Mia introduces herself as Nina, the interpreter, when she meets Korolev in Germany. Korolev was a married man. He had a daughter, Natalya. His marriage eventually fell apart, in part because of an affair with a young English interpreter from the Podlipki office. Her name was Nina Ivanovna Kotenkova. The two tied the knot in 1949.
Korolev’s crowning achievement as chief designer had to be the R-7, Mia’s perfect rocket. It launched both Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. You can read the issue of Life magazine dedicated to the little satellite that created the space race at Google Books.[5] As Mia predicts, the R-7 was more or less useless as a ballistic missile, and it was only briefly deployed operationally. It was, however, the perfect space launch vehicle, and versions of the R-7 served as the basis for the Soyuz family of launchers, which is still in service, more than sixty years after the R-7 first tested. As of now, it has launched over eighteen hundred times.
Some name dropping. Tons of people were involved in the development of every rocket, including the R-7. The original cluster or packet design came from Mikhail Tikhonravov. He could write, of course, and wrote some very influential papers about rocket technology. His design was improved upon by a fellow named Dmitry Okhotsimsky at the Steklov Institute of Applied Mathematics. He came up with the cluster concept Korolev chose for the R-7. Korolev’s right hand, Vasily Mishin, also played a major part in the R-7 project. Unfortunately, Mishin will mostly be remembered for failing to put a man on the moon after he inherited the Soviet N1 program.
At the beginning of Act IV, a self-loathing Mia goes to Kapustin Yar to help with test launches for the R-2 and save some dogs. (I know you want to hear about the dogs, but we’ll do that later.) Kapustin Yar was created in 1946 for testing jet-propelled weapons starting with captured German V-2s. Nuclear tests were also performed on-site in the late fifties. Understandably, Kapustin Yar was kept secret and didn’t appear on any maps. Secret remote location, secret military projects, shitty black-and-white photography. You know where I’m going with this. The site is an all-you-can-eat buffet for conspiracy theorists and is often referred to as the Russian Roswell. Secret underground base. UFO sightings. Alien autopsy, of course. Little green men. There’s a “documentary” episode of History’s UFO Files called “Russian Roswell,” which you can find online, or you can read a summary[6] and get the gist of things. There’s all sorts of crazy in there (dogfight between an alien ship and fighter planes!), and a lot of it connects to this book, somehow.
There’s mention of a giant fireball falling from the sky in 1908 near the town of Tunguska. That part is true. It was the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. Whatever it was, it flattened two thousand square kilometers of forest. Comet, asteroid, who knows? Of course, if you like conspiracies, you can believe just about anything hit Earth, including little green men in a giant spaceship. As the story goes, a team of scientists was sent to investigate some forty years later by none other than Sergei Korolev. Soon after, the Russian space program made miraculous progress because of some reverse-engineering of the alien spacecraft.
They even talk about Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, the tenth-century Muslim traveler who is said to have “witnessed ‘aerial battles’ between ‘shapes’ that moved through the clouds.” That is the dude the Sixty-Five is traveling with in AD 921 during the fourth entr’acte.
The other launchpad I mention in this book is Baikonur, a.k.a. “Gagarinskiy Start” (Gagarin’s pad). Both Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1, the first human spaceflight, launched from Baikonur on top of an R-7 rocket. In 1955, during construction, one of the workers fell off the launch platform and impaled himself on a steel rod midway down. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have the Kibsu’s superstrength, and he died before they could take him down.
Happy now? If your priorities are the same as Mia’s, you want to find out what happened to the dogs. Everyone’s heard about Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth aboard Sputnik 2, but there were lots of dogs before and after. Laika got the short stick. She’s the only dog that was sent with no hope of survival. She died soon after liftoff, but she’d have died anyway because, well, you shouldn’t put a dog inside a satellite. Sputnik 2 reentered Earth’s atmosphere on April 14, 1958, and burned up before it hit the ground. That means that for about six months, there was a dead dog flying over our heads.
The ones Mia tries to save are Dezik and Tsygan. They were the first. Back then, they didn’t used pressurized cabins, so the dogs had to wear tiny dog space suits. In July 1951, they were shot up 110 km into the sky on top of a modified R-1 and… came back down safely. (Yay!) Dezik made another flight a week later with a dog named Lisa. Unfortunately for Dezik, the parachute didn’t deploy that time. In the book, Mia brought Tsygan home, but in real life it was Soviet physicist Anatoli Blagonravov who adopted the dog.
Between 1951 and 1960, at least twenty dogs made suborbital flights on top of a rocket. Here are my three stars:
Smelaya. She ran away (I wonder why) the day before her launch. They found her, though, and she flew with another dog. Both of them survived.
Bobik. He ran away. They didn’t catch him. Go Bobik!
Zib. Zib was a street dog they found running around the barracks. He made a successful flight. ZIB is a Russian acronym for “Substitute for Missing Bobik.”
There’s a website about Soviet space dogs with more info (and more dogs) and tons of pictures.[7] There’s even one of Korolev with one of the dogs. I strongly suggest the story of Damka and Krasavka. It would make a great movie.
The Wikipedia entry[8] has pictures of Belka and Strelka in a museum (I’m not sure if they’re stuffed or fake, but they are creepy). These two were the real superstars in Russia. They spent a day in orbit with a gray rabbit, forty-two mice, two rats, and some flies (no partridge nor pear tree) and came back alive. That made them better propaganda tools than dead Laika, and soon they were featured in children’s books and cartoons and on just about anything from stamps to candy tins and cigarette packs. Then comes the true story of the Cold War romance that prevented World War III. Okay, not quite, but still. Back at the space center, there was a male dog named Pushok. He had never made it to space, but he was not the kind of dog that gave up, or ran away. He had grit, determination. It was those qualities that Strelka recognized, and the two quickly became proud parents of six puppies. Among the litter was little Pushinka (Fluffy), whom Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave to John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline. Pushinka could not resist the childish ways of Charlie, one of the Kennedy dogs, and their forbidden love resulted in the birth of Butterfly, Streaker, White Tips, and Blackie, whom Kennedy affectionately called “pupniks.”
Slight change of tone. Much of Act V revolves around Lavrentiy Beria. There were a lot of really bad people in positions of power around the time of the Second World War. Hitler, of course. Stalin was a nasty piece of work. And then there’s Lavrentiy Beria. If you make a list of evil people who walked the earth at one point or another, I suggest you leave some room near the top for this guy. He got his start crushing a nationalist uprising in Georgia, got about ten thousand people executed in the process. He met Stalin in 1926 and was a close ally during his rise to power. As chief of the secret police, he supervised the barrier troops, the folks who shot their own soldiers running away from battle. He expanded the gulag labor camps, continued the great purge started by his predecessor. After the war, he helped organize the communist revolutions in several European countries—he liked those as bloody as possible—and he oversaw the development of the atomic bomb for the Soviets. By some accounts, he liked to participate in the butchery himself. He is said to have personally tortured the family of an Abkhaz Communist leader, placing a snake inside his widow’s cell and having her watch as he beat her daughter to death.