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Rockets and People
knew all about Korolev, but in his dealings with the “uninitiated” he piously
observed the rule of the taboo.
Tyulin later told me that before Korolev, Glushko, and the other zeki freed in
accordance with Gaydukov’s list arrived in Berlin, he was strictly warned by the
“security apparatus” that a certain group would be flying into Berlin but that no
one under any circumstances was to know that they were former prisoners.
Upon meeting Korolev for the first time in my office at the Institute RABE in
late September or early October 1945, I knew nothing about him except for his
full name.When he entered my office, I stood up to greet him, as is appropriate
for a major receiving a lieutenant colonel.We exchanged greetings and introduced
ourselves. More than a half-century has passed since our first meeting. We had
countless meetings over that period of time. The majority, at least in terms of
details, have faded from my memory, but this first meeting has stuck. Independent
of our normal thinking process, there is a sort of subconscious “standby” memory
system that involuntarily switches to “record.”This recording cannot be erased and
can be replayed many times.
The brand new officer’s uniform fit the man who had entered very well. I
would have thought that a cadre officer was standing before me, but the absence
of medals on his clean tunic immediately gave him away as a “civilian” officer.
The only unusual thing was the fine officers’ chrome leather boots that he wore
instead of our usual kersey boots. His dark eyes, which had a sort of merry sparkle,
looked at me with curiosity and attentiveness. I immediately noticed Korolev’s
high forehead and large head on his short neck. There is an expression: “He
sucked his head into his shoulders.” But Korolev wasn’t sucking anything in—
nature had made him that way. There was something about him like a boxer
during a fight.We sat down. He sank into the deep armchair and with obvious
pleasure stretched out his legs. That’s usually what one does after sitting behind
the wheel of a car for a long time.“I would like to have a brief overview of the
structure and operation of your institute.” I always had a diagram of the institute’s
structure in a file on my desk. Of course, it was drawn by Germans and had
German inscriptions.
Korolev started to examine the diagram without showing much attention or
respect, or so it seemed to me, leading me to believe that he didn’t like the fact
that it was inscribed in German. His first question immediately found our weak
spot.“So who here is responsible for mastering launch technology and for launch
preparation?” I explained that Lieutenant Colonel Voskresenskiy was studying that
matter with a large group of Germans, two or three of whom who had actually
fired the systems.The military would soon be forming a special subunit to study
firing technology in its entirety. For the time being we had concentrated all of our
efforts on having something to fire.We needed to recreate the missiles themselves,
and the chief problem was the control instruments. As far as the engines were
concerned, we had found many of them in Lehesten, and firing tests were already
being performed successfully there.
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