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 détente’, 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 Revolution and were now allied with the West. Yugoslavia, too, a faithful Communist ally, had been alienated — quite absurd because the place had a strategic position and it could also have been a sort of showcase. Yugoslavia contained seven different and sometimes very different peoples, and had inherited a good bit of poisoned history. Lenin had decreed how such problems should be dealt with: get rid of capitalism, and the brotherhood of peoples would prevail. In Yugoslavia a serious effort was made. Tito, a Croat, had led the resistance, and his partisans, drawn from all the peoples of Yugoslavia, had liberated much of the country even before the Red Army arrived. Tito then ‘built socialism’ in the Moscow-approved manner. However, there were signs of independence that Stalin did not like, and suspicion reigned: a quarrel became open in summer 1948, and the Yugoslav Party was expelled from Cominform. However, this did not break Tito at all. Instead, he gained strong domestic support, approached old allies in Great Britain, received financial and other help from the West, crushed his Stalinist opponents, and proclaimed neutrality. For a very long time to come, Yugoslavia received adulation in the West: all of it, said an apologetic Khrushchev, the fault of Stalin and Molotov.