was unnecessarily, cruelly high. Khrushchev therefore had some cards to play and he could look the American President in the eye. In October 1957, timed for the fortieth anniversary of the Revolution, there was a symbol: Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, fired into orbit round the Earth. That little spot of light, moving visibly at night at some speed in the sky, was the calling card of Communism and of Russia’s emergence at last. The Americans had tried to compete, but had failed, farcically, to put even a football-sized one into space: their rocket had risen for a few yards and then settled back on its socket. In other matters, again, the USSR impressed. The violinist David Oistrakh and the pianist Svyatoslav Richter were household names in western Europe and at the Brussels Exhibition of 1958 the Soviet pavilion, with its recordings, caused spines to tingle, whereas the American one just showed off creature-comforts. Khrushchev beamed, and a 21st Party Congress solemnly announced in January 1959 that the USSR would ‘catch up’ by 1970. In October 1961 that turned into ‘1966’; by 1980 there was supposed to be ‘super-abundance’, a claim answered by an historical laugh when the time came. But there were many people in the West who agreed, including the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan (in his diary).
In fact most of it came from the pre-revolutionary world. There was a superb mathematical and musical tradition in old Russia, and Sputnik owed most to equations produced by a Tatar-Polish theoretical physicist called Konstantin Cholkovsky in 1903: even in his native Kaluga at that time, electro-magnetism and the name of James Clerk Maxwell were known. The Bolsheviks had some understanding of what was going on, and did not, initially, make problems for men such as Cholkovsky (who died in 1935 at a great age). Another learned man of the old order, Vladimir Vernadsky (born in 1863: his brother, a notable historian of Russia’s Tatar aspect, emigrated) stayed on, and in 1922 guessed that there was ‘a great revolution’ coming, ‘a source of power’ that would have something to do with radium, on which he became an expert. Scientific institutes were important to the Bolsheviks, and the 17th Party Congress in 1934 announced that the Soviet Union was to be ‘the most technologically advanced state in Europe’. There was some international collaboration (most notably with Piotr Kapitsa, born in 1894, who spent twelve years at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, in the era of Rutherford and the splitting of the atom; but of course there was a strong German link as well). The scientific intelligentsia of that era were extraordinarily well-rounded men and women, good on their music and literature (one of the outstanding Soviet nuclear physicists was Yuli Khariton, born in 1904, who had studied at Cambridge, like Kapitsa, and, back home, had to do with the founding of the Writers’ House). Of course they took their role very seriously indeed, Kapitsa writing to Stalin to say that scientists were the new patriarchs — patriarchs having become quite obsolete.
Vladimir Vernadsky seems to have been the model for Professor Preobrazhensky in Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, a splendid satire on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In it, a gynaecologist of the old school and a man of broad culture (including the proper qualities of vodka and the zakuski, or caviar, to go with it) keeps a large and well-appointed flat in Moscow because he can rejuvenate sexual organs and powerful Party people use his services. He implants the testicles and other glands of a drunken thug into a lovable dog, creating a monstrous dog-man who fits in with the local Communist cell. The book was read out to a chosen audience that contained an informer, who in outrage recorded that the Vernadsky-Preobrazhensky figure complains that Communism had meant the theft of galoshes from the communal hallway, and that this had caused ‘deafening laughter’. The book then vanished, known only to a few people. In Khrushchev’s time, characteristically, the circle in the know grew wider, but the book was not properly published until 1987. A regime capable of such absurdities of censorship would not in ordinary circumstances have been able to produce anything of much sophistication, let alone a pioneering bomb and missile programme. In fact engineers were initially put in charge, and they were so sceptical that they regarded uranium just as a rock, and irradiated themselves. Without the men and women of the late-Tsarist educational system, science and for that matter cultural life of any but the most primitive sort would not have survived. Matters even then became very difficult for many of them, the writers especially, and it was the war that saved them; even the aeronautics expert Sergey Korolev was sent to Kolyma camp, and both A. N. Tupolev and the designer of the katyusha missile system, V. N. Galkovskiy, were imprisoned in a specialist camp, a sharashka. But the scientists were badly needed, and they were given organization (and motivation) that they might otherwise have lost. It is also true that the first Soviet bomb owed something to Western examples, known through espionage, a glory of the regime. Some of the nuclear physicists were anxious for the West to give the secret to the USSR, which they much admired (for some reason, natural scientists lost their minds when it came to the Soviet Union: Sir Julian Huxley had written a particularly silly book about Soviet science, comparing it very favourably with British, just as the British produced penicillin, radar, the cathode-ray tube and the atomic bomb). But the essentials were Russian.
The USSR set up a bomb remarkably quickly. The Americans always had superiority of numbers — nine in 1946, thirteen in 1947, fifty-six in 1949, 1,161 in 1953 — but it had meant an enormous expense (during the war, $2bn, though much of this was on buildings). The Soviet system, with far fewer resources, responded rapidly and the first uranium plant was ready by the end of 1945, with a design similar to that of Enrico Fermi’s atomic pile at Chicago. Uranium (of which the Western powers had cornered 97 per cent in the Belgian Congo and elsewhere) was available at the Jachymov mines in Bohemia (strangely enough its German name, Joachimsthal, lent itself to a silver coin, the Thaler, i.e. ‘dollar’) and convicts were set to work in them. The research was carried out in an old monastery, 250 miles east of Moscow, and the monks’ cells became the laboratories; columns of convicts trudged through it all, and the guards were primitives who thought that plutonium was just old iron. It was there that Y. B. Zeldovitch, an inspired and versatile mathematician, worked out the depth and range of the explosive power, in microseconds; and within three years, in August 1949, the first bomb was successfully tested at Semipalatinsk. Next came the thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb which the Hungaro-American expert Edward Teller likened to the Sun itself, an atomic device being used to trigger a vast explosion. In this, the Russians (in 1952, with the first test) proved to be ahead of the Americans, although they exploded an even more powerful, and immediately usable, one in 1953 (and a later test killed several Japanese fishermen eighty miles away). Soviet tests were also murderous, though this was concealed at the time; they caused the most prominent physicist, Andrey Sakharov, to have his first doubts as to the whole thing; and Igor Kurchatov himself, the director of the Soviet atomic-weapons programme, wrote to Molotov in 1954 to say that war would mean the end of the world. Molotov did not punish him, or publicize the letter, one of Khrushchev’s reasons for subsequently getting rid of him. More generally, a doctrine came up of the ‘nuclear deterrent’, which would make war unthinkable. One of the chief Soviet physicists, Lev Landau, also had doubts as to the morality of the whole enterprise, and he was eavesdropped on in his house by the KGB. He was heard to remark that the first lives to be saved by the nuclear deterrent had been those of the Soviet scientists.
At any rate, Sputnik, launched on 4 October 1957, was followed in November by a dog, and then in 1961 by the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. Lunik landed a red pennant on the Moon, and was first to photograph its hidden side. Still, whatever these triumphs, there was always Anna Akhmatova’s slum of a city. Food and housing were dismal and the USSR’s transport system was primitive — fewer railways than India. Communism was hated in much of central and eastern Europe; it was maintained only by a Moscow tyranny, and the local powers depended on the Soviet embassies. At home, there were millions of slave labourers (Khrushchev reckoned ten), and once Stalin died there were great revolts among them, as the famous places — Vorkuta, Karaganda, Norilsk — went on strike, organized by Chechens, Ukrainians and Balts. What was Khrushchev to do about it all? Change in the Soviet Union was exceedingly difficult, especially given the presence, in the Politburo and elsewhere, of the old Stalin guard. He did indeed set about reforms, and these were to become compulsive and very deeply unsettling, but in the first instance there was one thing Khrushchev could do, more or less in agreement with the Politburo, and that was to improve relations with the West. It was to be called the ‘first detente’, a word meaning ‘relaxation of tension’, though it also happened to mean ‘trigger’. Experience was to show that the first meaning led straight to the second.
As Khrushchev contemplated the West, what did he see? He hardly knew it at all (unlike Stalin, who in his revolutionary youth had briefly been in London) but there were certain main lines in his understanding of it, and his younger advisers were clever. Stalin had managed to unite it, with NATO and the pacts that linked almost all of the Soviet Union’s neighbours, however disparate. In 1955, at a meeting of the Politburo, Khrushchev made some sarcastic remarks at the expense of Molotov, whose ‘no’ in international gatherings had become famously obstructive. The USSR under Stalin, he said, had managed to make enemies of everybody — even countries such as Iran and Turkey, which had been friendly since the
