Gagarin is immensely important as the man who went first, but before him were the animals, the fruit flies and rabbits and cats, the fungi and fish and spiders, the chimpanzees, and the space dogs, with Laika as their ambassador. What is it one makes of these events? How are we to understand the many trials and accidents and sufferings of the animals flown into space, their sacrifices, the physical proof that they could withstand the rigors of a rocket launch, the reentry of a spacecraft, life in a confined capsule, the unknowns of microgravity, bombardment by high-energy cosmic particles. What does all this mean to us, for us, about us? What does it mean that we use animals for our own designs, our own purposes, to improve human life, for wealth and power? What does it mean that we sacrifice them instead of ourselves?
Animals advance us. Their fantastic achievements become our achievements. Our civilization, on which rests the advancement of our technologies, from agriculture to computers to space-faring, would not be possible without animals. But we do not own the animals of the Earth. They are not here for us alone. They are beings in their own right, and this is how we should think of them. We use animals to learn, and we learn from animals, but they belong to themselves. It is as if the storehouse of human knowledge was given to us by the animals, and sometimes at great expense to them. When animals die in service to us, I think it takes something from us, some piece of our humanity, even while it reminds us that we are human. How do we live inside this contradiction, that the animals we love best—chiefly, the dog—we also sacrifice to the monument of civilization, to the monument of ourselves? If we cannot come to any clearer purpose than a stated contradiction, at the very least when we turn again to the animals for help, and that help is given, let us not forget where it came from. It was the animals, it was the space dogs, who taught the cosmonauts to fly.
In 1960 the Soviet government gave Korolev a house in a forested park in north Moscow near the present-day Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics. He lived there until his death in 1966, and these were his most productive years. He is said to have worked sixteen to eighteen hours a day, spending some six months away from home each year. But when he was working in Moscow, he came home every day for lunch. He did not care for foods that required effort to eat, fish with bones, for example, a waste of time to him. He loved pickled herring. He was a reader, and like Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and von Braun, he loved science fiction, especially Ivan Euremov’s novel Andromeda’s Nebula and the novels of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. He kept the works of Leo Tolstoy among his prized books, and he could recite passages from War and Peace. Like the great novelist himself, Korolev kept a set of dumbbells in his study, believing in physical exercise to sharpen the mind.
Korolev was the kind of person other people orbited around: his second wife, a few rumored mistresses (for he had a great fondness for women, and they for him), his co-workers, the first cosmonauts, dignitaries and officials of the government. Korolev was very close to Gagarin, who often came to the house to be near him. The house was alive with such people, passing in and out, stopping by for a talk or coffee, a meal or a movie. Korolev kept a reel-to-reel projector in the front sitting room, rare in those days in the Soviet Union (or anywhere, for that matter), and he used any excuse to assemble a party. There in the sitting room he also kept a television. After his first heart attack in December 1960, he avoided the excitement of news and press events. During the great celebrations of Gagarin’s successful flight into orbit in 1961, Korolev stayed at home to watch it on TV.
Korolev had great taste in art, or so I was told by my guide when I visited his Moscow home. Hung on the walls are several paintings he acquired not long before his death, evidence of a premonition, my guide said. I asked after the titles and the names of the artists. One work, entitled simply Landscape, was touted as the work of a French painter of some renown, but my guide could not name him. Two other paintings, both set at dusk, are entitled Evening Landscape and Evening Landscape by the River. For both, the painters were unknown. The mood of these paintings is dark, to be sure, a setting sun and a foreground of failing light. Fitting scenes for a man fixated on vanishing.
At the top of the stairs before the entrance to his study is a framed map of the moon, perhaps six feet by six feet in size, a handcrafted original. It was given to Korolev by a scientist in Saint Petersburg to honor his dream of planetary exploration. Korolev believed the moon to be rocky and solid, that a spacecraft could land on it and a cosmonaut could walk on it. Others during this time believed the moon to be gaseous, like the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. The first spacecraft to land on the moon, Luna 2, which Korolev’s team launched in 1959, proved he was right. Further into the study is a globe, a gift from the rocket engineer Valentin Glushko, who is said to have sent Korolev to prison but afterward became his boss (for a time), his colleague, and his friend. On the globe’s stand, Glushko has written: “My dear friend—I wish you to see the Earth like this from space.”
Korolev’s health problems, which began during his imprisonment, were troubled by his impossible work schedule and unremitting stress. He suffered from a form of kidney disease, cardiac arrhythmia, an inflamed gallbladder, hearing loss (likely from test-firing rocket engines), and intestinal bleeding. On the outside people saw a hale and powerful man who was at the extreme edge of human ingenuity and industry, but his body was failing. In his book Korolev, James Harford cites a letter Korolev wrote to his second wife, Nina Ivanovna, during one of his stays at the launch facility at Baikonur: “I am unusually deeply tired, and sometimes the little heart aches a bit.” Korolev dared not take any rest, however, for he was convinced that without him to drive the newly formed space program, Khrushchev would pull the funding and cancel it. So he worked ever harder, despite knowing he should not. “I can’t work like this any longer,” he once said to his wife.
To correct a bleeding polyp in his large intestine, on January 5, 1966, Korolev checked into the Kremlin hospital, a facility catering only to top Soviet state and Communist Party officials. The long black wool overcoat and shoes he wore that day are in the closet near the front door of his house. In the hospital, Korolev underwent a series of tests and then into surgery on January 14. In his book, Harford offers the details of Korolev’s death as told by his daughter, Natasha. During the routine surgery, Korolev began to bleed, a persistent bleeding that required his surgeons to cut into his abdomen. There they found a cancerous tumor and went to work to remove it. Korolev was under an anesthetic mask for eight hours, and after the surgery he never regained consciousness. Had the surgeons intubated him, Harford suggests, he might have made it, but his broken jaw from the torture he endured in the gulag had not healed properly and prevented the tube from going in. Still, the tumor was malignant, and according to Harford, “Korolev would not have lived more than a few months, even if he had not been operated on.” His body was cremated and his ashes interred with honors in the Kremlin Wall. He was fifty-nine years old.