Red Moon Rising

3 TRIALS AND ERRORS

The Pandora’s box that Nikita Khrushchev had pried open during his secret speech at the Twentieth Party Congress would explode in his face eight days later.

On the morning of March 5, 1956, the continuous blaring of car horns pierced the crisp mountain air over the ancient Georgian capital of Tbilisi. Sirens echoed through the steep cobblestone streets, bouncing off the fifth-century facades of ancient buildings, and the sound rippled down through the valley’s orchards, ravines, and steaming sulfur springs below. Near the Palace of Labor, a new and unappealing Soviet structure, a crowd of about 150 people marched down the middle of the road. Their heads were uncovered in a show of respect and bereavement, and they carried red wreaths and large portraits of Joseph Stalin with the corners draped in black crape. It was the third anniversary of the Great Leader’s death, an event previously marked by solemn processions throughout the Soviet Union.

But on that day only the Georgians commemorated the passing of their native son. In the rest of the empire there was an official and insulting silence: no ceremonies, no tributes, no mass rallies—just persistent and disturbing rumors that Stalin had been discredited as a brutal tyrant. In Tbilisi, the puzzlement turned to indignation. The Georgians were a fiercely proud people, one of the first nations on earth to have adopted Christianity back in AD 337. Tiny as their mountain enclave was, two of their own, Stalin and Beria, had ruled the endless and chaotic landmass of Russia and had presided over the largest expansion of the Slavic empire since Catherine the Great. Under Stalin, Georgian had become the unofficial second language of a global superpower, and ambitious apparatchiks in Moscow affected soft, slurry Georgian accents. Now, unsettling reports were circulating that Stalin’s memory had been besmirched, that the “Great Son of the Georgian People” had been denigrated. In Tbilisi, this caused grave patriotic concern.

The following day, something strange happened. The mourners returned for a spontaneous, unsanctioned march. This time there were one thousand people, and they carried portraits of Lenin in addition to Stalin. The mood was different as well, recalled Sergei Stanikov, the local correspondent for the Moscow daily Trud, or Labor. Stanikov, a loyal party man, smelled a story. In twenty years of covering Georgian politics, he had never witnessed a spontaneous rally. No one demonstrated in the Soviet Union without permission. Stanikov followed the crowd as it squeezed through the narrow, musty streets and made its way to Georgian Central Committee headquarters at Government House. Was it true, the mourners demanded, what was being said about Stalin in Moscow? “A meeting was held at 4 o’clock in which I was present,” Stanikov wrote in a secret report. “Comrade Mzhavanadze [the first secretary of the Georgian Communist Party] informed us that he would soon acquaint us with the letter regarding the Cult of Personality.”

Unsatisfied with this vague and discouraging response, the mourners returned in even larger numbers the next day. At noon, students from Stalin University, the Institute for Agriculture, and the Polytechnical Institute walked out of their classrooms and joined the growing mob on Rustaveli Street. “Dideba did Stalins” the crowd chanted defiantly in Georgian, “Long live Stalin.” The students were angry. Georgians had a reputation for their fiery temperament; their hospitality knew no bounds, as evidenced by their elaborate twenty-one-toast protocols during brandy-filled banquets for foreign guests, and neither did their anger at perceived slights. A car was overturned. Someone threw a rock at the City Council Building. The chants also took a more ominous, nationalistic turn. “Long live Georgia, long life to the Georgian people.”

Local officials dispatched frantic messages to Moscow. They had no experience with civil disobedience and wanted instructions from the Kremlin. This, in itself, was not unusual. In a vertical hierarchy like the USSR, no official who valued his perks—or position—made independent decisions without consulting higher authority. The members of the Presidium were so bogged down with the minutiae of running this vast nation that they were currently reading the manuscript of a young writer named Boris Pasternak to decide whether his novel Doctor Zhivago should be banned. (It was.) The Ministry of the Interior told the Georgian officials to publicly read Khrushchev’s proclamation on Stalin’s crimes and the Cult of Personality. That should silence the crowd. But it didn’t.

As Molotov and Kaganovich had feared, Khrushchev’s precedent of openly criticizing a Communist icon served only to whip Georgians into their own frenzy. It was as if Khrushchev, by his own example, had given citizens license to criticize the regime as well. And now that they had tasted a little freedom to protest, they couldn’t stop themselves.

The following day, March 8, some eighteen thousand demonstrators filled Lenin Square in Tbilisi, their grievances having grown more wide-ranging. “Provocative speeches of inflammatory, chauvinistic and anti-Soviet nature were read,” Stanikov reported indignantly to his editors, who relayed the breathless dispatches to KGB headquarters. (Stanikov, like other Russian correspondents in Tbilisi, understood that his field reports were not for publication, and the Soviet media made no official mention of the brewing unrest. Journalists simply acted as an extra set of eyes and ears on the ground for the security organs.) “A huge young man with a Tarzan hairdo,” Stanikov continued, “waved his fist in the air, and after a series of accusations against the Party and the government, went on to recall the struggle of the Georgians against foreigners.”

Stanikov was shocked, and for the first time since the marches began he was also frightened. The demonstration had shifted to dangerously seditious grounds, because the “foreigners” in question were Russians. What had started as indignation over Khrushchev’s denunciation of a hometown hero was rapidly devolving into an independence rally, a cry for autonomy from the Kremlin itself. Stalin, after all, had been the central linchpin to Georgia’s tenuous allegiance to Moscow. Without the reflected glory of the Great Leader, it did not take long for Georgians to remember that they had been forced at bayonet point to join the empire.

Poets and writers stoked the nationalist flames with fiery readings of Georgian folklore. People waved purple prerevolutionary Georgian flags and sang odes to kings from centuries past. Every vehicle in the city honked its horn in solidarity. Even Stanikov unwittingly caught the liberty bug, feeling free to criticize Soviet authorities in one dispatch. “In my opinion, the public reading of [Khrushchev’s] letter on the cult of personality should have been avoided,” he complained to his bosses, expressing a contrarian view to the party line that, in Stalin’s day, only a fool would have put in writing.

The situation was spiraling out of control. In Moscow, on the evening of March 8, the Presidium debated what to do. Khrushchev urged restraint; Molotov and Kaganovich wanted order restored immediately. The unrest had started to spread to other Georgian cities. Left unchecked, the madness could infect neighboring regions in the volatile Caucasus and possibly contaminate the entire Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, inflaming the nationalist aspirations of Kazaks, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Tatars, Baits, Moldovans, and western Ukrainians—to say nothing of the Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, and East Germans living unhappily under Moscow’s yoke. The Presidium argued late into the night. And by morning the reports from Tbilisi were increasingly alarmist. “On March 9th unimaginable things were happening,” Stanikov wrote. “Not only the youth, but even adults were going berserk on the streets. Most of the small workshops were closed. The employees of small offices came out on the streets…. The movements of trams, buses and trolley buses were disrupted.”

The entire city was paralyzed. The sprawling Stalin Coach Works, the huge locomotive factory, shut down. In the early afternoon, the Georgian first party secretary tried to address the agitated crowd outside Government House but was shouted down. No one had ever publicly defied the senior Communist Party representative before. Terrified, he locked himself in his office, surrounded by armed guards. The Georgian Central Committee hotline to the Kremlin burned with urgent pleas for guidance. The local authorities were no longer in control.

Just before midnight, word reached Moscow that a huge crowd had descended on the main radio and telegraph station in central Tbilisi, demanding to broadcast from the transmission tower. Tanks had deployed around the communications center and were anxiously awaiting instructions. The time for debate was over. Something had to be done now. “This is what the provocation, that was apparently organized by foreign spies and agents, and which was not dealt with in time, led to,” Stanikov reported afterward. “Hooligans put everything into action: knives, stones, belts. There was no way out for the soldiers. Their life was in danger and they were forced into taking defensive action.”

By the time the T-55 tanks finished “defending” themselves from the onslaught of civilian belt buckles and pocketknives, nine protesters were officially pronounced dead, dozens lay wounded, and thirty-eight alleged ringleaders were arrested. Historians would later increase the body count ten- to twentyfold, though to this day no one knows how many Georgians actually died during the March 9 massacre. One thing was clear, however: Nikita Khrushchev had unleashed powerful pent-up forces with his secret speech. His attempt to breathe a little democracy into the Stalinist corpse had horribly backfired because a little democracy can be dangerous in a totalitarian society. Liberalization is a slippery slope. And dictatorships can easily lose their footing once they loosen the reins. Khrushchev didn’t understand that, and he underestimated the longing for self-determination of the nationalities held captive behind the Iron Curtain.

His troubles, in fact, were just beginning.

As the winter wore on and the KGB hunted for the “nest of foreign spies” that had incited the Georgian uprising, Sergei Korolev grappled with his own share of difficulties. His problems, like Khrushchev’s, had been mostly of his own making.

Korolev had fallen into the classic salesman’s trap. During his pitch to the Presidium at OKB-1, he had made wildly unrealistic promises in order to close the deal for the satellite. By showing the Presidium a full-scale mock-up of the R-7, he had left Khrushchev and Molotov with the distinct impression that a prototype of the ICBM was almost complete. But the rocket they had seen was an illusion, little more than a ten-story-tall modeler’s toy. The real prototype was nowhere near ready. The satellite was also hopelessly behind schedule. And the modifications required for the rocket to carry it were not nearly as “minor” as Korolev had breezily suggested. In short, Korolev had conned Khrushchev, a sucker for engineering marvels who could easily “be beguiled by a charismatic scientist promising miracles,” according to his biographer William Taubman.

Korolev had played on Khrushchev’s intellectual aspirations and educational shortcomings, while downplaying his own limitations. During the Presidium presentation, he had even silenced Glushko, the suave main engine designer, who had emphasized the daunting complexities of making the R-7 operational. “Our guests are not interested in the technical details,” Korolev had interrupted, with a cheerfully dismissive wave. But now that Korolev had to deliver on his promise, those technical challenges were mounting.

Glushko’s engines were the first hurdle. They had to be almost ten times as powerful as anything ever built before, and required a radically new design. Their success also depended on the ability of Glushko and Korolev to get along, which was no easy task since they had a long and acrimonious history to overcome. Aside from their mutual disdain, these two titans of Soviet rocketry were diametric opposites. Glushko was elegant and regal, with delicate, slightly feminine features, and soft, sensuous Asiatic eyes that hinted at a genetic link to Mongol invaders from centuries past. Matinee-idol handsome, he took great pride in his appearance. His suits were handmade of imported black-market fabrics. His shirts were cut and starched in the latest Western style. And he wouldn’t be caught dead in the Bulgarian and Polish shoes favored by party high-ups. He fussed over his hair and neatly manicured nails, and selected his silk ties carefully.

Korolev, on the other hand, never wore a tie unless he had to, favoring black leather jackets, and he looked like a heavyweight boxing coach who had taken a few punches on the chin. His thick fingers were nicotine-tinged, and his shirts were wrinkled and often stained with soup. His thinning black mane had a will of its own whenever he forgot to slick it down, which was frequently, and it could safely be said that he didn’t give much thought to his appearance.

Glushko loved the ballet and classical music, and he enjoyed long, languid meals at Moscow’s few fine restaurants. Korolev had no interests outside of rockets and viewed food as fuel. “He ate very quickly,” a fellow OKB-1 engineer recalled. “After finishing the food on his plate, he would wipe it clean with a piece of bread, which he subsequently put in his mouth. He even scooped up the crumbs and ate them. Then he licked all his fingers. The people around him looked on with amazement until someone volunteered that this was a habit he had developed during his years in prison and in labor camps.”

No one who had ever gone through the gulag emerged physically or psychologically unscathed. Though the Chief Designer rarely spoke of it, the Great Terror had left indelible marks on both his body and his soul. Even decades later, he could remember the minutest details of his arrest in 1938: the rasp of the needle on the gramophone that kept churning its spent record while the men in black ransacked his apartment; the sound of the trolleybus bells ringing six stories below; the hushed whimper of his three-year-old daughter, Natalia, as she clung to her terrified mother.

At the Kolyma mines, the most notorious of Stalin’s Siberian death factories, his days had started at 4:00 AM, in sixty-below-zero darkness that lasted most of the year, conditions that killed a third of the inmates each year. The criminals administered justice in Kolyma, beating the political prisoners mercilessly if they dropped a pickax or spilled a wheelbarrow or missed their quota. They stole their food and clothes, and pried out the gold fillings the greedy guards had overlooked.

Within a few months of his arrival at Kolyma, Korolev was unrecognizable. He could barely walk or talk; toothless, his jaw was broken, scars ran down his shaven head, and his legs were swollen and grotesquely blue. Scurvy, malnutrition, and frostbite had started their lethal assault and he seemed destined to die.

And yet, like millions of other purge victims, he still held out the hope that Stalin himself would realize that a terrible mistake had been made and free him. “Glushko gave testimonies about my alleged membership of anti-Soviet organizations,” Korolev wrote Stalin in mid-1940, naming several others he claimed had borne false witness against him. “This is a despicable lie…. Without examining my case properly, the military board sentenced me to ten years…. My personal circumstances are so despicable and dreadful that I have been forced to ask for your help.”

Korolev’s mother also petitioned Stalin directly. “For the sake of my sole son, a young talented rocket expert and pilot, I beg you to resume the investigations.”

But their letters, like the countless other pleas of assistance with Siberian postmarks that reached the Kremlin daily, went unanswered. What saved Korolev, ultimately, was Hitler’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the sudden drastic need for skilled military engineers. Transferred to one of the special Sharaga minimum-security technical prison institutes that Beria had set up to exploit jailed brainpower, Korolev slowly recovered, until, at war’s end, he was released and sent to Germany to parse the secrets of the V-2.

Glushko had also been in the camps, and Korolev had worked for him when they were sent to the same Sharaga. He too had been told, or had somehow come under the impression, that Korolev had denounced him during the purges. After all, everyone talked and named names after a few days with the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB. Korolev himself had signed a written confession of guilt, following one of the bloodier sessions of his interrogation. And so perhaps it was true, even likely, that he had implicated others under duress. Neither man would ever truly know, though each would harbor his suspicions. Such was the fate of the children of a revolution that ate its own and spread complicity like a soul-sapping disease.

In America, the blacklists that had cost scientists and Hollywood writers their careers or promotions during McCarthy’s rampage had led to lifelong grudges. Here the betrayals had cost people their freedom and lives, their families and possessions. And yet, when it was all over, the denouncers and denouncees were all thrown back together to coexist peacefully as if nothing had happened. No Westerner could ever hope to understand this peculiarly Soviet condition, this enforced amnesia.

Had Glushko and Korolev forgotten, or forgiven each other? Or had they simply buried their simmering recriminations and resentments beneath a thin veneer of civility?

Another factor complicating their reconciliation was the persistent rumor that Korolev had engaged in a long-running affair with Glushko’s sister-in-law. The alleged romance—a source of contention among contemporary Russian historians—had predated the purges and apparently resumed in 1949, as the Chief Designer’s first marriage was falling apart. Whether Glushko knew about it, or how he felt about his brother’s deception and humiliation at the hands of his rival, is not a matter of the historical record. The only thing clear amid the unanswered questions was that Korolev and Glushko needed each other and had to find a way to work together.

Korolev now outranked Glushko, which probably didn’t help heal the old wounds, for the one characteristic the two men shared was pride. Both were intensely egotistical and ambitious and fiercely competitive by nature. In manner and demeanor, however, they were different in almost every other respect. Korolev was coarse and crude, capable of violently profane tirades during which he would scream, shout, and dismiss employees with threats of extended sojourns to Siberia. Boris Chertok recounted witnessing one such outburst. It occurred in 1945, when the two were in Germany, scouring for V-2 technology. As war booty Korolev had procured a shiny red Horche two-seater sports car, which he drove at breakneck speed, terrorizing passengers and pedestrians alike. “Sergei Pavlovich,” Chertok had pleaded, “your Horche is beautiful, but it’s not a fighter plane, and we are in a populated area, not the sky.”

“But I have both a driver’s license and a pilot’s license,” Korolev had retorted confidently. Sure enough, a few days later Korolev rammed a vehicle from the Soviet carpool just outside Chertok’s headquarters. “Korolev flew into my office extremely upset and demanded I immediately fire the German driver, and send Chiznikov [the Russian officer in charge of transportation] into exile for not keeping order in his motor pool.”

Korolev’s anger, however, never roiled for long. His temper subsided as quickly as it flared, and he would return a few hours later with sheepish good cheer, as if nothing had happened. (Chiznikov, for instance, was never banished for vehicular disorderliness; instead, Korolev promoted him and recruited him to work at OKB-1, where he liked to boast to impressionable young engineers: “I’m not afraid of anyone in the whole wide world—except Korolev.”)

Glushko, conversely, never betrayed emotion or raised his voice in anger. But he held bitter and enduring grudges and worked mercilessly behind the scenes to exact revenge on those who crossed him. He was a formidable adversary, and like Korolev he knew how to work the system. Neither man was much for compromise. And theirs was an uneasy partnership destined to explode.

The first hurdle the pair faced in the wake of the Presidium visit was rocket power. To fling a five-ton thermonuclear warhead 5,000 miles, Korolev had calculated that he needed more than 450 tons of thrust. This represented a tenfold increase over the R-5 intermediate-range ballistic missile, whose RD-103 booster had already strained the limits of single-engine capacity. (Glushko had experimented with a mammoth 120-ton thrust engine, the RD-110, but the project had been abandoned.) To meet Korolev’s vastly increased power requirement, the R-7 would have to be powered by five separate rockets, bundled like a giant Chinese fireworks display. But that still left Glushko with combustion chamber problems. Even with five supercharged furnaces sharing the load, they would still be too big and unwieldy, subject to destabilizing power fluctuations. The solution was the RD-107, an engine with a single turbo pump that simultaneously fed fuel and oxidizer to four regular-sized combustion chambers. The combined output of the twenty combustion chambers—four in each of the five boosters—would meet Korolev’s thrust specifications. The clustering of the peripheral boosters around the central rocket would make the R-7 ungainly in appearance with a bulging thirty-five-foot-wide base that resembled the skirt of a hefty babushka, but the RD-107s were far more efficient than previous-generation motors. With recast combustion chambers, shaped like cylinders rather than the standard flared mushroom mold popularized by the V-2, they would ignite kerosene, which burned hotter than the alcohol-based propellants the Germans and Americans used.

In addition to generating more lift, the five-booster configuration solved another serious design concern. The Soviets had never designed a multistage rocket before, and Glushko refused to guarantee that the upper stages—so critical to achieving orbital velocity—would work. But if the central R-7 engine block was designed to operate longer, the four peripheral boosters could be jettisoned in flight to lighten the load, while the central core kept firing in what was effectively a one-and-a-half-stage compromise.

The solution, however, created its own new snag. Because the larger central engine now worked longer, about four minutes in total, the heat-resistant graphite steering vanes Glushko had fixed to the exhaust nozzles could not be employed. They were rated to withstand the intense heat for only two minutes before burning up, and without them the R-7 could not be steered. A pitched debate broke out over how to fix the problem. Korolev favored using small gimbaled thrusters, mini-combustion chambers on swivels to provide steerage. But Glushko was violently opposed to the idea of anyone tinkering with his engines. (This was a man who so hated outside interference that he once famously drove several hundred miles with the handbrake engaged rather than heed a passenger’s advice to release it.) Already with the R-7, he was making a significant concession by using kerosene and liquid oxygen propellant rather than his favored mix of nitric acid and dimethyl hydrazine. And now Korolev was demanding even more significant alterations. A shouting match ensued, with Glushko hotly refusing to budge. If the Chief Designer wanted the damn changes, he’d have to make them himself.

Friction was also posing serious difficulties at the working end of the R-7. At the speed the missile would travel, none of the nose cones in Korolev’s inventory could withstand the heat that would be generated during the 24,000-feet-per-second atmospheric reentry. And without that thermal protection, the warheads would be incinerated, rendering the ICBM useless.

The problems mounted. Tests showed that the standard support blocks used to prop up rockets at launch would not support the mammoth R-7, which at 283 tons weighed more than any object that had ever been flown. A huge gantry rig with the rough dimensions of the Eiffel Tower had to be specifically built. So did an enhanced new guidance system, because the almost tenfold increase in the R-7’s range magnified minute trajectory inaccuracies by hundreds of miles at the point of impact. And then there was the nagging issue of postimpulse boost, the unwanted thrust from fuel remaining in a rocket’s plumbing system after the engine shut down. With small rockets, extraneous fuel amounted to only a few gallons that burned off harmlessly without affecting trajectory. But with a missile the size of the R-7, the amount of propellant left over in the feed lines was significantly larger. The residue could keep the engines firing for as much as a full second after shutdown and push the missile hopelessly off course at the critical aiming point.

All these were normal glitches, typical in the creation of any major new weapons system. Korolev, however, had promised Khrushchev an impossibly tight schedule: to have the R-7 ready for flight testing in January 1957. Khrushchev, in turn, had started chopping military spending for conventional forces in anticipation of the ICBM becoming Russia’s main line of defense. He had halted the construction of costly aircraft carriers and heavy cruisers, infuriating his admirals, and had cut back on the production of long-range bombers, outraging his air marshals. If Korolev didn’t deliver, he could be jeopardizing the security of the Soviet Union, to say nothing of risking the Presidium’s collective wrath. Khrushchev may not have been a butcher like Beria, but the men around him were, and they would have no hesitation making their displeasure known.

The Chief Designer began to sweat. He could not have forgotten the telephone call he had received from Beria in 1948 after the R-l had suffered several setbacks. “I’ve been sent the protocol of the latest tests,” Beria said, his childlike voice barely a whisper. “Another failure. And again no one is to blame. Some people are soliciting an award for you—but I think you deserve a warrant!”

Korolev had frozen in fear. “We are doing our work honestly,” he stammered. But Beria had no interest in excuses. “Do you understand about the warrant?” he hissed, hanging up.

Already the R-7’s delays were piling up, and now Glushko had seriously bad news. Static firing tests of his new engines showed the boosters were not performing to expectations. Thrust was not the issue. In terms of brute force, Glushko’s motors had generated 396.9 tons of lift, which translated to a better than expected 490.8 tons in the vacuum of space. The trouble was in the all-important realm of specific impulse, the ratio that calculated how many pounds of thrust were produced per each pound of propellant consumed per second. It was the aeronautic equivalent of the automobile industry’s gas-mileage ratings, which determined the fuel efficiency of different cars. The specifications for the R-7 had called for a specific impulse of 243 at sea level and 309.4 in space. But Glushko’s engines had come up short, at 239 and 303.1 respectively, a serious enough setback to warrant an official communiqué to the Kremlin. “At present time, we are completing static testing of the rocket,” Korolev glumly informed the Central Committee in the fall of 1956. “Preparations for the first launch of the rocket are experiencing substantial difficulties and are behind schedule. The current results of the stand tests give us solid hope that by March of 1957 the rocket will be launched. After small modifications, the rocket can be used to launch an artificial satellite with a small payload of scientific instruments of about 25kg.”

Couched in the soothing verbiage of “solid hope,” Korolev was effectively warning Khrushchev that not only was he going to miss his January deadline, but the R-7 probably wouldn’t be ready in March either. What’s more, instead of the 2,200-pound advanced satellite package he had promised, the R-7 would manage to carry only a meager fifty-pound payload into space because of its poor fuel efficiency.

The reality check, Korolev well knew, was not likely to sit well with the impatient Presidium. Fortunately for the Chief Designer, Khrushchev and the Central Committee were preoccupied with other, far more urgent matters.

On the morning of June 28, 1956, workers in the western Polish city of Poznan declared a general strike. It was the first labor unrest in the Soviet bloc, and by early afternoon the walkout had turned into the largest anti-Communist rally since the war. One hundred thousand people, a third of Poznan’s population, crammed Adam Mickiewicz Square, waving banners that read DOWN WITH DICTATORSHIP and, in a play on Lenin’s most famous revolutionary slogan, WE WANT BREAD, FREEDOM, AND TRUTH.

As Kaganovich and Molotov had feared, the ill winds of liberalization let loose by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization decree had blown westward from the snowcapped Caucasus to the plains of Poland. Only Poland wasn’t an isolated and inaccessible mountain republic with a few million inhabitants. It was smack in the middle of Europe, the anchor of the new Warsaw Pact defense league designed to counter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and by far the largest of the Kremlin’s foreign holdings. It was also a very reluctant Soviet vassal, a nation with a powerful peasant class that refused to collectivize, an activist Catholic Church that could not be brought to heel, and a thriving black-market economy that was capitalist in every respect but name. It had been the unruly Poles who had leaked the contents of the secret speech to Israeli intelligence and the CIA, and it was Poland, more than any other Soviet satellite state, that had taken Khrushchev’s reformist message to heart. The thaw in Poland had actually begun shortly after Stalin’s death, but Khrushchev’s encouraging speech had accelerated the process, giving Poles new hope for democratic freedoms. Censorship in the media melted away, people grumbled publicly, and dissident officials who had been imprisoned or expelled from the Polish Communist Party were officially rehabilitated.

In Poznan, trouble had been brewing for weeks. Residents were unhappy with working conditions, housing and food shortages, and low pay. When they marched in protest, the crowd’s anger quickly found an outlet in the secret police headquarters on Kochanowski Street. Tens of thousands of people, some armed with bats, pipes, or cobblestones ripped from the road, laid siege to the security service building. A shot rang out from one of the upper windows, and thirteen-year-old Romek Strzalkowski fell dead. After that, things got ugly. Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, the Soviet Union’s military overseer for Poland, ordered tanks and ten thousand troops into Poznan. This time, the official body count was seventy dead, three hundred wounded, and seven hundred arrested.

By October, Rokossovsky was massing troops outside Warsaw and the Soviet embassy was sending distress signals to Moscow. “The Poles were vilifying the Soviet Union, and were all but preparing a coup to put people with anti-Soviet tendencies in power,” Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. The Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party was now itself in open revolt. Poland’s Communist leaders wanted to oust their Moscow-backed first secretary and replace him with Władysław Gomułka, whom Stalin had jailed for “nationalist deviation.” Khrushchev was shocked. His rehabilitation program never envisioned actually putting former political prisoners into positions of high authority, never mind as heads of state. But the residents of Warsaw were arming themselves, preparing to repel Rokossovsky’s troops. On the morning of October 19, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and a visibly agitated Molotov flew to Warsaw. “From the airport we went to the [Polish] Central Committtee,” Khrushchev recalled. “The discussion was stormy…. I saw Gomulka coming toward me. He said, very nervously, ‘Comrade Khrushchev, your tank division is moving toward Warsaw. I ask that you order it to stop. I’m afraid that something irreparable could happen.’”

Khrushchev halted the tanks and accepted Gomułka’s leadership. “A clash would have been good for no one but our enemies,” he reasoned. Faced with the imminent prospect of armed intervention, Gomułka, in turn, promised to keep Poland in the Soviet orbit. They had gone to the brink, but catastrophe had been narrowly avoided. Two weeks later, under almost identical circumstances, no one would be so lucky.

South of Poland, in Hungary, a crisis had been building since October 23, when students in Budapest began demonstrating in solidarity with Gomułka’s defiance. Quickly the protests spread, as factory and office workers joined the revolt. The crowds marched on the main radio tower to broadcast their grievances, what they called their Sixteen Points: more freedom and food, less police interference, fewer travel restrictions, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-sponsored network that beamed Western news into the Eastern bloc, picked up the rallying cry, its broadcasts becoming increasingly insurrectionary. Secretary of State Dulles, who had long vowed to “roll back” communism, encouraged the Hungarian demonstrators and pledged American support. “To all those suffering under communist slavery,” he said, “let us say you can count on us.”

Emboldened, the protesters surrounded parliament and gathered outside the secret police headquarters, chanting for the Red Star atop the building to be removed. Their requests were met by a hail of gunfire, and in the ensuing hand-to-hand fighting eighty were killed. But the building was taken, as was a nearby armory. The uprising was now an armed revolt, gaining momentum. Radio Free Europe stoked the flames, instructing Hungarians on how to make weapons out of gasoline, bottles, and rags. Hungarians felt certain that the United States was behind them. Within days, 80 percent of the Hungarian army had switched sides. The Hungarian people could taste the liberty that Dulles had promised.

In Moscow, at an October 28 emergency session of the Presidium, Khrushchev counseled caution. Molotov and the hard-liners wanted swift action, but the first secretary advocated compromise. “The Soviet government is prepared to enter into the appropriate negotiations with the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic, and other members of the Warsaw Treaty, on the question of the presence of Soviet troops on the territory of Hungary,” Pravda announced on October 31.

In Washington, a jubilant Allen Dulles hailed the concession as “a miracle,” the most meaningful sign yet that communism could be in retreat. “This utterance is one of the most significant to come out of the Soviet Union since World War II,” he told Eisenhower.

“Yes,” the president agreed skeptically. “If it is honest.”

Khrushchev, the reformer, had unwittingly opened the floodgates, and now the Kremlin was being swamped in a tide of upheaval. And if Hungary fell, Moscow’s other dominions would quickly follow. No one would be able to stop the outpour.

Just as swiftly, however, the tide turned. In Budapest that same day, the violence spiraled into an orgy of revenge. Dozens of suspected secret police officers and informers were hung from lampposts by rampaging mobs, while Imre Nagy, the Hungarian prime minister, defiantly summoned the Soviet ambassador, Yuri Andropov—the future KGB boss and head of state. Like Gomułka, Nagy had been imprisoned by Stalin and rehabilitated after the secret speech. Under Khrushchev’s liberalizations he had replaced the Stalinist puppet Mátyás Rákosi only a few months earlier. And now he had done the unthinkable. Hungary, Nagy told Andropov, was renouncing the Warsaw Pact and proclaiming its neutrality. A telegram had already been dispatched to the United Nations, asking the United States, Britain, and France “to help defend” the breakaway Soviet satellite.

When news of the declaration and lynch mobs reached Moscow, Khrushchev reversed course. “We have no choice,” he said at another emergency Presidium session that evening. “We should take the initiative in restoring order.”

“Agreed,” growled Molotov, Bulganin, and Kaganovich. “We showed patience but things have gone too far. We must act to ensure that victory goes to our side.”

“If we depart from Hungary,” Khrushchev went on, “it will give a great boost to the imperialists. They will perceive it as weakness on our part and go on the offensive.”

“We should use the argument that we will not let socialism in Hungary be strangled,” volunteered Pyotr Pospelov, the party’s PR chief and the editor of Pravda. “That we are responding to an appeal for assistance.”

Khrushchev agreed. Closing the session, he instructed Marshal Georgy Zhukov, his deputy defense chief, “to work out a plan and report it.”

There was no longer room for negotiation. This time an example had to be made; the fate of the Soviet empire depended on it.

“Bombs, by God!” Eisenhower was awakened in the early hours of November 1. But it was not a Soviet invasion. Instead the news was that France and Britain (along with Israel) had attacked Egypt, in a punitive strike against President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. “What does Anthony think he’s doing?” Eisenhower demanded, as he picked up the phone to call the British prime minister, Anthony Eden. The whole world was going up in flames, on the eve of the U.S. presidential election. How could the United States now condemn the Soviets, a furious Allen Dulles lamented, “when our own allies are guilty of exactly similar acts of aggression?”

Now there was no longer any room for talk of coming to Hungary’s aid. Moscow would have free rein to teach the Hungarian “hooligans” a lesson no one in Eastern Europe would soon forget. Shortly before 9:00 AM on November 4, the BBC interrupted its regularly scheduled broadcast with the following announcement: “The Soviet Air Force has bombed the Hungarian capital, Budapest, and Russian troops have poured into the city in a massive dawn offensive.”

The death toll, this time, was thirty thousand. Russian tanks rolled out of their Hungarian bases and dragged bloodied corpses through Budapest’s central squares to serve as brutal warnings to future counterrevolutionaries. Nagy was executed. Thousands were placed under arrest, while two hundred thousand Hungarians fled to the West. By November 14, order had been restored, but there was little doubt in the minds of the Kremlin hard-liners who was truly responsible for the string of rebellions. “Khrushchev’s days are numbered,” Allen Dulles predicted.