crowding his bumper, biding their time for an opportunity to overtake him. This Khrushchev knew, understood almost instinctively, from the survival skills he had honed during two treacherous decades in Stalin’s inner circle. When the “boss” was alive, they had all vied for his favor, slid tomatoes onto each other’s chairs in prank-filled drinking contests that lasted till dawn. Like sixty-year-old frat boys, they all laughed when Lavrenty Beria, the secret police chief and serial rapist, pinned little notes with the Russian word prick spelled in big Cyrillic letters on Khrushchev’s unsuspecting back. But the day the boss died, the jokes ended and the plotting began. This Khrushchev also knew from personal experience, for it was he who had masterminded the coup against the psychopath Beria. Stalin’s chief henchman and self-anointed successor had been dispatched with a bullet to the brain, and it was Khrushchev, the class clown of this murderous fraternity, who had unexpectedly emerged to fill the power vacuum.

The convoy sped north unimpeded by traffic, since so few Muscovites owned cars. A few rickety Moskviches, twenty-six-horsepower knockoffs of the 1938 Opel Kadett, quickly clattered out of the way, and soon Khrushchev and his retinue reached the new suburbs. These vast tracts of land around the capital were also being completely remade. The little wooden dachas and garden plots that supplemented the diet of city dwellers were being bulldozed in accordance with the latest Five Year Plan to allay the capital’s dire housing shortage. In Moscow, divorced couples still often lived together in communal apartments with three other families. Government workers and newlyweds were housed in dormitories where toilets and kitchens were divvied up on a time-share basis. For those without blat—connections—the waiting list for new apartments could stretch into the decades. People got married while still in their teens just to get in line. The situation was much the same throughout the Soviet Union, and even more drastic in the western parts of the country, where entire cities had been reduced to rubble during the war.

To remedy the housing shortage, Khrushchev had embarked on a massive national construction binge, which, like Stalin’s oppressive overhaul of Moscow’s downtown districts, was leaving its own unique architectural imprint on the city’s outer rings. But the suburban building boom looked nothing like the Levittown planned communities sweeping across America, where the appetite for new homes seemed just as insatiable and the explosion of affordable automobiles was changing the way people lived. Outside Moscow, there were no ranch houses and ramblers with circular driveways branching off cul-de-sacs. There were no swimming pools in gated backyards; no children’s playgrounds with baseball diamonds and swings. Instead, row after row after row of mind-numbingly identical five-story apartment buildings rose from the sandy soil, resembling the ill-conceived housing projects that would later blight America’s ghettos. Large numbers—1 through 50, 51 through 75, and so on—were painted on the sides of the squat concrete structures, so that residents could tell them apart. Not a blade of grass grew in between the prefabricated buildings of this suburban wasteland, and there were no stores, shopping centers, or movie theaters. There were only bus stops that led to the nearest commuter train station and cranes leaning over the open pits of unfinished units.

Quantity, not quality, was the construction crews’ rallying cry, and the “Khrushchevki,” or Little Khrushchevs, as the dwarfish blocs quickly became known, howled when the winds blew in from the Urals. They suffered from shifting foundations and perennially creaky plumbing. Their gas lines exploded and their roofs leaked. But they met Kremlin quotas, and Khrushchev was immensely proud of them. Just the other month, he had taken Sergei on a tour of the cement factory that made their prefabricated parts.

On this day, Sergei was also accompanying his father on an inspection tour. The favorite of Khrushchev’s four children, Sergei, at twentyone, already stood a head taller than his dad, whom a French official once described as a “little man with fat paws.” (Khrushchev himself poked fun at his diminutive stature, joking that he was as wide as he was tall.) Sergei had his mother’s looks, blond hair and blue eyes. Nikita had darker, vaguely Asiatic features, though what little hair remained on the elder Khrushchev’s head had long ago turned white, leaving only a narrow band to warm his bald pate. Unlike his father, whose loquacious, self-deprecating sense of humor made him a favorite at Stalin’s court (and lulled his enemies into a false sense of superiority), Sergei was a serious, studious lad, on his way to fulfilling his father’s dream of becoming an engineer. The elder Khrushchev had had only four years of formal schooling before beginning his apprenticeship, at the age of fourteen, as a metalworker in a prerevolutionary Ukrainian coal mine owned by a Welsh millionaire. “After a year or two of school, I had learnt how to count to thirty and my father decided that was enough,” Nikita Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs. “He said that all I needed was to be able to count money, and I would never have more than thirty rubles to count anyway.”

Khrushchev’s lack of education was a sore point, a source of embarrassment and frustration—not only to him but to the party as well. The leaders of the revolution had been learned men: Trotsky, Bukharin, the lawyerly Lenin. Even Stalin had studied in a seminary before finding Marx. But in the Soviet version of upward mobility, the next generation of Communist Party functionaries had risen from the bottom of the proletariat, sons and daughters of the peasantry suddenly catapulted into the twentieth century, as Khrushchev himself conceded with remarkable candor. “We weren’t gentlemen in the old-fashioned sense,” he wrote in his memoir, recalling his wartime stay at the estate of a Polish nobleman. “It became impossible to enter the bathroom. Why? Because the people in our group didn’t know how to use it properly. Instead of sitting on the toilet seat so that people could use it after them, they perched like eagles on top of the toilet and mucked up the place terribly. And after we put the bathroom out of commission, we set to work on the park grounds.”

Throughout his late twenties and thirties, Khrushchev had struggled to better himself, attending the Rabfak high school equivalency programs offered to rising party functionaries and enrolling in special courses at the Stalin Industrial Academy for promising technocrats. But party business always interfered, and he never managed to finish any of them. “He could barely hold a pencil in his calloused hand,” one of his teachers later told the biographer William Taubman. “She recalled his struggling to grasp a point of grammar and, when he at last understood it, smiling and shouting, ‘I got it.’”

Sergei was thus on the cusp of fulfilling his father’s unrealized dream. In a few months he would defend his master’s thesis and become a full-fledged engineer. “My father felt this was the best, most honorable profession a man could have,” he recalled fifty years later. “In technical matters, he was very creative and curious.”

Khrushchev’s passion for technology could at times lead to childlike bursts of enthusiasm, and whenever state business took him to a plant or research facility of technical interest, he brought Sergei. “He wanted me to see the theories I had been learning at university applied in practice,” Sergei recalled. The two had recently gone to the Tupolev factory to inspect the first Soviet jet-engine passenger plane, and Nikita had boyishly rubbed his hands in glee at the prospect of impressing foreigners with it on his next trip abroad.

Today, though, was a special outing for Sergei. Ever since the ZIS had picked him up outside class at the Moscow Institute of Power Engineering that morning, he had been giddy with anticipation. “You see, I was studying to become a rocket scientist, a guidance systems expert to be precise,” he noted. And today his father was taking him to NII-88, the USSR’s top-secret rocket research facility.

The design bureaus of NII-88 were discreetly tucked away outside Moscow, where too many foreigners with prying eyes roamed the streets. To get there, then as today, visitors took the main road to Yaroslavl. Khrushchev’s motorcade, with the other Presidium members in tow, turned onto what is now called the M8 highway, and the cranes and suburban construction sites soon gave way to the countryside. The transition came abruptly, like crossing some imaginary threshold between the twentieth and eighteenth centuries. Roads turned to mud, settlements into ramshackle villages. Wooden farmhouses and huts with thatched roofs leaned at crazy angles. Most had no electricity or running water. Their inhabitants had few teeth. They walked around half dazed, as if in slow motion, swaddled in rags, filthy peacoats, and sleeveless jackets made from the hides of farm animals. The herds of cattle were scrawny and clumped with manure. Skinny chickens scampered underfoot.

Though the Communist Party viewed the backward peasants with undisguised contempt for both ideological and practical reasons (stemming from perennially poor harvests), Khrushchev had always felt comfortable in the countryside. He had made agriculture his bailiwick under Stalin, and he had grown up in similar circumstances, tending sheep as a young boy in the tiny farming community of Kalinovka, near Kursk. “Every villager dreamed of owning a pair of boots,” he recalled. “We children were lucky if we had a decent pair of shoes. We wiped our noses on our sleeves and kept our trousers up with a piece of string.”

But the massive farms that the Presidium held in such low regard played another critical role besides putting food on Soviet tables. The endless expanses they covered provided Russia with its main line of defense. It was these snow-covered fields, stretching thousands of miles, that had defeated Hitler and Napoleon. Like frozen deserts that thawed into impassable bogs, they had protected Moscow from all its Western enemies. Armies could advance over the plains, but invariably their supply lines would grow thin, the winter would set in, and rural Russia would ravage the invaders. The steppe had always afforded Moscow the ultimate victory. Until now. Now, in the nuclear and jet age, distance and climate no longer provided a natural limit to foreign depredations. And to Khrushchev, that seemed precisely what the latest U.S. military doctrine aimed to do.

Khrushchev was unsettled by the rise to power of the Republican Party, after more than two decades of Democratic rule. The Republicans represented the American capitalist class, and their electoral battle cry had been hard-line anticommunism. To the Soviets, the emergence of the rich, Russophobe Republicans signaled the arrival of a more combative and ideological adversary in Washington, personified by John Foster Dulles, the dour and deeply religious secretary of state, a man who dressed and talked like a clergyman and yet managed to make millions during the Great Depression. The USSR, Dulles declared, could never be appeased, because “the Soviets sought not a place in the sun, but the sun itself.” His opinion was codified by the National Intelligence Estimate of September 15, 1954, which stated, “Soviet leaders probably envision: (a) the elimination of every world power center capable of competing with the USSR; (b) the spread of communism to all parts of the world; and (c) Soviet domination over all other communist regimes.”

With growing alarm, the Soviets watched as Dulles purged the State Department of suspected liberals. Veteran foreign service officers who had accurately predicted Communist gains in Asia were sacked for not displaying “positive loyalty,” while foreign allies were warned that they too had better toe the new hard line or be faced with an “agonizing reappraisal” of U.S. assistance. Dulles’s playboy brother Allen, whose hedonism was matched only by his hatred of communism, was put in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency, which rapidly ballooned from an obscure bureaucratic outpost with 350 employees to an aggressive frontline agency with thousands of operatives intent on undermining Soviet power.

John Foster Dulles lurked dangerously behind the kind, grandfatherly facade of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom the Soviets knew to be ill with a heart condition and increasingly detached from day-to-day affairs of state. It was the unelected and standoffish lawyer, not the popular war hero, who thus dictated U.S. policy. America’s moral duty, Dulles declared, was not merely to stop the spread of communism but to “liberate captive peoples” all over the world. The Eisenhower administration, Dulles pledged, would “roll back” Communist advances in Europe and Asia and send the Soviets packing. What’s more, he continued, the United States would no longer bother with small local conflicts like Korea to keep communism in check. Henceforth it would prepare for “total war,” a phrase coined by Admiral Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and wage an “instant, tremendous, and devastating” nuclear attack on the Soviet Union itself. Only a doctrine of “massive retaliation” promised “to create sufficient fear in the enemy to deter aggression.” The strategy, Dulles noted, “will depend primarily on a great capacity to retaliate instantly by means and at places of our choosing.”

To the stunned Soviets, who did not yet have the effective capacity to launch any sort of surprise attack on the United States (as Dulles well knew), the massive retaliation doctrine was perceived as little more than a massive intimidation tactic. “We shall never be the aggressor,” Eisenhower had reassured the Russians at a summit meeting in Geneva in 1955, but Khrushchev had no guarantees of that. The only way for Khrushchev to guarantee Soviet security was to develop his own massive retaliation capabilities. But he lagged far behind his American rivals.

Nuclear weapons production in America had been ramped up to an industrial, assembly-line scale under the Eisenhower administration. By 1955 the United States had amassed 2,280 atomic and thermonuclear bombs, a tenfold increase from 1951, representing an arsenal nearly twenty times greater than the Soviet stockpile. (As Dulles’s doctrine evolved, the number of warheads would jump to 3,500 by late 1957, double to 7,000 by 1959, hit 12,305 by 1961, and top 23,000 two years later.) Meanwhile, billions of dollars were being poured into an armada of heavy long-range bombers to deliver the nuclear payloads. By 1956 the air force bomber fleet had almost doubled in size, and the Strategic Air Command kept a third of its 1,200 B-47 long-range bombers on the runway at all times, fueled and loaded with their nuclear cargo. Curtis LeMay, the cigar-chomping SAC commander, seemed to be on a personal mission to instill fear in Russian hearts. In January 1956, LeMay scrambled almost all his bombers in a simulated nuclear attack. In another exercise, Operation Powerhouse, his planes flew nearly one thousand simultaneous sorties from more than thirty bases around the world to intimidate Moscow. In a few weeks, he would launch yet another exercise called Operation Home Run—reconnaissance versions of his B-47 Stratojets would fly from Thule, Greenland, over the North Pole, and into Siberia to probe for gaps in Soviet radar defenses. The mission would culminate with a squadron of the metallic silver RB-47s, their undersides painted white to reflect the flash of a nuclear blast, flying in attack formation in broad daylight several hundred miles into Soviet territory. The Soviets would have no way of knowing that the bombers were not armed, or that an attack was not imminent. And that would be the point of the exercise: to expose the USSR’s defenselessness against a polar attack and to drive home the message that the United States could strike Russia at will. “With a bit of luck, we could have started World War III,” LeMay would later reminisce ruefully.

At times LeMay’s antics even scared the CIA. “Soviet leaders may have become convinced that the US actually has intentions of military aggression in the near future,” warned an ad hoc committee of CIA, State Department, and military intelligence agency representatives. “Recent events may have somewhat strengthened Soviet conviction in this respect.”

From their American bases in Greenland, Norway, Germany, Turkey, Britain, Italy, Morocco, Pakistan, Korea, Japan, and Alaska, B-47s could reach just about any target in the Soviet Union, furthering LeMay’s well-publicized goal of obliterating 118 of the 134 largest population and industrial centers in the USSR. (LeMay calculated that 77 million casualties could be expected, including 60 million dead.) And he was about to get an even bigger bomber, the intercontinental B-52 Stratofortress, which was just entering into service. The giant plane could carry 70,000 pounds of thermonuclear ordnance over a distance of 8,800 miles at a speed of more than 500 miles an hour. With the B-52, the Americans no longer even needed their staging bases in Europe and Asia to attack Russia. They could do it from the comfort of home without missing more than a meal.

Most distressing for Khrushchev, he had no way of striking back. The biggest Soviet bomber in service, the Tupolev Tu4, was an aging knockoff of the propeller-driven Boeing B-29 with a 2,900-mile range and no midair refueling capacity. It could not effectively reach U.S. soil. The Tu4 would either run out of gas as it approached the American eastern seaboard or crash in the coastal states of New England. In either scenario, planes and pilots would be lost on one-way suicide missions. Unfortunately for the Kremlin, the early prototypes for a pair of bigger bombers, the Mya-4 Bison and Tu95 Bear, which were designed to hit targets deep in U.S. territory, seemed to display similarly suicidal tendencies. Their test flights had been plagued by crashes, and it would be years before they were operational in significant numbers.

The bottom line was that the United States could stage a multipronged attack on the USSR from dozens of points across the globe, while the Soviet Union was hemmed in from all sides and could not retaliate. It was this strategic imbalance, and the urgent need to redress it with an effective retaliatory capability of their own, that drove Khrushchev and the other Presidium members through the windswept countryside on February 27, 1956, to visit the secret missile laboratories of NII-88.

The tiny czarist town of Podlipki had been erased from Soviet maps. With a swipe of the pen and an eye toward subterfuge, Kremlin cartographers had rechristened it Kaliningrad, the same name they had given to a large Baltic enclave seized from Germany after the war. Such attempts at misdirection were common to conceal sensitive installations, aimed at sending American spies a thousand miles the wrong way, but this one didn’t fool the CIA for long. By the mid-1950s, German V-2 scientists repatriated from Russia had already given the agency a vague idea of what was going on behind the birch forests and high fences that hid NII-88. Allen Dulles knew, for instance, that to get there visitors had to take a series of right turns along a maze of unmarked country roads; that the approach was discreetly monitored; and that about half a mile down the main perimeter wall, a narrow automated steel gate known as the “Mousetrap” governed access to the grounds.

It was through the Mousetrap that Khrushchev’s ZIS-110 slid. In a few months, he would have a new limo—the sleeker, squarer ZIL, modeled after the 1954 Cadillac—and the first party secretary was anxiously awaiting its delivery. In addition to the modern redesign, the ZIL held the promise of being the ultimate Soviet status symbol, because only three people in the entire country would get one: the first secretary of the Central Committee, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium, and the chairman of the Council of Ministers. Like Khrushchev’s new house on Lenin Hills, with its gardens and fountains, cherry trees, and panoramic views of the Moskva River, the ZIL was a coveted perk that would help the CIA divine the shifting pecking order of communism’s quarrelsome high priests. In the opaque Soviet system, one glance at the Kremlin motor pool could yield more intelligence than a year’s subscription to the newspaper Pravda.

Pravda never made mention of the work in Kaliningrad, for if the name was even spoken “it was always in a whisper,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. Such was the secrecy surrounding the missile complex that the name of the man who awaited the Presidium delegation this February morning had also been erased from all records. He had been given a pseudonym and was obliquely referred to in official communiqués simply as the Chief Designer. The Chief Designer was a prisoner of his own success. He was deemed so important to national security that a KGB detail watched his every step. For as long as he lived, he would not be permitted to travel abroad. He could not openly wear the numerous medals and citations he received, nor could he have his photograph publicly taken. All this was for his own protection, because the Soviets were convinced that the CIA would try to kidnap or assassinate him. The veil of anonymity would be lifted only after his death, when his name would replace Kaliningrad on post-Communist maps. But back in 1956, Sergei Korolev’s true identity was a closely guarded state secret.

Korolev greeted his guests formally, exchanging rigid handshakes with the Kremlin cardinals. Molotov, the aging diplomat, whose signature had adorned the nonaggression pact with the Nazis, was the senior member of the group. By dint of his decades as foreign minister, he was also the most worldly and urbane. Kaganovich, Khrushchev’s mustachioed former mentor, was another story. Once rakishly handsome, he had grown fat, old, and ugly, and was resentful at heaving been leapfrogged by his protégé. Kirichenko was the new boy, tall and big-boned. He’d been brought in by Khrushchev, who was trying to pack the Presidium with his own acolytes. The last to extend a hand was Bulganin, Khrushchev’s bitter rival, the sly Soviet premier with a sinister silver goatee.

Bulganin and Khrushchev shared power under an uneasy arrangement that satisfied neither man and sowed confusion both at home and abroad. Bulganin, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, headed the government. Khrushchev headed the party. But who was the head of state? According to communist dogma, the government was supposed to answer to the party. But in practice, the subordination was not always so clear-cut. When Eisenhower met both men in Geneva for talks the year before, the president’s advisers had spent much of that summit trying to figure out who was really running the show in the Soviet Union. Such an ambiguous arrangement could not last indefinitely. Nor would it.

While the introductions were made, and aides scurried attentively to take their bosses’ overcoats and homburg hats, the younger Khrushchev soaked in the surroundings. Buildings of all sizes dotted the missile complex: dark, grime-covered brick structures, huge rusty hangars, water towers, military-style barracks, and corrugated steel sheds that stored, among other things, 1,500 tons of potatoes and 500 tons of cabbage so that NII-88’s cantina would not suffer from the food shortages that plagued the rest of the country. There was a decrepit, Dickensian feel to the place, so much so that Sergei Khrushchev mistakenly dated the facility’s original construction to the nineteenth century. In fact, it had been built in 1926 by the German firm of Rhein-Metall Borsig to manufacture precision machinery and was later retooled and expanded to produce artillery pieces for the war. Buildings had a tendency to age prematurely under Soviet care.

Inside, the installations were surprisingly clean and modern and gleamed with white paint. The delegation was ushered into one of the largest of these, a brightly lit hangar of imposing dimensions. At the center of the hangar, displayed on large holding rings like precious museum exhibits, lay three rockets. “This is our past,” said Korolev, pointing to the smallest of the reclined missiles. Korolev was a short, powerfully built man, with a muscular neck and the compact frame of a middleweight wrestler. He had thick black hair, slightly graying on the sides, which he slicked straight back over his large forehead with the aid of pomade. He spoke slowly, in a tone that was neither obsequious nor insecure. Korolev was accustomed to dealing with Presidium members; he had even reported to Stalin on several occasions after returning from Germany in 1946 and being named head of the newly created OKB Special Design Bureau at NII-88.

The rocket he pointed to was the fruit of OKB-l’s German labors, an identical replica of the V-2 called the R-l. Everything about it was German: the parts that had gone into it; the engineers and technicians who had been forcibly relocated to Russia to assemble it (it was from them that the CIA eventually gleaned most of its information on the missile complex); even the camouflage scheme, which mimicked that of the V-2. The R-l, Korolev explained, had taken three painstaking years to master. Not until 1948 had Korolev felt confident enough to try to launch it. It flew a few hundred miles—in the wrong direction.

Khrushchev listened attentively, nodding politely. Much of this he already knew. “Father was no longer a novice when it came to missiles,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. That certainly had not been the case when Beria was alive. Beria, much like Hitler’s secret police chief, Heinrich Himmler (whom he even resembled in an effete, murderous way), had tried to dominate his country’s missile programs. Though Beria had not exercised remotely the same degree of control over NII-88 as the SS chief had exerted over V-2 production, virtually all top-level decisions involving Soviet missile development had been made by him and Stalin alone, without the participation of other Presidium members. “We were technological ignoramuses,” the elder Khrushchev recounted in his memoirs, describing the first time he and his fellow Presidium members saw a missile after Stalin’s death in 1953. “We gawked,” he wrote, “as if we were a bunch of sheep. We were like peasants in the marketplace. We walked around and around the rocket, touching it, tapping it to see if it was sturdy enough—we did everything but lick it to see how it tasted.”

The missile they had seen back then was the R-2, and this was the next exhibit in Korolev’s tour of OKB-1. The delegation—Kremlin dignitaries in their somber, medal-bedecked suits, engineers in white smocks, security men from the KGB’s Ninth Directorate in black knee-length leather jackets—obediently walked over to the full-scale R-2 model. It closely resembled the R-l, except that it was nine feet longer and of a slightly wider girth, which allowed it to carry extra fuel, doubling its range to nearly 400 miles. The R-2, Korolev explained, was a hybrid: a half-Russian, half-German elongation of the original V-2. It could go farther and faster, climb higher, and carry a heavier payload than its predecessor. Alas, it could not land much more accurately, despite all the 15,000-ruble bonuses offered to captive German engineers to improve the gyroscopic and radio beacon guidance systems that had been developed in Germany during the last year of the war. Still, the R-2 represented a major technological leap in the field of structural design, where the Soviets had learned how to build a much stronger rocket, able to withstand far greater stress loads, without significantly increasing the width and weight of the materials used to build it.

At this, the Presidium members also nodded knowingly. But Molotov and Kaganovich seemed distracted, while Bulganin appeared lost in his own private universe. Perhaps they had also heard the lecture before, or perhaps they were still mulling over the consequences of Khrushchev’s secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress. Barely two days had passed since the dramatic address had so shocked and staggered its audience that, in the words of one participant, “you could hear a fly buzzing” in the stunned silence that permeated the Great Kremlin Palace. Khrushchev had spoken for nearly four uninterrupted hours, and his listeners had turned either deathly pale or beet-red with anger. When he was done, there was not the usual standing ovation, which was typically thunderous and prolonged, because in Stalin’s day no one dared to be the first to stop clapping and sit down. The cheering could last five palm-aching minutes until the “boss” signaled that he was satisfied. But Khrushchev, at the Twentieth Party Congress, had done the unimaginable: he had publicly attacked Joseph Stalin. Stalin, he said, had abused his authority and had ruined millions of innocent lives. Stalin was a murderer, a liar, and a thief, who had stolen the communist ideal and perverted it with his paranoid quest for power.

An audible gasp had echoed throughout the palace hall, as if there suddenly was not enough air to breathe. Even to think what Khrushchev had uttered aloud was considered heretical in the Soviet Union, punishable by excommunication to Siberia or outright execution. What Khrushchev had done was tantamount to the pope assembling the College of Cardinals to denounce Christ. Stalin had been a demigod, as much revered as feared. At his funeral, such was the outpouring of grief that one hundred people had been trampled to death by the mobs of mourners that had descended on Red Square to view his body lying in state next to Lenin. His victims sent tearful tributes from prisons. Grown men sobbed inconsolably on the subway. Only the Presidium members shed crocodile tears. As the Great Leader slipped in and out of consciousness, they had denied him medical attention to hasten his demise. They had hovered over his deathbed like ghouls, falling to their knees when his eyes flickered open, retreating to scheme in dark corners when they closed. When at last he drew his final strained breath, the relief on their faces was clear. They had survived the Terror.

But now Khrushchev’s speech had put them all in danger again. They had warned him not to do it; it would open up a can of worms that might consume them all, they said. “If now, at the fountain of communist wisdom, a new course is set which appears to deviate considerably from that of the Stalin era,” the CIA noted in an April 1956 analysis of the speech, “repercussions are likely to occur which may be of great moment…. It may set in motion forces extending far beyond the contemplation of the collective leaders of the CPSU.”

Khrushchev told his fellow Presidium members that 7 million Soviet citizens would soon be returning from Stalin’s Siberian gulags. From the prisons they would bring back horror stories of torture and mass murder, of starvation and sham trials. There would be no way, Khrushchev reasoned, to keep the full and terrible extent of Stalin’s purges quiet much longer.

“Don’t you see what will happen?” Kaganovich had protested. “They’ll hold us accountable…. We were in the leadership, and if we didn’t know, that’s our problem, but we’re still responsible for everything.”

Kaganovich’s feigned ignorance must have provoked a cynical snicker from the other members of the Presidium. How any Soviet citizen, least of all a fawning Stalin henchman like Lazar Kaganovich, could profess no knowledge of the fratricidal inferno that raged between 1929 and 1953 and engulfed 18 million lives was baffling. What had begun as a settling of accounts in the Central Committee had degenerated into a national feeding frenzy that left no corner of the Soviet empire unscarred. People turned in their neighbors because they wanted their apartments. Subordinates ratted out superiors because they wanted their jobs. Economic failures were blamed on “wreckers” and foreign saboteurs. Ethnic minorities were arrested en masse. Baits, Jews, Chechens, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Western Ukrainians were shipped by the trainload to Arctic jails. The Siberian death trains ran from as far west as Warsaw, where more than one million Poles were sent to the gulags, half never to return. The gulag archipelago that became their final resting place stretched over thirteen time zones, encompassed three thousand prison and labor camps, and employed hundreds of thousands of guards, administrators, and factory technicians. Vast railway networks had been carved over the permafrost to supply it with inmates and to haul the gold, coal, diamonds, and timber that their slave labor produced. Entire swaths of the Soviet economy depended on the blood-soaked revenue generated by the gulags, which did double duty as an engine of mass murder no less efficient than the Nazi concentration camps. The weeks-long cattle-car journeys could kill half the arrivals. Cold, disease, malnutrition, and overwork did the rest.

It was impossible for Kaganovich not to know any of this, just as it was impossible for the delegates of the Twentieth Party Congress not to have noticed that more than 1,000 of their 1,500 predecessors from the Seventeenth Congress in 1949 had been shot. Of course Kaganovich had known. Everyone knew. Each Presidium member, Khrushchev included, had personally signed thousands of arrest and death warrants. In their speeches, they had all exhorted the security men to exceed their brutal interrogation quotas, to root out shirkers, reactionary right-leaners, and foreign spies. Molotov, in his memoirs, even justified arresting the wives and children of enemies of the people: “They had to be isolated…. Otherwise, of course, they would have spread all sorts of complaints and demoralization.” Molotov’s own wife fell victim to the purges, but he did not try to save her from a Siberian labor camp. Nor did Kaganovich rise to the defense of his brother, who committed suicide rather than face trial. They had had to remain silent, to be more Stalinist than Stalin himself, because betraying even the slightest hint of hesitation would have cost them their lives. “All it took was an instant,” Khrushchev recalled. “All you did was blink and the door would open and you’d find yourself in Lubyanka,” the KGB headquarters.

For the men of Stalin’s inner circle, participation in the purges had been a matter of personal survival. But now that Khrushchev had unmasked Stalin’s reign of terror, would they survive an accounting for their actions? That was the real danger of Khrushchev’s speech—not the professed knowledge of the purges but the official acknowledgment of them, as the CIA report on the secret speech underscored. “A change from violence to diplomacy and from tension to relaxation cannot but have a deep psychological impact on the people inside the communist orbit” was the analysis in Washington. “The question arises whether the leaders of the CPSU can dispense with permanent tension without at the same time undermining their monolithic dictatorship.”

For the first time, a Soviet leader had admitted that horrible crimes had been committed in the name of communism, that terror as a tool of the state was wrong. It was still too early to tell what that meant. But as the CIA predicted, there were almost certainly going to be dire consequences.

These, and other, thoughts troubled Korolev’s distracted guests. The Chief Designer would not have known what weighty matters preoccupied his visitors because he had not been privy to the secret speech. But he was intimately acquainted with its contents. He had been among the 1,548,366 people arrested in 1938, an ordeal that began, as in the case of countless others, with a knock at the door in the middle of the night and nearly always ended in death, either by outright execution or later in the camps. “He was taken to Lefortovo prison, interrogated, beaten,” a colleague of Korolev’s would later inform the biographer James Harford. “He remembered asking for a glass of water from one [guard] who handed him the glass and then hit him in the head with the water jug. He was called an enemy of the people.”

Korolev didn’t need Khrushchev to tell him how cold it could get in Kolyma, or what it was like to sleep barefoot in the snow with a broken jaw. He had not needed to be told how it felt to lose all your teeth from malnutrition. And he didn’t need to listen to a speech to know that the prosecutions had been shams. In fact, the scientist at his side during most of the Presidium visit, the propulsion expert Valentin Glushko, had provided testimony against him at his own trial, which had ended with a ten-year sentence “for crimes in the field of a new technology” and a perfunctory “Next.”

What Korolev did need from Khrushchev that day was the green light to embark on an ambitious new project. So the Chief Designer smiled his pearly denture smile at the men who had robbed years from his life and continued his lecture. The first full-scale R-2, he explained, had been field-tested in October 1950. The launch was not a success. After tinkering throughout the harsh winter, the designers attempted another series of test firings in the spring of 1951. This time it flew 390 miles—in the right direction. “Which brings us to the present,” said Korolev, gesturing toward the largest of the three missiles. “This is the R-5,” he said, tapping the rocket with a pointer, “the first Soviet strategic rocket,” built entirely by Russians without German help.

The R-5, the Presidium members could immediately see, was radically different from its predecessors. It was longer by half than the original V-2 replica, slimmer, more fragile in appearance, and tubular in shape. The four big, graceful stabilizer fins that had made the tapered V-2 instantly recognizable had been lopped back to tiny triangle wedges on the R-5, and the nose cone had been blunted into an ungainly snout.

“The construction looked utterly incapable of flight,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled, a sixty-six-foot-long pencil in need of sharpening, with an engine for a rubber eraser. “The [R-l and R-2] at least had streamlined shapes and a certain refinement in the form of stabilizers,” he would later write. “Apparently I wasn’t the only one to have this reaction, since Father looked surprised.”

Korolev, at last, had his guests’ undivided attention. Not only did the R-5 fly, he explained, but it spent most of its flight above the atmosphere. Large stabilizer fins were not necessary because of servomotors for the small aerodynamic rudders. The rocket’s tubular shell doubled as the propellant tank wall, further reducing design mass by a full ton while increasing fuel capacity by 60 percent. The engine, an RD-103 designed by Glushko, also produced 60 percent more thrust than its predecessors, and thanks to the introduction of coolant flowing through integrated solder-welded ribs around the combustion chamber, it could operate longer and more efficiently, without overheating or cracking under the intense temperatures and pressure generated by forty-four tons of thrust. Glushko’s engine propelled the R-5 to a top speed of 10,000 feet per second, or twice as fast as the V-2. A new thermal shield protected the nose cone from the excess heat generated by the increased velocity and atmospheric reentry, while targeting accuracy had been greatly improved with the addition of longitudinal acceleration integrators, which could control engine cutoff with greater precision.

Fully fueled and armed, the R-5 weighed twenty-nine tons. Its range was 1,200 kilometers, roughly 800 miles. Its payload was an eightykiloton nuclear warhead, the equivalent force of six Hiroshima bombs. And the R-5 was not a mock-up or test vehicle. It was operational. Three weeks earlier, on February 2, the missile had carried its lethal cargo 800 miles, setting off a mushroom cloud over a target area near the Aral Sea in Soviet central Asia. The test had marked the world’s first nuclear detonation delivered by a ballistic missile, the dawn of a new age in warfare. The Soviet Union had fired the first salvo of an arms race that would consume trillions of dollars and hold the planet hostage for the next forty years.

The Presidium members stared intently at their revolutionary new weapon. It seemed incomprehensible that such a strange, fragile object could wield such power; that with one push of a button it could vaporize an entire city in an instant. Khrushchev and a few of the other Presidium members had seen war, and they knew that it was incremental, a process of attrition. In the sieges of Stalingrad and Kursk, Leningrad and Kiev, the devastation had been progressive. A little bit of each city had died each day, and the process had lasted for agonizing months. With the R-5, everything would be over within seven minutes of launch. You didn’t need planes, tanks, or troops, or an invasion fleet. You didn’t need to worry about logistics or supply trains. You didn’t need to put your soldiers in harm’s way. It made war seem almost effortless.

For nearly a minute no one spoke. Khrushchev finally broke the silence. Which countries were in its range? he wanted to know. His son recorded the scene: “Korolev walked over to a map of Europe, which was hanging on a special stand. It looked just like the ones we had had in school, except that this one had arcs of intersecting circles against the blue background of the Atlantic Ocean. Thin radii drawn with India ink stretched to [the Soviet bloc’s] western borders, to the frontier of East Germany. In the upper right-hand corner of the map there was a calligraphic inscription: ‘Highly classified. Of special importance.’ Slightly below that was Copy Number—I don’t remember the number, but it was no higher than three.”

The map showed that the R-5 could strike every nation in Europe, except Spain and Portugal, which were still out of range. A murmur of satisfaction rose from the Presidium members. “Excellent,” said Khrushchev. “Until recently we couldn’t even dream of such a thing. But the appetite grows by what it feeds on. Comrade Korolev, isn’t it possible to extend the rocket’s range?”

No, the Chief Designer replied flatly, a new missile would be required. Khrushchev and the others seemed disappointed. But Korolev appeared unperturbed; his authority was already well established within Kremlin circles. The delegation remained rooted in front of the map for some time, contemplating Armageddon. “Father stared piercingly at it,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled.

“How many warheads would be needed to destroy England?” the party leader finally asked. “Have you calculated that?”

Dmitri Ustinov, the armaments minister, fielded the question. “Five. A few more for France—seven or nine, depending on the choice of targets.”

Only five? Khrushchev seemed skeptical. The British had withstood a daily barrage of V-2s. They had shrugged off the Junker bombers during the Blitz, displayed a tenacity that even Stalin had praised. But now Great Britain was America’s closest ally; it would have to be taken out first.

“Five would be enough to crush defenses and disrupt communications and transportation, not to mention the destruction of major cities,” Ustinov explained. His tone, Sergei Khrushchev remembered, “did not allow for even a shadow of a doubt.”

“Terrible,” said Khrushchev, trailing off in thought. Five flicks of a switch to break the will of a nation like Britain. Astonishing. Cost-effective, too.

It was not only the search for a new weapon to counter American air superiority that had brought Khrushchev to Korolev’s design bureau. He was also looking for ways to save money because, unlike the booming American economy, Soviet central planning was in trouble. The years of rapid growth after the war, when entire cities and industries had been rebuilt from rubble, were over by the mid-1950s. Most Western European nations had made remarkable recoveries by then, due in part to the Marshall Plan. But the command economies of the Eastern bloc had spurned American financial aid and were now beginning to suffer from a crisis of inefficiency. Put simply, Soviet central planning was suffering from the law of diminishing returns. No matter how many rubles the Russians sank into their wobbly industries, they were getting a smaller and smaller return on their investment. And the problem was only going to get worse over time.

For Khrushchev, the economic slowdown came just as his treasury faced the twin challenge of meeting the raised American threat and rising consumer demands at home. After years of sacrifice, first during the war and then during reconstruction, Soviet citizens were beginning to yearn for a higher standard of living. Encouraged in part by a slew of lighthearted films and musicals after Stalin’s death that featured fashionable clothes, fast cars, and the joys of shopping, Soviet citizens had embraced this new material slant on life. Khrushchev had approved the cinematic thaw and the departure from the austere militarist offerings of Stalinist directors because he understood that he could not rule by fear alone. Stalin had shrewdly substituted a diet of national pride and terror for material well-being that had given his subjects comfort in the notion that while they were frightened and poor, they were building a great empire and a better tomorrow. Khrushchev preferred the carrot to Stalin’s stick. Parades were not enough. People had to have tangible rewards from the socialist miracle touted by the new propaganda films.

To bring his movies more in line with reality, Khrushchev needed to free up hundreds of billions of rubles to pay for housing projects, to recapitalize decrepit automobile factories, and to finance agricultural reforms that would put food on people’s tables. As things stood, the Soviet Union could barely feed itself. Yields were so low that in 1953 per capita grain production had fallen to 1913 levels. All told, the USSR’s muddy collective farms were producing less food in the early 1950s than they had in 1940. If the trend continued, the Soviet Union would starve.

To reverse the decline, Khrushchev had embarked on a hugely ambitious and controversial program to develop 80 million acres of virgin steppe in central Asia that was intended to increase agricultural production by 50 percent. Molotov, in particular, had vehemently opposed the plan, which required relocating three hundred thousand farmworkers and fifty thousand tractors to cultivate the raw fields in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia. It was far too expensive, Molotov argued, and the climate was too harsh. But Khrushchev had overruled him; the money, he said, would be found somewhere, trimmed from the fat of various other budget allocations.

Military expenditures ate up between 14 and 20 percent of the Soviet economy, compared to 9 percent for the United States, whose economy was much larger. And yet, despite the large outlays, the Soviet armed forces could not adequately address the new American jet-bomber threat. The Red Army had more than 3.5 million men under arms, but they were useless against B-47s carrying nuclear bombs. What’s more, they were expensive; soldiers had to be clothed, fed, housed, and provided with costly trucks, tanks, and artillery whose role in a nuclear standoff was of limited or no value. Khrushchev could try to compete with the Americans by bulking up his aging fleet of World War II-era bombers, but it was becoming clear that he could not keep pace with the U.S. Air Force. Even if Khrushchev ramped up spending, he could not hope to match the new B-52 superbomber that Boeing was beginning to mass-produce. In heavy aviation, the Soviet Union had simply fallen too far behind to make the investment worthwhile.

In the high-stakes arms race, Khrushchev was a pauper playing at a rich’s man table. Given the vast financial gulf between America and the Soviet Union, he had to marshal his resources more carefully than Eisenhower, and he saw that missiles were the cheapest, most cost-effective way to stay in the game. Their costs were mostly up-front, in research and development. And Khrushchev felt that he would not need to produce them in significant numbers. That hadn’t been the case in World War II. Hitler, after all, had bet the Reich on the V-2, built thousands of them, and lost. But that was before the atomic age. Nuclear warheads dramatically changed the equation. Now you could defeat England with only five rockets and keep America at bay with a few dozen more. From a financial point of view, focusing on missiles made more sense than maintaining a huge standing army or sinking money into giant bomber fleets that rockets would soon render obsolete anyway.

And so Khrushchev was betting the farm on Korolev. He had slashed spending on conventional forces to free up funds for foodstuffs and housing, while he hoped that the Chief Designer’s missiles would provide the USSR with a shield against American bombers. Just how big a wager he was placing would stun the CIA, which in a 1958 report underscored “the striking re-allocation of expenditures within the [Soviet military] mission structure. The most dramatic examples are the 34% decline in expenditures for the ground mission, and the 127% increase for the strategic attack mission…. Increasing expenditures on strategic attack reflect the replacement of the manned bomber by long range missiles.”

Khrushchev, in short, was gambling that the Americans had put their money on the wrong weapons system.

“Well,” asked Khrushchev, “what else do you have to show us?” This was the moment Sergei Korolev had been waiting for; the moment he had prepared for ever since the day he was released from prison and sent to Germany to join Chertok and Glushko to uncover the secrets of Nazi missiles. (Chertok, alas, could not share in the triumph. He had been demoted from his post as NII-88 deputy director during one of Stalin’s anti-Semitic roundups. After Stalin’s death, Korolev eased Chertok back into a senior position at OKB-1, but his rank was not high enough to meet Presidium members.) Now NII-88’s most senior scientists stirred anxiously as Korolev prepared to unveil their collective masterpiece, the product of over a decade of research and millions of man-hours of dedicated work.

“We have seen the past and the present of Soviet rocketry,” said Korolev, leading his guests to a large double door, where a pair of crisply uniformed guards stood rigidly at attention. “This is the future.”

The doors swung dramatically open, and Sergei Khrushchev gasped. “I was amazed. I had never seen anything remotely like it, no one had,” he said, the excitement and wonder of that first glimpse still evident even after fifty years. Sergei and his father stepped into the top-secret inner room. The structure was brand-new, so spotless that everything shone, and its walls soared upward instead of lengthwise like the hangar they had just come from. These walls were constructed entirely of glass, and they had been painted white to allow light in but to keep prying eyes out. At the center of the gigantic atrium stood a rocket larger than Sergei Khrushchev had ever imagined. “It looked like the Kremlin tower,” he said.

Korolev stood aside and savored the moment. The rulers of the Soviet empire, among the most ruthless and powerful men on the planet, were frozen with awe. They had stopped dead in their tracks, reduced momentarily to the status of mere mortals. “Father later told me that he was simply numb, intimidated by the grandeur of such an object created by human hands,” Sergei recalled.

“The R-7,” announced Korolev with theatrical flair. The Presidium members recovered some of their composure and slowly circled the mammoth missile. In weight and mass it was ten times the size of the R-5, and almost twice as heavy as the Hindenburg Zeppelin, the largest aircraft ever built. Whereas the R-5 had one engine, the R-7 boasted five giant boosters that would consume 247 tons of fuel in four minutes. The nearly one million pounds of lift they generated could hurl the missile more than 5,000 miles at a speed of over 24,000 feet per second, four times faster and forty times farther than the original V-2.

The Presidium members drank this all in like a golden elixir. They poked their bald pates into the missile’s twenty burnished copper exhaust nozzles and craned their creaky old necks up at the inky black nose cone where the thermonuclear warhead would sit, a five-ton device that would have an explosive yield nearly one hundred times that of the atomic bomb the Americans had dropped on Hiroshima. The men of the Presidium shook their heads in wonder, whistled softly, and shot one another glances that brimmed with satisfaction. At last the Soviet Union would have its ultimate weapon, a rocket that could reach New York and Washington with the deadly force of all the combined ordnance dropped in the Second World War.

But try as they did, the Presidium members could not entirely fathom the full lethal potential of the R-7. Just how fast is 24,000 feet per second? Khrushchev tried to imagine.

“How long would it take to fly to Kiev?” he asked Korolev. When he was Stalin’s Ukrainian viceroy, Khrushchev had made the arduous three-hour air commute between Moscow and the Ukrainian capital several times a week in his old Douglass.

“Maybe a minute,” Korolev replied.

Khrushchev whistled appreciatively. Bulganin stroked his goatee. That meant the R-7 could reach the United States in less than half an hour. Even if the radar stations the Americans had built in Norway, Turkey, and Iran picked up the launch, they would not have enough time to react, to scramble the Strategic Air Command or evacuate their cities. The R-7 really could make all the difference, change the entire security dynamic—if it worked. And that would not be known until later that year, when testing could begin.

“Why is the rocket tapered in the middle?” Molotov asked, interrupting Khrushchev’s train of thought. The R-7 had a slightly hourglass-like shape because the four big boosters strapped around the central core flared out like a skirt. Korolev began to explain that the narrow midriff was necessary for the strapped-on engines to attach and jettison properly, but Khrushchev snapped impatiently: “Why do you ask such stupid questions? You don’t understand anything about these technical matters. Leave them to the experts.”

Molotov shrank back at the public rebuke but said nothing. There was a time when Khrushchev would never have dared to humiliate him so openly, when Khrushchev had fawned over him and genuinely admired him. But now the upstart was putting on airs, interfering in foreign affairs—even though he had never traveled abroad until after Stalin’s death. Once, when they had been coconspirators, Khrushchev had known his place. But now he was becoming impossible, an expert on everything. Behind his back Molotov called Khrushchev a “smalltime cattle dealer. Without a doubt a man of little culture. A cattle trader. A man who sells livestock.” Khrushchev, on the other hand, derided the old diplomat as a geriatric Stalinist relic. “Their relations had become tense,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled, “especially after the secret speech.”

Like Kaganovich, Molotov had been vehemently opposed to Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program. For the foreign minister, there were external considerations. Fear of Stalin had been the glue that cemented the Eastern Bloc. After his death, rumblings of discontent had begun to ripple throughout the captive states of central Europe, particularly in Poland and Hungary. In Yugoslavia, Marshal Josip Broz Tito had become downright disrespectful, and Molotov had been furious that Khrushchev had not punished him. It set a bad precedent to be seen as so soft. And now that Khrushchev had denounced Stalin’s reign of terror, the Poles and Hungarians might also grow bolder. Khrushchev’s speech could be taken as a sign of weakness throughout the Soviet dominions, a reflection of waning resolve, a cue to rise up. Khrushchev, the novice, didn’t understand any of these things; he had no comprehension of the forces he might have unleashed. His pigheaded ignorance could bring down the whole empire.

Molotov, of course, said none of this publicly. He was too seasoned a Kremlin intriguer to make that mistake. Publicly he recanted his opposition to appeasing Tito, saying, “I consider the Presidium has correctly pointed out the error of my position,” and joined Kaganovich in praising Khrushchev on his insightful initiatives. “Comrade Khrushchev carries out his work… intensively, steadfastly, actively and enterprisingly, as befits a Leninist Bolshevik,” he had said only a few months earlier. But privately, Kaganovich and Molotov were already whispering in Bulganin’s malevolent ear. Now was not yet the time. Like the butcher Beria before him, the cattle salesman would get his comeuppance soon enough. With luck he might not even live to see the R-7 fly.

“I would like you to know about still another project,” Korolev said quickly, as the Presidium delegation was about to leave. For the first time a hint of hesitation had crept into the Chief Designer’s normally self-confident tone, and his words had gushed out in a torrent of pent-up anxiety.

Korolev “led us to a stand occupying a modest place in the corner,” Sergei Khrushchev recalled. “A model of some kind of apparatus lay on the stand. It looked unusual, to put it mildly. A flying machine should have a smooth surface, flowing shapes and clean-cut angles. But this one had some type of rods protruding on all sides and paneling swollen by projections.”

What is it? the Presidium members asked. A satellite, said Korolev. He paused for effect, gauging his guests’ reaction. There was none. Instead, they stared blankly at the meaningless object. Korolev must have sensed the disinterest, for he launched into an impassioned speech. From time immemorial, he said, growing animated and uncharacteristically emotional, man has dreamed of escaping the bonds of gravity, of breaking free of the earth’s atmosphere and exploring the cosmos. Until now the dream of the space pioneers—and here Korolev spoke glowingly of the nineteenth-century Russian rocket visionary Konstantin Tsiolkowsky—had belonged to the realm of theory or science fiction because no man-made object could generate sufficient velocity to break the gravity barrier. The R-7, though, was almost fast enough. With a little tinkering and a few minor adjustments, it could make that age-old dream possible.

Once again, Korolev paused and looked at his guests. The Presidium members seemed unmoved. So what? their expressionless faces seemed to say. What did any of this have to do with the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could keep the Soviet Union safe from American attack? How could the two even compare in national importance? Korolev was wasting their time with this romantic nonsense. The Chief Designer had been getting this sort of blasé reaction for two years now, ever since his proposal for a satellite project had begun wending its way slowly up the Soviet bureaucracy from one skeptical committee to the next. Decrees had been signed advocating the “artificial moon” as far back as May 1954, but without a champion on the Presidium to lend weight to the resolutions they were just pieces of paper. “You needed the constant support of power,” Sergei Khrushchev explained of the way things worked in the dictatorship of the proletariat. “Everyone needed to know that you could pick up the phone and dial the First Secretary’s four-digit extension number directly if there was an obstacle. Otherwise you would fail.”

Korolev must have sensed that he was losing his audience, and his one chance to get Khrushchev or one of the others to personally sign off on his pet project. He quickly changed tack. The Americans, he said casually, were in the advanced stages of developing a similar satellite. This was a slight exaggeration, but the Presidium didn’t need to know that. The United States, Korolev continued his pitch, had been working on a satellite for some years. He was certain, though, that he could beat them to space. It would be a significant scientific victory, he added, not to mention a serious defeat for the capitalists. Bulganin and Molotov looked at the model satellite with renewed interest. The shadow of a smile formed under Kaganovich’s dark mustache.

Korolev’s ploy had not been subtle, but it had its desired effect. He decided to press his advantage: “The Americans have taken a wrong turn. They are developing a special rocket and spending millions. We only have to remove the thermonuclear warhead and put a satellite in its place. And that’s all.”

Sergei Khrushchev recalled his father staring long and hard at the satellite model, mulling over Korolev’s request. “It seemed as if he was still debating the matter,” he observed. Part of the problem was that other than the prestige of being first in orbit, the satellite didn’t appear to have much of a purpose. Korolev had spoken of scientific readings and radio signals, but the men of the Presidium failed to see the point. They were not alone. Only a few hundred people on the entire planet in 1956 grasped the true potential and significance of a satellite, and several of them happened to work in surveillance at the CIA. For the leaders of the Soviet Union, dreams of distant space conquests risked becoming costly distractions from the immediate and earthly concerns of the cold war.

Minutes passed, and Korolev once again assured his masters that launching a satellite would in no way interfere with the development of the ICBM since it could only occur once the R-7 was fully operational anyway. Khrushchev seemed to weigh this. The ICBM was unquestionably the Soviet Union’s overriding priority. But the prospect of thumbing his nose at the arrogant Americans also had a certain undeniable appeal.

Okay, he finally relented. “If the main task doesn’t suffer, do it.”