The Rockets' Red Glare: Technology, Conflict, and Terror in the ...

The Rockets' Red Glare: Technology, Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
Author(s): Asif Siddiqi
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Technology and Culture, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Jul., 2003), pp. 470-501
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Society for the History of Technology
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The Rockets' Red Glare
Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
ASIF
SIDDIQI
On 27 June 1938, after a long day at work at a secret rocketry research insti
tute, thirty-one-year-old Sergei
Korolev walked home to his one-room
tiny
Moscow apartment in a drab five-story building
on Koniushkovskaia
Street, near the United States Embassy. His three-year-old daughter Nataliia
had been sent
away
to her
grandmother's country house, so the
apartment
was
unusually quiet that night. His wife Kseniia, a medical student, had
noticed two men in dark suits lurking nearby when she returned from work
but thought little of it. After supper, as the two sat listening
to music on
their new
phonograph, the doorbell rang. Two men from the People's
Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet security police,
walked in and directed Korolev to sit down while they searched the apart
ment. Then, as Kseniia later remembered, "They told Sergei Pavlovich to
get dressed. He put on a leather coat he usually wore. I naively gave him two
changes of underwear for the journey. We said goodbye and kissed each
other. But when I wanted to go downstairs to see him off in the car, they
prevented me quite roughly. I remained alone in the flat. I had golden hair
and it went
completely gray overnight."l
Mr.
Siddiqi
is a Ph.D. candidate in history
at Carnegie Mellon
University
in Pittsburgh.
He thanks David Hounshell, Wendy Goldman, Scott
Sandage, Jonathan Harris, Anoo
Raman, Rebecca Kluchin, Steve Burnett, Jill Hochman, Michael Neufeld, John Stauden
maier, and the Technology
and Culture referees for their
insightful
comments on earlier
versions of this article. He also thanks the participants
of the October 2000 Midwestern
Russian
History Workshop
at the University of Chicago.
Research for this article was
made possible
a
by grant from the National Science Foundation.
2003
by
the Society
for the History of Technology.
All rights reserved.
0040- 165X/03/4403-0002$8.00
1. Interview with Kseniia Koroleva, Nova, "The Russian
Right Stuff: Korolev," show
no. 1808, WGBH-TV, broadcast 20
February 1991; Iaroslav Golovanov, Korolev: fakty
i
mify (Moscow, 1994), 242-43,248-49; M. Rebrov, "Lider: maloizvestnye stranitsy iz zhiz
ni," Krasnaia zvezda, 1 July
1989. NKVD stood for Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del
(People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs).
470

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
For the next six years, Korolev would be ground through the most in
human depths of the Main Administration of Camps (GULAG) system,
from the terrible Lubianka prison to the infamous Kolyma labor camps in
eastern Siberia, and finally
to the Tupolev sharaga (prison workshop) in
Moscow.2 Freed in 1944, he rose through the ranks after Stalin appointed
him to lead the Soviets' postwar ballistic missile effort. Within twelve years,
his team launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, putting the
Soviet Union on the map as a technological superpower and setting off the
space
race.
Korolev's arrest, the culmination of the NKVD's attack on the rocketry
research institute (RNII), remains one of the most important turning
points in accounts of Soviet rocketry research.3 Russia had produced the
first serious rocketry theoretician, Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, at the beginning
of the century. In the early 1930s, several different rocketry teams achieved
significant successes, paralleling the work of budding German rocketry
societies of the time. In 1933, the Soviet government consolidated the dis
parate efforts into a single institution, a scientific research institute based in
Moscow. Yet in the summer of 1945, Soviet occupation forces were collect
ing scraps of German rockets in hopes of learning something
new. When
World War II ended, the Germans had the most powerful ballistic missile
in the world, the terrifying Vergeltungswaffe Zwei (Vengeance Weapon
Two, V-2). The V-2 may have failed as a military weapon by
most standards,
but for the Soviet teams
scouring
the remains of German
rocketry centers,
its technological prowess highlighted their own
relatively weak work on
ballistic missiles.4 What had happened
To date, both Russian and Western historians have treated the history of
Soviet rocketry
as a linear technological evolution interrupted only by the
Great Purges of 1937-38, when the Soviet security police arrested and shot
several
senior
engineers
at RNII.
Lacking
a substantial archival record, his
2. Between 1938 and 1944, the NKVD
placed
Korolev in a number of locations.
From June 1938 to August 1939, he was at prisons around Moscow. From August
to
December 1939, he was at the Kolyma gold
mines in Siberia. From March to September
1940, he was back in prison
in Moscow. From
September
1940 to November 1942, he was
incarcerated at Tupolev's sharaga prison design bureau, known as TsKB-29. Finally,
from
November 1942 to July 1944, he was at Plant No. 16 at Kazan' as part of another prison
design group. He was released in July
1944. For the most detailed accounts of Korolev's
incarceration, see Nataliia Koroleva, Otets: kniga
vtoraia (Moscow, 2002), 7-192; Golo
vanov, 248-328. For an English-language
account of Korolev's time at the Tupolev
sharaga,
see L. L. Kerber, Stalins Aviation
Gulag:
A Memoir of Andrei Tupolev and the
Purge
Era
(Washington, D.C, 1996). The acronym GULAG derives from Glavnoe uprav
lenie ispravitel'no-trudovykh lagerei.
3. RNII stood for Reaktivnyi nauchno-issledovatePskii institut (Reactive Scientific
Research Institute).
4. For the most important history
of the A-4 (or V-2), see Michael J. Neufeld, The
Rocket and the Reich: Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York,
1995).
471

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
JULY
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torians, in both Russia and the West, have uniformly viewed the purges as
the defining and singular break in rocketry work that explained the Soviet
in
"lag"
1945.5
However, by reconstructing the activities of RNII in the 1930s, as well
as the specific
events surrounding the arrests in 1937-38, it is possible
to
develop
a different narrative. Evidence available in the
post-Soviet
gests that bitter conflicts over the adoption of specific technologies plagued
the institute before the purges. These technical disagreements
were
partly
responsible for the arrests at the institute. Although conflicts over technol
ogy would not be uncommon in most research and development milieux,
Soviet R&D institutions in the 1930s were unable to resolve technical dis
sension in a way that facilitated radical innovation.6 These debates over
technological choice affected the trajectory of Soviet rocketry more pro
foundly than the purges.
The narrative that follows is framed by
two important questions. First,
how did the Soviets manage radical technological innovation in the pre
World War II era, given the exigencies of massive industrialization and mil
itary rearmament7 Second, how did engineers try to resolve "deadlocked
conflicts" over
technologies
in an environment characterized by the threat
of terror These
are
questions
important
because their answers
promise
insights into technological innovation under conditions of extreme finan
cial and political strain.
era
sug
5. For English-language
works
favoring
this
interpretation,
see James E. Oberg,
Red
Star in Orbit (New York, 1981); Frank H. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age:
The Rocket
Societies, 1924-1940
(Washington, D.C, 1983); Steven J. Zaloga, Target America: The
Soviet Union and the Strategic Arms Race, 1945-1964 (Novato, Calif., 1993); James
Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the
Moon (New York, 1997); T. A. Heppenheimer, Countdown: A History of Space Flight (New
York, 1997). For Russian-language works, see Golovanov; G. S. Vetrov, S. P. Korolev i kos
monavtika: perve shagi (Moscow, 1994); Aleksandr Romanov, Korolev (Moscow, 1996).
6. There is no
equivalent
term in the Russian
language
to "research and develop
ment." As a general rule, Russian use the term "scientific-research work" (NIR) to con
vey a similar
meaning
to "research," and
"experimental-design
work" (OKR) to do the
same for "development." They refer to the two
together
as "scientific-research and exper
imental-design
work" (NIOKR), which is roughly equivalent
to "R&D." See V. P. Mishin
and V. K. Karrask, Osnovy konstruirovaniia raket-nositelei kosmicheskikh apparatov (Mos
cow, 1991), 391.
7. I use the term "radical innovation" to refer to a technology
that differs
signifi
cantly from any existing technology in how it operates and how it is used. For the pur
poses of this article, I do not
distinguish,
as economists often do, between invention,
entrepreneurship, investment, and
development. Thus, I consider "radical innovation"
an
integrated notion that encompasses the entire process between conception and pro
duction rather than a single part of that process. See Matthew
Evangelista,
How the Uni
ted States and the Soviet Union
Develop
New
Military Technologies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988),
52-53.
472

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror In the Soviet Union
Historiography
David Holloway's early work on military innovation laid the ground
work for discerning such key aspects of the Soviet defense industry
as the
relative importance of both "piecemeal and revolutionary development."8
He underscored the importance of influential individuals to fostering the
types of innovation that required new institutional arrangements. The lack
of a strong individual patron for the Soviet rocketry effort in the 1930s in
fluenced the outcome of the project, both positively and negatively.
Another important dimension of Soviet R&D in the interwar years was
the relationship between the state and the "technical intelligentsia." In his
landmark Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, Kendall E. Bailes
rejected the orthodox interpretation that the technical intelligentsia simply
executed demands from above. Instead, Bailes
argued,
the "technostruc
ture" continually interacted with the "power structure." He contended that
conflicts with
the state, as well as internal conflicts based on cultural and
class differences, contributed to the poor showing of Soviet R&D in the
1930s. The government demanded both quantity and quality. Given the
economic exigencies of the day, industrial managers found these two goals
contradictory and adopted
new
technology only under duress.9 Like other
R&D projects, the Soviet rocketry efforts of the period illustrate this inher
ent tension between short-term
goals
and new innovations that
require
long-term
investment.
Terror also played
a key role in the process of innovation. Mikhail Tsyp
kin, who examined the
development
of so-called
new-in-principle weapons
such as rockets
during
the interwar years, concluded that "terror
disorgan
8. David Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector: Battle Tanks and ICBMs," in
Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union, ed. Ronald Amann and Julian Cooper (New
Haven, Conn., 1982), 405. For general surveys of Soviet R&D and applied research, see
Alexander Korol, Soviet Research and Development:
Its Organisation, Personnel and Funds
(Cambridge, Mass., 1965); Eugene Zaleski et al., Science
Policy in the USSR (Paris, 1969);
Robert A. Lewis, "Some Aspects of the Research and Development Effort of the Soviet
Union, 1924-35," Science Studies 2 (1972): 153-79; Joseph S. Berliner, The Innovation
Decision in Soviet Industry (Cambridge, Mass., 1976); David Holloway, "The Soviet Style
of Military R&D," in The Genesis of New Weapons: Decision Making for Military R&D, ed.
Franklin A. Long and Judith Reppy (New York, 1980), 137-57; Bruce Parrot, Politics and
Technology
in the Soviet Union
(Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Ellen Jones, "Defense R&D
Policymaking
in the USSR," in Soviet Decisionmaking for National Security,
ed. Jiri Val
enta and William C. Potter (London, 1984), 116-35; Evangelista;
and Jerry F. Hough,
"The Historical Legacy
in Soviet Weapons Development,"
in Valenta and Potter, 87-115.
9. Kendall E. Bailes, Technology
and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of
the
Soviet Technical Intelligentsia,
1917-1941 (Princeton, N.J., 1978). In a similar but not
identical vein, Robert Lewis attributes the poor showing of Soviet R&D in the 1930s to
factors such as
improper allocation of resources, an inefficient
organizational structure,
and the focus on
quantity
over
quality; Science and Industrialisation in the USSR (New
York, 1979), 144-46.
473

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
JULY
2003
VOL. 44
ized and inhibited military R&D work." He observed that Soviet weapons
designers constantly molded their design styles
to strike a balance between
the need for better weapons and the deadly repercussions of failure. Such
contradictions inevitably led to incremental innovation processes. Tsypkin
also offered a more nuanced interpretation of the effects of the purges. He
argued that other factors besides the terrorsuch as the Soviet leadership's
focus on weapons that promised immediate returns and the lack of intelli
gence
on concurrent German effortsalso contributed to the "failure" of
Soviet
as
rocketry compared
to the German
program.10
More
recently,
Russian historians, especially Iaroslav Golovanov and Georgii Vetrov, have
begun dealing openly with the discord among Soviet rocketry engineers in
the 1930s, adding richly
to the discourse. They have not, however, ques
tioned the entrenched notion that the purges stifled the development of
Soviet rocketry, thereby leaving the Soviets in a weak position at the end of
World War II.11 Newly available archival evidence, however, suggests that
radical innovation such as the development of rockets was characterized by
the complex interplay between technological choice, discord, and terror.
Two Divergent Approaches to Rocketry
Russia had a distinguished tradition of rocketry dating back to pre-rev
olutionary times. As early
as 1680 the Russian government set up a plant in
Moscow for producing black powder rockets, and the army and navy both
used such rockets in combat during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen
turies.12 The military integrated these solid-propellant rockets into its
artillery tradition. Although powder rockets could be built easily, they had
limited military utility because they were difficult to control and did not fly
10. Mikhail Tsypkin, "The
Origins
of Soviet
Military
Research and Development
System (1917-1941)" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985). In a recent work, economic
historian Mark Harrison
partly supports Tsypkin's claims. Harrison attributes the rela
tively poor state of Soviet rocketry
at the end of World War II to resource
shortages that
prevented serious pursuit of
rocketry, peculiarities
in the Soviet R&D system that
emphasized short-term
goals,
and pervasive technological conservatism that impeded
innovation. See Mark Harrison, "New Postwar Branches of Defence
Industry (1):
Rocketry,"
in The Soviet
Defence-Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev, ed. J. D.
Barber and Mark Harrison (London, 2000), 127-30. For a third
English-language
work
with a similar view, see David Easton Potts, "Soviet Man in Space: Politics and Technol
ogy from Stalin to Gorbachev" (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1992), 47-48.
11. Golovanov (n. 1 above); Vetrov (n. 5 above). William P. Barry
was the first West
erner to describe the prewar discord, but, like Russian historians, he did not link the de
bate with the purges. See William P. Barry, "The Missile Design Bureaux and Soviet
Manned
Space Policy, 1953-1970" (D.Phil, diss., University
of Oxford, 1996), 33-36.
12. For general surveys of pre-twentieth-century
work on Russian
rocketry,
see V. N.
Sokol'skii, A Short Outline
of the Development of Rocket Research in the USSR (Jerusalem,
1967); I. A. Slukhai, Russian Rocketry:
A Historical Survey (Jerusalem, 1968).
474

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
very far. Traditional black powder rockets also left smoke trails back to the
firing spota liability in battle. Thus, Russia, like other European powers,
continued to favor traditional artillery, which by the late nineteenth cen
tury offered significant advantages
over solid rockets.13
A second thread in rocketry emerged much later. In 1903, Konstantin
Tsiolkovskii, a deaf, self-taught schoolteacher, inaugurated
a new school of
thought when he published
a seminal work on the possibilities of space ex
ploration using powerful liquid propellant rockets.14 Widely recognized
as
the "father of astronautics," he argued that such rockets, especially those
using liquid oxygen, would be more efficient than the old solid-fuel rockets,
especially for exploring the upper atmosphere and the cosmos. Few paid
attention to Tsiolkovskii's far-reaching ideas until the mid-1920s, when an
indigenous "space fad" in the USSR brought his name to prominence.
pite the unconventional nature of his theories, the Bolshevik leadership
eventually bestowed a number of important honors on Tsiolkovskii, who fit
his original quasi-spiritual conception of space exploration in line with a
more technocratic and Marxist-Leninist vision of
progress.15
Soviet rocketry's dichotomous and oppositional nature, with one group
focused on military needs and the other on outer space, profoundly af
fected the manner in which rocketry institutions formed in the 1930s.
Those looking toward space, who included a young glider pilot named
Sergei Korolev, established a small team of enthusiasts named the Group
for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD, in its Russian acronym) in
September 1931.16 The group's members (fig. 1), all influenced by the
Des
13. Prior to the twentieth century, the most
commonly used solid propellant
black powder, composed of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur. European military
strategists
abandoned black powder
in the late nineteenth century partly because it
cracked at storage temperatures, causing
it to burn unevenly. Black powder
also pos
sessed very low caloric content, which translated into a low discharge velocity and rela
tively short range. The revolution in artillery weapons, specifically
the adoption
of rifled,
breech-loading guns, hastened the end for black powder rockets.
14. Tsiolkovskii's article, "Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi priborami"
(Exploration
of cosmic spaces by reactive devices), was
published
in the May
1903 issue
of the St. Petersburg journal Nauchnoe obozrenie. He
published
a much expanded
version
in the
journal
Vestnik vozdukhoplavaniia
in 1911-12 (nos. 19-22 and 2-9) and added a
self-published supplement
in 1914. For English-language reproductions of all three, see
A. A. Blagonravov, ed., K. E. Tsiolkovsky: Selected Works (Moscow, 1968), 51-139.
15. Tsiolkovskii's more
spiritually oriented writings stemmed from the philosophy
of "Cosmism." See Richard Stites, Revolutionary
Dreams: Utopian
Vision and Experimen
tal Life
in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 168-71; Michael Holquist, "Konstan
tin Tsiolkovsky:
Science Fiction and Philosophy
in the History of Soviet Space Explora
tion," Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. George
E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin
(Carbondale, 111., 1987), 74-86; Michael Hagemeister,
"Russian Cosmism in the 1920s
and Today," The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ith
aca, N.Y., 1997), 185-202.
16. GIRD stood for Gruppa izucheniia reaktivnogo
nical vernacular of the 1930s and 1940s, Russian engineers
was
dvizheniia. Note that in the tech
considered the word "reac
475

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
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FIG. 1 The original team of spaceflight enthusiasts who called themselves the
Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (GIRD, short for Gruppa izucheniia
reaktivnogo dvizheniia), shown here circa 1932. Sergei Korolev is seated in
the center of the front row. (Files of Asif Siddiqi.)
works of Tsiolkovskii, favored liquid-propellant rocket engines
over the
more conventional
powder
rockets.
Liquid propellants,
because
con
they
tained so much untapped energy, offered the only real chance of breaching
the
atmosphere.
GIRD represented the Utopian and mostly civilian strand of early Soviet
rocketry. Military-oriented rocketeers, on the other hand, gathered not in
Moscow but in Leningrad. In 1921, the Revolutionary Military Council
established a small laboratory
to develop
a "self-propelled mine" using
smokeless
a
powder, type of solid
propellant
safe to store and manufacture.17
The ten-man team took the name Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) in 1928,
tive" synonymous with "jet." From a theoretical perspective, rocket propulsion
is a sub
set of reactive propulsion.
For a detailed technical summary of the work at GIRD, see
N. I. Efremov and E. K. Moshkin, "K piatidesiatiletiiu
so vremeni
organizatsii
v moskve
gruppy izucheniia reaktivnogo dvizheniiagird,"
Iz istorii aviatsii i kosmonavtiki no. 45
(1981): 3-53.
17. L. M. Aleksandrova, "60 let so dnia podachi
N. I. Tikhomirovym prosheniia
o vy
dache
privilegii
na novyi tip samodvizhushchiksia min dlia vody
i vozdukha," Iz istorii
aviatsii i kosmonavtiki no. 27 (1975): 140-43. Chemical engineer
N. I. Tikhomirov estab
lished this institution
originally
in Moscow on 1 March 1921, under the banner "Labor
atory for the Development
of Inventions of
Engineer
Tikhomirov." It moved to Lenin
grad
in 1927.
476

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
reporting directly to the Military Research Committee of the Revolutionary
Military Council, the research arm of the armed forces. In that year, the GDL
launched the first Soviet smokeless-powder rocket, which flew a distance of
1,300 meters.18 The laboratory set out to develop solid-fuel rockets for arm
ing aircraft or for aiding airplanes during takeoffs. In 1929 the GDL also
added a small subdivision, headed by twenty-year-old Valentin Glushko, to
conduct research on
liquid-propellant engines. Most of its work was, how
ever, focused on
powder
rockets.
By 1933, the
now
a
laboratory,
numbering
staff of two hundred, had achieved a modicum of success with a variety of
solid rocket projectiles. The Leningraders did not share the Muscovites' Uto
pian visions of space travel; most of the Leningrad engineers had military
backgrounds and were schooled in artillery warfare. Their modest funding
came directly from the Soviet military.19
By the end of the 1920s, the Red Army, particularly its chief of staff
Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii, began
to notice the GDL's rocketry work.
Described
one
by
Western historian as "the
major
facilitator of... innova
tion in the Red Army during the First Five Year Plan period," Tukhachevskii
was also one of the most
forward-thinking military strategists of the Soviet
era.20 He strongly believed that modern technology could rearm the weak
ened Soviet Union against the encircling forces of capitalism. In his semi
nal "New Problems of War," written in 1931-32, Tukhachevskii wrote
glow
ingly
on the possible applications of rocket-powered high-speed and
high-altitude aircraft, believing that they would be invulnerable to antiair
craft fire.21 By late 1932, Tukhachevskii proposed uniting the GDL and
18. Smokeless powder, which left no smoke trails and had higher caloric content,
offered tactical advantages
over black powder, but it suffered from similar problems
of
burn control. The GDL in the 1920s
developed
a specific type of smokeless powder
known as pyroxyline
TNT powder (known by
its Russian acronym, PTP) that promised
slow and constant
burning
and
relatively easy production processes. For an official sum
mary of the work at GDL, issued by the military in January 1934, see "Gazo-dinamich
eskaia laboratoriia UVI," Russian State Military
Archive (RGVA), f. 4, op. 14, d. 1171,11.
5-6. The best
published
account is V. F. Rakhmanin, ed., Odnazhdy
i navsegda
...: doku
menty i liudi o sozdatele raketnykh dvigatelei
i kosmicheskikh sistem akademike Valentine
Petroviche Glushko (Moscow, 1998), 392-401.
19. The Main
Artillery
Directorate of the Soviet armed forces began financing
works of the GDL in December 1922.
20. Sally
W. Stoecker, Forging Stalin's Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky
and the Politics of
Military Innovation (Boulder, Colo., 1998), 168. Soviet and Russian historians have writ
ten on widely Tukhachevskii's life, publishing
over a dozen tomes on the
subject.
There
are, however, no
comprehensive English-language biographies
of him. For a brief treat
ment, see Shimon Naveh, "Tukhachevsky,"
in Stalin s Generals, ed. Harold Shukman
(New York, 1993), 255-74.
21. M. N. Tukhachevskii, "Novye voprosy voiny,"
in M. N. Tukhachevskii, izbrannye
proizvedeniia:
torn vtoroi, 1928-1937 gg. (Moscow, 1964), 182-84. For a detailed study
of
Tukhachevskii's interest in rocketry in the late 1920s and early 1930s, see Iu. V. Biriukov,
"RoF M. N.
Tukhachevskogo
v razvitii Sovetskoi aviatskii i raketnoi tekhniki," Iz istorii
aviatsii i kosmonavtiki no. 25 (1975): 3-17.
the
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TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
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GIRD into a single national R&D institute to develop both solid- and liq
uid-propellant rockets for the military. In numerous letters to high officials,
Tukhachevskii repeatedly underlined his belief that rockets would advance
Soviet technological prowess.22 Following
a tortuous series of negotiations,
letters, and meetings, Tukhachevskii signed an order on 21 September 1933
that united GIRD and GDL into the new Reactive Scientific-Research
Institute (RNII) under the armed forces' Revolutionary Military Council.
On 31 October, however, the government issued a decree moving the insti
tute to the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtiazhprom),
a civilian-controlled ministry that managed defense production.23 Thus,
having conceived and shepherded this merger, Tukhachevskii eventually
relinquished control. The new
organization, the first governmental rock
etry research institution in the world, would create its own mandate, with
out Tukhachevskii's strategic vision and commitment to developing
mili
tary rockets. The loss of his guidance set the stage for unprecedented
discord between the solid-propellant experts of the former GDL and the
liquid-propellant
advocates of GIRD.
Three
Conflicts
Without Tukhachevskii's patronage, the new institute floundered.
While Tukhachevskii's original order had emphasized "the enormous
...
prospects
of
using
reactive
engines
and
especially liquid-propellant
reactive
engines
in various areas of military technology,"
most
engineers
found the language of the mandate vague and confusing.24 In establishing
an organizational structure, Tukhachevskii had originally approved
a pro
posal from a senior GDL staff memberwho evidently
never consulted
anyone from the GIRD faction.25 In this climate, as the two teams moved
their equipment to a single
new location at Likhobory
on the outskirts of
Moscow, they quarreled
over
both
management
and
technology.
22. For excerpts from several of these letters, see Golovanov (n. 1 above), 162-70.
Tukhachevskii's actions
regarding rocketry research were
part of a larger plan issued in
December 1932, in which he proposed establishing
a centralized
body
to coordinate Sov
iet R&D for "the mobilisation of scientific and technical work for the requirements of the
Red Army." See Lennart Samuelson, Plans for Stalin s War Machine: Tukhachevskii and
Military-Economic Planning,
1925-1941 (London, 2000), 152-54.
23. "Ob organizatsii reaktivnogo instituta," State Archive of the Russian Federation
(GARF), f. 8418, op. 28, d. 3,11. 17-18. In a February 1934 letter to his boss, K. E. Voro
shilov, Tukhachevskii argued that most
military
R&D
organizations should remain
under his control. Voroshilov
responded
on 28 April 1934, rejecting Tukhachevskii's
request, insisting that military
R&D institutions should be under the control of
Narkomtiazhprom because that ministry could afford these organizations substantial
industrial support. See RGVA, f. 4, op. 14, d. 1171,11. 54-59.
24. GARF, f. 8418, op. 28, d. 3,1. 17.
25. Rakhmanin (n. 18 above), 407.
478

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
FIG. 2 A
heavily retouched photograph of Ivan Kleimenov from the mid-1930s.
(National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, SI 83-7691.)
The space enthusiasts from GIRD did not find the new arrangement to
their advantage. Although they had eagerly supported the idea of a unified
institute, they had not expected
to be so marginalized. The division of res
ponsibilities at the top of the institute paralleled the schisms and tensions
between the factions. Ivan Kleimenov (fig. 2), one of Tukhachevskii's pro
teges from GDL who strongly favored the solid-propellant rocketeers from
Leningrad, headed the institute and retained oversight of all the primary
R&D divisions. Sergei Korolev, the ambitious engineer from GIRD, served as
his
deputy,
and
oversaw
only
some
administrative
departments,
the manu
facturing workshops, drafting teams, document copying, and the library.26
26. Vetrov (n. 5 above), 75; Golovanov, 171. This institutional arrangement
was
partly accidental. In 1933, Tukhachevskii had established a commission to determine the
institute's future structure. When the commission, composed
of
representatives
from
both GDL and GIRD, failed to compromise,
one of Tukhachevskii's subordinates, G. P.
Novikov, stipulated
a structure under which the director would
supervise
R&D activities
and the deputy director would oversee
production.
Tukhachevskii considered both
Kleimenov and Korolev for the directorship, but eventually chose the former because he
was a member of the Communist Party,
a military officer, and a veteran of the Civil War.
479

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
JULY
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VOL. 44
Korolev, among the most farsighted engineers
at the institute, chafed at being
cut off from design work. In his first three months as deputy, he repeatedly
clashed with Kleimenov over the role of former GIRD engineers in the new
setting.
In
January 1934, when Korolev sent a memo to his new boss com
plaining of the shoddy workmanship on the shop floor, Kleimenov lost his
patience;
he wrote to the local Communist
Party
committee
recommending
Korolev's dismissal from the institute. As a compromise, party
functionaries
demoted Korolev to a junior position in a design department.27
Upon the new institute's formation, Kleimenov stopped funding several
research projects that had been fundamental to GIRD's work, including
a
coveted rocket-plane effort. These cancellations fostered so much discord
that Tukhachevskii, who no longer had any official connection with the insti
tute, was
besieged with letters and drawn into the conflict. In a May 1934
memo, for example, Korolev complained to Tukhachevskii that "the situa
tion in the institute has become intolerable."28 Tukhachevskii, by then the
chief of armaments of the Red Army, tried to have Kleimenov fired, but the
effort failed despite widespread criticism of Kleimenov's managerial abilities.
Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the head of Narkomtiazhprom, evidently protected
Kleimenov from further attacks.29 As a result of the infighting, many former
GIRD members left, were fired, or were demoted in 1934. Remarkably,
even
one former GDL engineer complained about Kleimenov, writing to Tuk
hachevskii: "To characterize the general situation at RNII, one could point
out that you could not find a single satisfied employee, [since all the] effi
cient workers, designers and engineers have run from [the institute]."30
In this environment, or more
technology,
precisely
choices among
cer
tain
technologies,
assumed a central role in the
acrimony. Engineers
focus
ed their disagreements around three major technical issues. Opponents in
one debate often supported each other in another dispute.
The first and most
important disagreement
involved the use of solid or
liquid propellants. The GDL faction had been using solid propellants for
over a decade, working
in a tradition of
powder
rocket
development
that
stretched back two centuries in Russia. Partly due to institutional inertia,
27. For Korolev's memo, dated 17 January 1934, see Korolev to Kleimenov, Archive
of the Russian Academy
of Sciences (ARAN), r. 4, op. 14, d. 169,11. 1-7. He was demoted
soon after, on 25
January
1934.
28. For the cancellation of the rocket-plane project,
see Romanov (n. 5 above),
127-28; Tsypkin (n. 10 above), 192. For Korolev's memo, dated 29 May 1934, see RGVA,
f. 34272, op. l,d. 177,11. 17-19.
29. I. I. Kleimenova, "Proisshestviia . . .
posle 'proisshestviia '," Voenno-istoricheskii
zhurnal, no. 3 (1991): 78-81; Golovanov, 178-79. In 1934, Tukhachevskii issued several
memos
recommending Kleimenov's dismissal. See RGVA, f. 4, op. 14, d. 1237,11. 9-9ob.
30. Golovanov, 178-79. See ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 150,1. 38, for a list of
engineers
who left the institute.
480

SIDDIQI I Technology, Conflict and Terror in the Soviet Union
Kleimenov devoted the lion's share of the institute's personnel
resources
and production time to designing and manufacturing solid-propellant
rockets. When he demoted Korolev in January 1934, Kleimenov replaced
him with Georgii Langemak,
a solid rocket pioneer; his order further forti
fied the solid-propellant faction. Unusually for a military institution in
Stalin's Soviet Union, the two sides openly disagreed
on the issue. For
example,
at a scientific conference held in the spring of 1934 in Moscow,
Korolev enumerated all the drawbacks of solid propellants of the day,
including their inability to keep firing for as long
as liquid-propellant rock
ets, low caloric content, and the need for
heavy
combustion chambers.31
When
Pravda
favorably
mentioned
Korolev's
presentation,
Kleimenov
wrote to the newspaper disavowing any connection to the young engineer.32
Korolev also complained to the military. In his May 1934 letter to Tukhach
evskii, Korolev opined that "powder reactive projectiles [may] have great
significance
as a new source for arming the [Red
...
Army] today but you
can count on thisthis is the disastrous
politics
of'near
sightedness.'"33
Despite the complaints, the institute's GDL faction refused to compromise.
The second disagreement also dealt with propellant choice. The old
visionary Tsiolkovskii had predicted that rockets could travel most effi
ciently into space by using
a specific combination of liquid propellants:
supercooled (or cryogenic) liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Although
engineers found liquid oxygen inordinately difficult to produce and store,
it promised unprecedentedly high calorific energy contentthat is, a rela
tively small amount could impart sufficient energy to lift an object up to
space. Following in Tsiolkovskii's footsteps, the GIRD veterans had put all
their energies into developing liquid-oxygen engines. Here again they came
into conflict with the GDL faction, who, with
limited interest in liquids, had
chosen to
spend money
on
only
storable
liquid-propellant
rocket
engines,
which have less energy
content. Their choice stemmed
partly
from circum
stance and partly from operational military requirements. In their original
location in Leningrad, the GDL's head of storable rocket engines, Valentin
Glushko, had found it easy to obtain nitric acid, a type of storable fuel, for
his experiments. Nitric acid was in fact widely available and relatively cheap
to produce, while liquid oxygen was much more difficult to obtain. Glush
ko published
a monograph
on the topic in 1936 that profoundly influenced
the institute's preference for the nitric acid. In it he bluntly criticized liquid
31. "Polet reaktivnykh apparatov
v stratosfere," ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 240,11. 16-30.
Korolev presented this paper at the First All-Union Conference for the Study of the
Stratosphere, March-April
1934.
32. "Konferentsiia po stratosfere
zakrylas'," Pravda, 8 April 1934; ARAN, r. 4, op. 14,
d. 240,1. 31.
33. RGVA, f. 34272, op. 1, d. 177,11. 17-19. See also Rakhmanin (n. 18 above), 411;
Golovanov, 178.
481

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
JULY
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VOL. 44
oxygen as inefficient and underlined nitric acid's better operational advan
tages.34
Glushko's conclusions, as well as the need to conserve limited eco
nomic resources, prompted
institute director Kleimenov to terminate all
work on
liquid-oxygen rocket engines in November 1936.35
The conflict over
liquid oxygen and nitric acid engendered much more
acrimony than the one over solids and liquids. Throughout the institute's
existence, numerous individuals from the GIRD space faction wrote letters
to the government and the
partyindeed,
to anyone who would listento
air their grievances
over the way liquid oxygen had been discarded as a
technical option. Two men, Leonid Korneev and Andrei Kostikov, inde
pendently led this attack, and both their charges would figure prominently
in the terror that descended upon the institute in the late 1930s. Kleimenov
had fired Korneev in May 1934 after a violent disagreement
over the pro
pellant question. In a series of unusually bitter letters to Tukhachevskii and
Stalin in 1934-35, Korneev complained at length
over the oxygen issue.36
None of these entreaties, however, prevented
Kleimenov from
canceling
work on
liquid oxygen engines. One senior engineer specializing in oxygen
recalled that after that order "documentation on oxygen engines and rock
ets was burned in the archives, and manufactured models [of oxygen mis
siles] and other components
were thrown away
in a dump."37
In a remark
ably prescient letter to his boss in early 1937, Kleimenov defended his
action by arguing that liquid oxygen was
notoriously difficult to store for
long periods, thus compromising battle readiness.38 For the GIRD space ad
vocates, on the other hand, storage problems
were far less
important
than
energy characteristics.
The third technical debate concerned the choice to build winged
or
34. For a complete reproduction of Glushko's monograph, originally published in
1936, see Valentin P. Glushko, "Zhidkoe
toplivo dlia
reaktivnykh dvigatelei," in V^ P.
Glushko: put'
v raketnoi
tekhnikiizbrannye trudy, 1924-1946, ed. Valentin P. Glushko
(Moscow, 1977), 231-330, esp. 266, 271. See also L. E. Sternin, "Valentin Petrovich
Glushkopioner i tvorets otechestvennoi raketnoi tekhniki," in Nezabyvaemyi Baikonur,
ed. K. V. Gerchik (Moscow, 1998), 231, 241.
35. On 19 November 1936, Kleimenov terminated work on the
single liquid-oxygen
engine remaining
in the work program
at the institute, an engine known as "object 208."
Subsequently,
on 4 December 1936, engine expert M. K. Tikhonravov signed
an order
finalizing this arrangement. See Iu. G. Demianko, "Dvigateli
ORM-65 i RDA-150: istoriia
sozdaniia i ikh mesto v otechestvennom raketnom
dvigatelestroenii,"
Iz istorii aviatsii i
kosmonavtiki no. 74 (1999): 16-39. See also the interview with L. S. Dushkin, a liquid
oxygen engineer
at RNII, who attributes the cancellation
specifically
to Glushko's mono
graph. See Gennadi Maksimovich, "Tak kto zhe est' kto," KryVia rodiny,
no. 7 (1988):
28-31.
36. For excerpts from these letters, dated May 1934,17 April 1935, and 19 June 1935,
see Rakhmanin, 412, 415-16.
37. Maksimovich, 29. The oxygen engineer
was L. S. Dushkin.
38. For an excerpt from this letter, see Rakhmanin, 422-23.
482

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
FIG. 3 In the 1930s, the Soviet rocketry research Institute RNII developed several
experimental winged missiles using efficient liquid-propellant rocket engines
and stabilization systems. Show here is "object 212," a 2.6-meter-long rocket
with a range of about 50 kilometers. The 212 was tested in flight in 1939,
but the project
was canceled soon after. (National Air and Space Museum,
Smithsonian Institution, SI 91-1881.)
wingless missiles. When the old GIRD team had aimed for the cosmos, they
built both types of rockets, unsure of which offered better performance. For
the short run, the limitations of engine technology forced Korolev to favor
winged missiles. Because the Soviet Union had not designed powerful liq
uid propellant rocket engines, Korolev believed that he could compensate
by building missiles with wings (fig. 3). Rockets using relatively weak
engines could thus cover
longer distances, as wings provide additional lift.
It would be a stopgap
measure until RNII developed
more
powerful liquid
fuel engines.39 Yet when leading engineers
met in January 1935 to decide
39. Korolev wrote in his 1935 monograph,
Raketnii
polet
v stratosfere: "Only
when a
propulsion system is available which operates
on the new
principle
of reactive
propul
sion and is thus sufficiently
reliable and can
complete high-altitude flights
then
perhaps
someday interplanetary flights
can be made
[by wingless rockets]." That 1935 mono
graph
is reproduced
in S. P. Korolev, "Raketnii polet
v stratosfere," in Pionery
raketnoi
tekhniki: Vetchinkin Glushko Korolev Tikhonravov: izbrannye trudy (1929-1945 gg.),
ed.
S. A. Sokolova and T. M. Mel'kumov (Moscow, 1972), 381-451.
Ironically,
the German
team at Peenemunde took the exact
opposite view, emphasizing
the power of the rocket
engine
and
developing wingless missiles such as the V-2 rocket. Historian Walter
McDougall,
in considering
Korolev's
favoring winged missiles, noted that "Korolev . . .
seemed to believeas his U.S. Air Force rivals did in the 1960sthat
winged
rocket
483

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
JULY
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VOL. 44
how to focus their limited resources on one path, winged
or wingless mis
siles, Korolev recommended "not to terminate research into
wingless
rock
ets ... in the face of
design
failures."40 Kleimenov shared Korolev's ambiva
lence, but both Korolev and Kleimenov had to defend their position against
a vicious attack from Andrei Kostikov, an old GIRD engineer. He argued
that wingless rockets flying ballistic trajectories had no future as weapons
of war; they could only be useful for exploring the upper atmosphere.41
Through 1934 Kostikov had repeatedly asked his boss Kleimenov to elimi
nate work on such missiles. He had the blessing of a number of leading
aeronautical
engineers
from academia, but Kleimenov refused to back
down. Eventually, Kostikov and two associates decided to write a letter on
the issue to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the head of Narkomtiazhprom and the
commissar in charge of the Soviet defense industry. When Kleimenov
found out, perhaps fearing for his job, he agreed to eliminate wingless mis
siles from future plans, but only after dismissing Kostikov's two partners
from the institute.42
These three technical disagreements within RNII stemmed from the two
factions' different visions of
rocketry's
future.
term
military imperatives;
the other
aspired
One
sought
to the heavens.
to
satisfy
Unfortunately,
the institute's
engineers
could not resolve the conflicts in a manner that fos
tered technical advancement. External factors profoundly influenced deci
sion making within the institute. The larger institutional setting for rocketry
research not only exacerbated tensions within the institute but also impeded
the kind of radical innovation required to develop successful rockets.
short
Soviet Rocketry's Institutional Context
Unlike
almost all other Soviet R&D institutions of the 1930s, RNII dealt
with what the Soviets called
"new-in-principle" weapons, radically
innova
tive armaments that had little connection with
existing systems.
Neither the
armed forces nor the
engineers grasped
the
potential
of rockets in warfare.
Holloway's observation, that influential individuals at the top and bottom
can energize radical innovation in the Soviet R&D setting, rang particularly
true for rocketry.43 Both Tukhachevskii and Korolev had lobbied hard for
craft, not ballistic missiles, were destined to launch the Space Age.
As it happened, his
own
genius for missile
design
defeated his expectations." See Walter
. .
McDougall,. the
Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York, 1985), 37.
40. ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 171,1. 15ob.
41. ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 171,11. 12-14.
42. See A. G. Kostikov's letter to the local Communist
Party cell from late 1937,
reproduced
as A. G. Kostikov, "V partkom VKP(b) Nil No. 3 zaiavlenie ot chlena VKP/b/
s 1922 g No. 0050652," in Rakhmanin (n. 18 above), 104-10.
43. Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector: Battle Tanks and ICBMs" (n. 8
above), 406-8; Tsypkin (n. 10 above), 182.
484

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
establishing RNII. After 1934, Tukhachevskii hardly communicated with
the institute, while Korolev's power declined with his demotion. By relin
quishing control over the institute, Tukhachevskii inadvertently affected
two external factors, the state's and the
military's
commitment to such
weapons. Both, combined with a third external factor, the lack of intelli
gence about foreign rocketry, fueled the internal discord.
STATE COMMITMENT
For a brief period in the early 1930s the Soviet government cultivated
radical innovation, but by the middle of the decade the pace had clearly
slowed.44 Robert Lewis has noted: "By the late 1930s the Soviet R&D system
was extensive. But its organisational structure, the pattern of resources and
facilities, and the economic planning system all set up barriers to the wide
spread development of indigenous technology and its speedy innova
tion."45 Ultimately, the institutional environment of the rocketry effort
that is, the national drive to militarize quickly in anticipation of waracted
as a countervailing
force
against
radical innovation.
Narkomtiazhprom, the ministry overseeing RNII, did not consider the
institute a priority, and had moved the organization to a poorly financed
subdivision.46 Although RNII enjoyed relatively substantial monetary sup
port during its early existence, by 1936 Kleimenov had great difficulty
obtaining sufficient money for his plans. Of the 1.6 billion rubles Narkom
tiazhprom invested in defense production in 1936, RNII received only 3.42
million. Of this amount, Kleimenov allocated about half to solid rockets
and one-third to liquids.47 Although RNII expenditures increased about
threefold in 1936-40, they actually declined substantially when adjusted for
inflation.48
44. See Stoecker (n. 20 above), 8, where she concludes that "the military
as an inde
pendent institution . . . was
capable
of successful innovation
during
the First Five Year
Plan (1928-33) with the aid of
budgetary resources, reform-minded officers, foreign
expertise, indigenous
R&D programs and combat experience obtained in the Far East."
45. Robert Lewis, "Technology
and the Transformation of the Soviet
Economy,"
in
The Economic
Transformation of
the Soviet Union, 1913-1945, ed. R. W. Davies, Mark
Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft
(Cambridge, 1994), 192.
46. Narkomtiazhprom
moved RNII to its low priority Scientific-Research Sector on
4 April
1934. For a general
institutional history of Narkomtiazhprom,
see O. Khlevnyuk,
"The People's
Commissariat of Heavy Industry,"
in Decision-Making
in the Stalinist Com
mand Economy, 1932-37, ed. E. A. Rees (London, 1997), 94-123.
47. For RNII
expenditures
in 1936, see Russian State Archive of the Economy
(RGAE), f. 8162, op. 1, d. 16,11. 1-16.
48. Mark Harrison, "The Soviet Market for Inventions: The Case of Jet Propulsion,
1932 to 1944," Warwick Economic Research Papers, No. 605, Department of Economics,
University
of Warwick, 10-11. For RNII
funding figures
for 1937, see RGAE, f. 8162, op.
1, d. 16,1. 31. For 1938 figures,
see RGAE, f. 8162, op. 1, d. 89,1. 172. For 1939 figures,
see
RGAE, f. 8162, op. 1, d. 240,11. 1-7. For 1940
figures,
see RGAE, f. 8162, op. 1, d. 449,11.
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TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
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VOL. 44
Documentary evidence indicates that the institute's leadership repeat
edly complained of poor support. Kleimenov often even bypassed ministry
bosses and took his case directly to Stalin, suggesting that RNII had a luke
warm relationship with Narkomtiazhprom's leadership.49
In one letter from
June 1935, Kleimenov tried to interest Stalin in the new field of rocketry,
underlining Soviet achievements in both solid- and liquid-propellant mis
siles. Evidently Stalin never
replied to any of his appeals.50 This relationship
contrasts sharply with the attention Stalin gave to other military R&D pro
grams of the period. Historians have chronicled numerous cases of tank,
aircraft, and artillery development in which Stalin personally intervened,
often deciding
on a particular path of innovation.51 There is no evidence to
suggest that Stalinor indeed any other powerful industrial leader, such as
Sergo Ordzhonikidze or Kliment Voroshilovever expressed
more than a
cursory interest in rocketry after the mid-1930s. In fact, when the RNII
leadership attempted
to inform Vyacheslav Molotov of the results of
important tests of solid rockets in 1937, a midlevel bureaucrat intercepted
the letter, claiming
that such a report
was
"premature."52
Lack of state commitment harmed
rocketry
research. The
existing system
could support technical innovation without top-level individual interven
tion, but it could not support radical technical innovation, partly because the
latter was characterized by technological ambiguity. Sustained supplies of
materiel and generous economic support could resolve such uncertainty by
permitting scientists and engineers to pursue multiple paths of development,
but the financial constraints on RNII engineers gave them no such luxury.53
2-12. See also table of expenditures
Rakhmanin (n. 18 above), 145-46.
for liquid
rockets at RNII for the 1935-38 period in
49. See, for example, Kleimenov's December 1935 letter to Stalin, in which he com
plains about the "absence of sufficient material and technical resources at RNII," in
RGVA, f. 4, op. 14, d. 1398,11. 54-55.
50. Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (ARPF), f. 3, op. 47, d. 179,11.
1-7. Kleimenov sent the letter on 1 June 1935. For a reproduction of the letter, see I. T.
Kleimenov, "Zapiska
nachal'nika
reaktivnogo nauchno-issledovatel'skogo
Kleimenova I. V. Stalinu," in V. I. Ivkin, "U istokov
otechestvennogo
Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 2 (1996): 35-43.
instituta I. T.
raketostroeniia,"
51. For general surveys of Stalin's close relationship with weapons systems designers
in the 1930s, see Tsypkin (n. 10 above); Hough (n. 8 above); Arthur J. Alexander,
"Decision-making
in Soviet Weapons Procurement," Adelphi Paper,
nos. 147/148 (win
ter 1978/79): 1-64; Robin
Higham, John T. Greenwood, and Von
Hardesty, eds., Russian
Aviation and Air Power in the Twentieth Century (London, 1998).
11-18.
52. "Vo voprosy reaktivnykh
snariadov aviabomb," GARF, f. 8418, op. 27, d. 125,11.
53. Lewis has
argued
that the Soviet aviation sector was one of the few successes in
Soviet R8cD in the 1930s
precisely
because of high-level
commitment that allowed avia
tion
engineers
to pursue multiple lines of research, among other things.
He also noted
the value of flexible
planning
and
project-oriented personnel.
See Lewis, Science and
Industrialisation in the USSR (n. 9 above), 132-42.
486

SIDDIQI f Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
MILITARY COMMITMENT
The military, the primary would-be operator of rockets in the Soviet
Union, had an ambivalent attitude toward them. Jerry Hough has noted
that despite the unprecedented Soviet military buildup in the 1930s, its
leadership "strongly emphasized] the basic weaponstanks, artillery, air
planes and (for a period) large shipsand peripheral weapons were neg
lected in the budgetary squeeze."54 Within the military, the air force and the
artillery directorate served as the primary conduits for issuing require
ments for weapons to RNII, but because their leaders did not foresee using
rocketsespecially
liquid-propellant
rocketsin future wars, their con
nection to the institute remained tenuous at best. Before 1936, both issued
a few contracts on
solid-propellant rockets but none for liquid propel
lants.55 Because the military exercised relatively little supervision
over what
the institute produced, RNII's managers developed their own
requirements
for weapons. Thus, Kleimenov could focus on nitric acid and shut down
work on
liquid oxygen without repercussions.
To take another example, in January 1936 Korolev wrote up a "tactical
technical requirement"a document that the military would normally
preparefor
a piloted rocket-aircraft.56 Much later, he involved leading air
force tacticians in the project and obtained the blessing of a commission of
officers.57
Reversing
the process of weapons developmentthat is, concep
tualizing
a weapons system and then asking the military if they needed it
led to further disputes,
as engineers
never determined the original charac
teristics using any standardized methods. Some supported the rocket
plane.
Others
opposed
it. Without firm
military orders, the institute's com
mitment to different projects varied considerably through the late 1930s.
INTELLIGENCE ON FOREIGN EFFORTS
The lack of high-level commitment and the absence of military needs
intertwined with a third factor, Soviet intelligence
on
foreign rocketry.
Intelligence
on German rocketry activities in the early 1930s had at least
partly inspired Tukhachevskii's early exhortations to develop Soviet rockets
54. Hough,
100.
55. By 1935 the air force had issued contracts to develop
an air-launched projectile,
a tank-launched rocket, several types of chemical projectiles, illumination and signal
rockets, and rockets to aid heavy bombers during takeoff; see Kleimenov, 36. After 1936,
the air force and the Red Army's
Directorate of Communications a
assigned
few tasks to
develop liquid-propellant winged missiles. Unlike the solid rockets, all of these were
experimental.
See "Krylatye rakety (kratkii obzor rabot, v
provodivshikhsia
RNII v
1932-1938 gg.)," ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 87,11. 1-23.
56. The rocket-aircraft was known as
"object 218." See "Ob'ekt No. 218: Taktiko
tekhnicheskie trebovaniia na samolet s raketnymi dvigateliami (raketoplan)," ARAN, r.
4, op. 14, d. 105,11. 221-34. The document is dated 30
January 1936.
57. For the air force's recommendations, see ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 103,11. 76-79.
487

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quickly.58 A Soviet engineer who worked with the German spaceflight pio
neer Herman Oberth returned home in March 1932 with additional re
ports
on German
progress.59 Although security
around German
military
programs tightened after Hitler came to power in 1933, recent evidence
suggests that the Soviets had access to information from the top-secret Ger
man
rocketry project in the late 1930s. Willy Lehmann, a communist sym
pathizer in the counterintelligence department of the Gestapo, had been
passing information on German armaments to the Soviet security police
since about 1930 under the code name Breitenbach ("Wide Brook"). In
November 1935, Lehmann attended a ground firing of a large rocket engine
at Kummersdorf in the presence of Wernher von Braun, one of the techni
cal leaders of the German program. Lehmann's information, comprising
six
pages of data on the rocketry program, was then passed
on to Stalin and
Voroshilov on 17 December 1935, and to Tukhachevskii on 26 January
1936. Intelligence agents from the Red Army's general staff responded with
further questions, including queries for Lehmann about "engineer Braun"
and the possibility of "penetrating his laboratory." Tukhachevskii also
expressed interest in the work of the American rocketry pioneer Robert
Goddard and appealed to Voroshilov that the Soviets needed more intelli
gence information on his research.60 Probably
as a result, in April 1936 the
NKVD submitted more than fifty documents on foreign technology, in
cluding materials on Goddard, gathered from both open and covert sources
to Marshal Tukhachevskii.61
questions,
These recent revelations, while
since
overwhelming
evidence
tantalizing,
suggests
also raise some intractable
that
intelligence
on Ger
58. For
example,
Soviet agents sent Tukhachevskii a report
on Wilhelm Belz of
Cologne, who claimed to have launched a liquid-propellant rocket that traveled a dis
tance of six kilometers. See "Svodki svedenii po inostranoi voennoi tekhniki," GARF, f.
8355, op. 1, d. 370,11. 18-18ob. See also Rakhmanin (n. 18 above), 404-5. Belz's claim
later turned out be fraudulent. For an English-language
account of Belz, see Neufeld (n.
4 above), 19.
59. GARF, f. 8355, op. 1, d. 370,1. 4. After his return to the USSR, A. B. Shershevskii
worked at the GDL in Leningrad from March 1932 to December 1933. He did not pur
sue
rocketry after the formation of the new RNII in Moscow. The NKVD arrested him
on 7 October 1936 on
trumped-up charges of
sabotage and executed him on 22 March
1937, during
the height of the Great Purges. See Rakhmanin, 397; Neufeld, 11-12.
60. Tukhachevskii to Voroshilov, 23
July 1935, ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 245,11. 5-6. V. S.
Motov, '"Braitenbakh,"' in Ocherki istorii rossiiskoi vneshnei razvedki: torn 3, 1933-1941
gody, ed. E. M. Primakov (Moscow, 1997), 344. Although Lehmann appears to have sent
no further information on rockets, he continued to transmit weapons information to the
NKVD via intermediaries
through
the beginning
of World War II. The Gestapo eventu
ally discovered his activities and executed him in December 1942. See also A. V. Pronin,
"'Shtirlits' sluzhil pod nachalom . . .
Miullera," parts 1 and 2, Voenno-istoricheskii zhur
nal, no. 6 (1996): 22-31; no. 1 (1997): 18-25.
61. B. V. Barkovskii,"Nauchno-tekhnicheskaia razvedka na sluzhbe
sovetskogo gosu
darstva (1917-1946 gg.)," Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 2 (1995): 76-87.
488

SIDDIQI I Technology, Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
man
rocketry did not affect concurrent Soviet efforts. In fact, engineers
on
the ground appear to have had little knowledge of the German project. As
late as 1940 a key engineer at RNII asserted in an official report that he had
no information on
foreign work on long-range ballistic missiles.62 The
Soviet leadership's lack of interest in rocketry indicates either that intelli
gence on rocketry never reached top decision makers or that Soviet leaders
failed to make proper use of this knowledge.63
Tukhachevskii was
certainly the person most likely to have made the
best use of this information. But it may have been a case of too little too
late. In April 1936, a few months after intelligence
on rocketry reached the
Red Army, Stalin fired Tukhachevskii as the Red Army's weapons procure
ment chief. Thus, even if Tukhachevskii did see the reports, he was no
longer in any position to act on them. As historian Shimon Naveh noted
about Tukhachevskii, "it was clear [then] that he had lost his authority in
matters of strategic force-building."64 Ultimately, due to inefficient evalua
tion of intelligence information on German rocketry, the important data
had very little effect on the Soviet rocketry project.
With weak state commitment, the military's lack of interest, and inef
fective intelligence regarding foreign developments, Soviet engineers faced
difficult choices on technology. In the three major debates over technology,
Kleimenov and his allies tried to choose the path of least resistance and
quickest
returnsnot surprising given the exigencies of the day. Their
decisions, however, led to serious conflicts with those who preferred more
ambitious options. Unfortunately for the institute, the discord and the
Great
Purges both peaked simultaneously. Technological
raled out of control.
debates
now
spi
The Purges and Their Consequences
In the literature on the Great Purges, historians have devoted much at
tention to the Soviet security police's decimation of the upper layers of the
Red Army in 1937-38.65 The NKVD set off its attack by arresting Marshal
62. "Raketa
dal'nego deistviia," RGAE, f. 8162, op. 1, d. 300,1. 104. The engineer
was
L. S. Dushkin.
63. In an interview with a Russian newspaper in 1990, an unnamed person with
access to the still-closed NKVD archives revealed that information on
rocketry
and other
military technology
from Germany
was transmitted directly
to the
topi.e.,
to Stalin,
Molotov, Beriia, and othersbut provided
no evidence that these men had actually
viewed the information. See Lollii Zamoiskii and Iurii Nezhnikov, "U rokovoi cherty:
Sovetskaia razvedka nakanune voiny," Izvestiia, 5 May 1990. For a recent archival study
of Soviet intelligence activity in Germany in the prewar years,
see L. A. Bezymenskii,
"Sovetskaia razvedka pered voinoi," Voprosy istorii, no. 9 (1996): 78-90.
64. Naveh (n. 20 above), 263-64.
65. For recent
examples,
see Roger
A. Reese, "The Red Army and the Great
Purges,"
489

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
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Tukhachevskii and seven other senior officers on 26 May 1937. Among
those arrested was Tukhachevskii's aide Robert Eideman, a top-ranking mil
itary officer who had sponsored GIRD's rocketry works in the early 1930s.
All were shot seventeen
days later.66 Those from the rocketry institute who
had previously allied themselves with Tukhachevskii and Eideman, includ
ing Kleimenov and Korolev, came
immediately
under
suspicion.
Just three days after the executions, Leonid Korneev, the oxygen engi
neer whom Kleimenov had twice fired from the institute, wrote to Defense
Commissar Voroshilov: "Only now, in the light of recent events, it has
become clear that Kleimenov is also a saboteur, standing [with] the scum
of humanity, extraordinary bastards of the twentieth century such as
Piatakov, Tukhachevskii and others."67 The letter spurred
a local Commu
nist Party commission to investigate, and the commission sent a detailed
complaint
on Kleimenov to the commissar in charge of the rocketry insti
tute on 16 July 1937.68 In his defense, eight days later, Kleimenov responded
by sending
a short letter directly
to the NKVD. He wrote:
As a
to
supplement
the earlier message,
I am
reporting
that two
years
ago a group was established in the institute that has been playing
an
active role in
reducing
the pace of work on reactive armaments.
They
have demanded the reduction of work on powder rockets and [nitric
acid] in favor of strengthening the oxygen sector. Among others, the
list of activists includes A. G. Kostikov, M. K. Tikhonravov, L. K.
Korneev, L. S. Dushkin, and others. Outside of this institute, this
group was led by a protege of the executed spy M. N. Tukhachevskii.
... All of this requires investigation and bringing
to account.69
in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (Cam
bridge, 1993), 198-214; O. R Suvenirov, ed., Tragediia RKKA: 1937-1938 (Moscow, 1998).
66. Aleksei Khorev, "Kak sudili
Tukhachevskogo," Krasnaia zvezda, 17 April 1991;
J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of
the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (New Haven, Conn., 1999), 444-48; Roy A. Medvedev, Let His
tory Judge:
The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1972), 300-301; Victor
Alexandrov, The Tukhachevsky Affair (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963).
67. RGVA, f. 4, op. 14, d. 1628,11. 123-28.
68. The commission sent its report to M. L. Rukhimovich, the head of the People's
Commissariat of Defense Industry (Narkomoboronprom),
the ministry that oversaw
RNII after December 1936. Note that in the course of the transfer RNII was renamed
NII-3, in January
1937. See Aleksandr Glushko, "Ivan Kleimenov: A Talented
Organizer,"
Quest: The Journal of Spaceflight History 8, no. 3 (2000): 24-31.
69.
Emphasis mine. The protege
was la. M. Terent'ev, who had had close contacts
with many in the former GIRD
during negotiations to establish the rocketry institute in
the early
1930s. For the complete letter, see Maksimovich, "Tak kto zhe est' kto," 28-29.
Kleimenov sent a second letter on 25
July
1937 to Rukhimovich, in which he implicitly
attacked ministry officials for not
helping the institute deliver operational
armament to
the Soviet armed forces and asked for an
investigation. See Glushko, "Ivan Kleimenov,"
29-30.
490

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
As the internal terror in the Soviet Union began
to escalate, the debate over
rocket technology
now threatened people's lives.
Despite Kleimenov's defensive counterattack against his opponents, in
August 1937 the ministry fired him and relegated him to a junior position
at another institute.70 His troubles were
only beginning. One of those
whom Kleimenov had named as "activists," Andrei Kostikov, responded by
writing
a long letter to the local party committee denouncing
not only
Kleimenov but several others from the old GDL faction. His indictment
ranged from incompetence to implicit sabotage.71
In retrospect, Kostikov's
letter proved to be the critical turning point of the entire affair, for the
NKVD used it as the blueprint for its vendetta against the institute in the
ensuing
months.
At three in the morning of 3 November 1937, NKVD agents arrived at
Kleimenov's apartment and arrested him. Evidently the security police had
neither concrete evidence nor an arrest warrant.
a
Needing
solid case
against Kleimenov, the NKVD arrested a second GDL man from Kostikov's
list, Georgii Langemak, the following night.72 The revelation that Klei
menov had once served as a member of a trade delegation in Germany
made
it relatively easy to build spying charges against him. Forty-three days
after his arrest, Kleimenov, beaten viciously, admitted to a host of trumped
up charges, including membership in an "anti-Soviet Trotskiite spy-sabo
tage organization."73 He later refused to sign his "testimony," but the NKVD
found another "member" of this organization and collected more "evi
dence" against the beleaguered former director.74 On 10 January 1938, after ;
a
twenty-minute trial, the Military Collegium
of the USSR
Supreme
Court
condemned Kleimenov to death, and the NKVD's
on-duty
commandant
executed him later that same day. The following day, after another trial on
similar charges, the Collegium sentenced Langemak
to death, along with
thirty-five others; their sentences were also carried out the same
day.75
70. Kleimenov was dismissed on 30 August
1937 and
given
an appointment
at the
Central Aerohydrodynamics
Institute (TsAGI), outside Moscow. See Golovanov (n. 1
above), 232.
71. For the complete
text of the letter, see Kostikov, "V partkom VKP(b) Nil No. 3
zaiavlenie ot chlena VKP/b/ s 1922 g No. 0050652," in Rakhmanin (n. 18 above), 104-10.
See also B. Viktorov, "Kto est' kto," Nauka i zhizn, no. 12 (1988): 74-76.
72. Golovanov, 232-33.
73. For an excerpt from the bill of indictment, see N. L. Anisimov and V. G. Oppo
kov, "Proisshestvie v NII-3," Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 10 (1989): 81-87.
74. On 14 November 1937, another member of the Berlin trade
delegation
who had
been arrested, M. A. Rubinchik, confessed under torture that Kleimenov was a saboteur.
Rubinchik was later executed. See Anisimov and Oppokov,
82.
75. For Kleimenov's execution, see Anisimov and Oppokov, 82; A. Glushko, "K 100
letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia I. T. Kleimenova," Novosti kosmonavtiki 9, no. 6 (1999): 70-72.
In Langemak's case, the NKVD prepared the bill of indictment for his arrest on 20
December 1937, more than a month after his arrest. For excerpts from the indictment,
491

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These executions did not occur in a vacuum. The NKVD fiercely at
tacked the top and middle levels of the ministries that supervised the rock
etry institute. Hundreds if not thousands of plant managers, senior members
of the institute staff, and ministry officials were arrested in a horrific purge.76
The breathtaking pace of the arrests and executions was not so unusual in
1937-38, during the peak of the Great Purges, when the NKVD arrested
hundreds of thousands of people in a few months. At the rocket institute, the
executions of two
leading engineers
led to more arrests. Before their deaths,
both had signed "confessions" implicating
a number of other engineers.77
Members of the oxygen faction took advantage of the opportunity
to vilify
the leading engineer of nitric-acid engines, Valentin Glushko. On 23 March
1938, the NKVD arrested him, making him the third member of the old
GDL faction to be imprisoned. Glushko, in his initial testimony, implicated
Korolev as a saboteur.78
Using
this "evidence," the NKVD then arrested
Korolev, the most prominent engineer from the space faction still free. After
his arrest in June 1938, four senior
a
engineers signed
state
denunciatory
ment, claiming that Korolev had sabotaged work at the institute.79 Finally,
on
27 September 1938, the NKVD sentenced Korolev to ten years imprisonment
with five years of "deprivation of rights." Among the more absurd charges
see A. Glushko, "'Delo
Eeorgii Erikhovich
Langemaka':
Novosti kosmonavtiki 8, nos. 15/16 (1998): 66-67.
k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia,"
76. RNII was moved from Narkomtiazhprom (the People's Commissariat of Heavy
Industry)
to Narkomoboronprom (the People's Commissariat for Defense Industry)
in
December 1936, as part of an
industry-wide restructuring plan.
For an account of the
NKVD's attack on the two ministries, see Simonov (n. 47 above), 107-11.
77. Kleimenov, for
example, implicated engineers
V. P. Glushko, S. P. Korolev, Iu. A.
Pobedonostsev, and L. E. Shvarts in his testimony. See Anisimov and Oppokov, 82. By
including these names, he unwittingly expanded the pool of people originally under sus
picion, i.e., those that were named in Kostikov's infamous letter to the party committee
in 1937, which the NKVD used as a guide
to arrest
engineers
at the institute.
78. See the excerpt from Glushko's
testimony
of 5 June 1938 in Rakhmanin (n. 18
above), 136. By that time Korolev had been under suspicion for over a year, due to his
associations with both Tukhachevskii and Eideman. The latter had been chairman of the
Central Council of Osoaviakhim, the organization that had supported GIRD's nascent
efforts
in the early
1930s. About two weeks after Tukachevskii's and Eideman's execu
tions, on 28 June 1937, at a meeting
of the local Moscow Communist Party cell, party
functionaries called Korolev
"politically
unreliable" because he had had "close ties to
enemy of the state Eideman." On the same
day, Kleimenov withdrew his recommenda
tion
supporting Korolev's application
to become a Communist
Party member. See Iurii
Demianko, "Zolotaia zvezda no. 13," in Zagadki zvezdnykh
ostrovov:
kniga shestaia, ed.
F. S. Alymov (Moscow, 1990), 26.
79. The NKVD
strong-armed the creation of this
"expert committee" at the direct
order of the institute's new director, B. M. Slonimer.
Engineers
A. N. Dedov, L. S.
Dushkin, M. P. Kalianova, and A. G. Kostikov served on the committee. For
excerpts
from its final statement, dated 20
July 1938, see Golovanov (n. 1 above), 258-59. See also
B. Viktorov, "Vozvrashchenie imeni," Nauka i zhizn, no. 5 (1988): 78-82.
492

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
was that of destroying
his beloved rocket-plane in 1935an aircraft that in
fact
languished
undamaged
in the institute's main
courtyard. Later, on 15
August 1939, the NKVD sentenced Glushko to eight years imprisonment.80
Undoubtedly the arrests at the institute in 1937-38
profoundly affected
Soviet rocketry development. Neither Korolev nor Glushko, the institute's
two leading engineers, returned to serious work on
rocketry until the
NKVD freed them in July 1944.81 We can never know what they might have
produced in the intervening years had they not been imprisoned. But did
the arrests, as almost all historians have
argued, really change
the
trajectory
of work at the institute Despite the interruptions they caused, the institute
continued token work on
liquid rockets after 1938, not fundamentally
changing the balance of R&D established by the mid-1930s.82 As before, its
main focus remained solid-propellant projectiles, the original primary
mandate of the institute. The new evidence illustrates that the purges had
much less effect on Soviet rocketry than has long been believed. Debates
prior to the arrests had already established technological priorities that the
purges did not radically alter.
Tsypkin
notes: "Of the whole range of rocket weapons developed by the
[institute] by the late 1930s, only powder rockets had been successfully
tested. At that time their development
was
nearly complete, and did not
require significant
further investment in R&D."83 In 1938, on a modest as
signment from the Red Army, engineers began developing ground-launch
ed versions that could fire sixteen solid rockets in a volley from the back of
a truck. During World War II, the Soviets used these multiple-firing launch
systems extensively and effectively in thunderous volleys of firepower.
Russian historians of World War II consider these inexpensive rockets,
affectionately called katiusha ("little Katies"), one of the most effective
Soviet weapons of the war.84 In
retrospect, the
short-range
solid rockets
proved
far more effective and efficient than the German V-2.
80. For Korolev's defense against the charges
leveled
against him, composed
on 15
October 1939, while he was at the Kolyma
labor camp,
see "Zaiavlenie S. P. Koroleva
verkhovnomy prokurory
soiuza ssr," ARAN, f. 1546, op. 1, d. 25,11. 1-4. For Glushko's
final sentencing,
see N. L. Anisimov and V G. Oppokov, "Proisshestvie v NII-3," Voenno
istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 11 (1989): 65-71.
81. On 27
July 1944, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet issued a decree that
released both Korolev and Glushko from confinement, after Lavrenty Beriia, head of the
security police, requested
their release in a letter to Stalin dated 25 April
1944. See GARF,
f. 9401, op. 2, d. 65,11. 385-92.
82. Under a new mandate, the organization actually resumed research on
liquid-oxy
gen rockets in 1939, but funding
constraints and the German invasion of 1941 precluded
any serious work. See GARF, f. 8162, op. 1, d. 240,1. 50; ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 18,11. 16-20.
For the fate of Korolev's
projects following
his arrest, Vetrov (n. 5 above), 117-18.
83. Tsypkin (n. 10 above), 217.
84. For histories of the ground-launched
katiusha multiple-firing systems,
see G. A.
493

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
li. . , , , moderate
High A highnsk rjsk
V *
JULY
2003
VOL. 44
.2
Si
1 ;
I \
' \ i
v
,
\ !
v
j \
I moderate x
! risk N
I
low risk
FIG. 4 Schematic showing the relationship between risk, innovation, and
political
commitment.
Deadlocked Conflicts In the Innovation Process
Any technologically innovative endeavor is risky, owing
to the uncer
tain relationship between investment and return. The level of risk, however,
can change when the level of commitment fluctuates. By level of commit
ment I mean the measure of
symbolic
and substantive
patronage
at the top
decision-making levels, the amounts of
funding
and material resources
made available, and the extent to which leadership eliminates institutional
impediments to facilitate a project.
Risks can also differ between incremental and radical innovation
(fig. 4).
Incremental innovation depends
on
incorporating changes in both design
and manufacture that improve weapons systems but do not significantly
disrupt the established norms of R&D and production. Radical innovation,
in contrast, involves the use of newer scientific and
technological concepts
that require significant testing and as such can have disruptive effects on the
established norms of R&D and production.
The Soviet effort to develop liquid-propellant rockets in the 1930s best
fits the outcome represented by the upper left corner of figure 1low com
Sadovoi, "1 Sentiabria50 let so dnia nachala ispytanii
v sssr mnogozariadnoi raketnoi
ustanovki
zaplovogo ognia (1939 g.)," Iz istorii aviatsii i kosmonavtiki no. 62 (1991): 77
85; P. A. Degtiarev and P. P. Popov, cKatiushi na pole boia (Moscow, 1991). On their role
in World War II, see Holloway, "Innovation in the Defence Sector" (n. 8 above), 387;
David M. Glantz, The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union: A History (London, 1992), 65
69; Andrei A. Kokoshin, Soviet
160-63.
Strategic Thought, 1917-91
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998),
494

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
mitment and an attempt at high innovation leading
to high risk. Factors
such as intelligence from Germany, where the Reichswehr unambiguously
committed to developing liquid-oxygen ballistic missiles, might have con
siderably mitigated the risk. Lacking this information, however, Soviet
technocrats found themselves mired in conflict over proper technological
approaches in an industrial climate that discouraged risk taking. As a result,
the program was immersed in deadlocked conflicts that remained unre
solved at the technical, managerial,
and
political
levels. In such a case, res
olution emerges only if the level of commitment rises, the engineers adopt
less innovative technical options,
or high risk becomes acceptable. Dead
locked conflicts such as the one at RNII have more to do with systemic lim
itations (lack of money, uncertain future prospects, inflexible actors, and
the like) in the innovation process than the inability to solve specific tech
nical problems.
To what extent is this a generalized model Two other case studies of
radical innovation in the 1930s in the Soviet Union provide instructive evi
dence. The first involves those engineers who
left or were fired from RNII
amid the various technical conflicts of the early 1930s. Initially, at least, they
agreed
on one
goal:
to build liquid-oxygen ballistic missiles. Leonid Kor
neev, the engineer who had left RNII in the wake of several clashes with
Kleimenov, wrote to Tukhachevskii repeatedly
to interest him in such rock
ets. Tukhachevskii, probably alarmed by the chaos at RNII, found Korneev's
to set
proposal intriguing enough
up
a new
rocketry
research
organization,
KB-7, in August 1935, this time within the Red Army's Main Artillery
Directorate and therefore within his
purview.85
In the space of a year, how
ever, Tukhachevskii's fortunes had begun
to fall, and the new effort foun
dered. KB-7 lost its main patron,
saw state commitment diminish, and
experienced
a drop in fundingjust
as the military
was
turning its back on
radical innovation. Not surprisingly, engineers within KB-7 began
to fight
bitterly
over how to allocate limited resources. In 1939, at the tail end of the
purges, a special commission investigated the infighting at KB-7; Korneev
was later arrested and imprisoned for "criminal negligence,"
a charge based
on accusations by his coworkers.86 The Soviet military immediately dis
solved the
organization.
Radar development offers a second case of radical innovation in the
1930s. John Erickson called early Soviet research on radar an example of
"scientific choice."87 As he had done for rocketry, Tukhachevskii strongly
supported early radar development. Two parallel teams worked on the
same problem, using different technical approaches. In contrast to the
85. Korneev to Khalepskii, ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 150,11. 1-2.
86. "Akt," ARAN, r. 4, op. 14, d. 181, 1. 37. For the best summary of KB-7's work,
based on
recently declassified material, see Rakhmanin (n. 18 above), 413-19.
87. John Erickson, "Radio-location and the Air Defence Problem: The Design and
Development
of Soviet Radar, 1934-40," Science Studies 2 (1972): 241-68.
495

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE
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rocketry case, however, these two teams worked
independently
supported by rival military constituencies. By 1935 the two sides began
bickering
over limited resources. When the purges hit the radar project two
years later, one side, an institute within the Red Army Signals Command,
instigated
an attack on the other, leading
to the arrest and dismissal of sev
eral senior scientists and engineers. Prompted by intelligence
on
foreign
work, the Soviets made radar research a national priority in June 1943. The
evidence from the 1930s suggests striking similarities with rocketry: the
search for radical innovation, a strong early commitment followed by loss
of interest and funding, and an industrial context that undermined radical
innovation. Again, this set of circumstances led competing factions to
deadlocked conflicts.88
The German experience in the 1930s with rocketry development
serves
as an interesting counterpoint
to the Soviet cases. Lieutenant Colonel (later
General) Karl Emil Becker of the German Army Ordnance Office ensured
both material and high-level support for the burgeoning German rocketry
program in the 1930s. As Michael Neufeld has noted, "without [Becker] it
is scarcely imaginable that the program would have gotten off the ground
in the early 1930s-The man himself was highly competent, and he sur
rounded himself with excellent technical officers."89 Much the same could
be said of Tukachevskii and the Soviet program. Both sides also had highly
competent engineers, who produced major innovations in rocketry in the
early 1930s. Unlike Tukachevskii, however, Becker remained a key advocate
through the 1930s, and despite declining influence within the army man
aged to keep the program on track through various technical debates until
the ballistic missile was close to reality.
The three Soviet cases also suggest
a common
relationship
between ter
ror and radical innovation. In each program, technical conflict both pre
ceded and fueled the terror. Once that conflict reached a critical point, just
as the purges reached their peak, the principal actors in the debate pushed
the argument out of the bounds of technology and into the prevailing "cul
ture of denunciation."90 In each case, scientists and
engineers
invoked ter
and
were
88. Louis Brown, A Radar
History of World War II: Technical and Military Imperatives
(Bristol, 1999), 47-49, 85-89. See also R. Pokrovskii, "Iz istorii otechestvennoi radi
olokatsii," Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal, no. 1 (1976): 73-78; M. M. Lobanov, Razvitie
sovetskoi radiolokatsionnoi tekhniki (Moscow, 1982); P. K. Oshchepkov,
"10 iulya40 let
so dnia nachala ispytanii pervoi sovetskoi radiolokatsionnoi stantsii
istorii aviatsii i kosmonavtiki no. 22 (1974): 87-90.
89. Neufeld (n. 4 above), 275-76.
'Rapid'
(1934 g.)," Iz
90. For a recent treatment of the culture of denunciation in the Stalin Era, see Sheila
Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life
in Extraordinary TimesSoviet Russia in
the 1930s (New York, 1999), 134-35,207-8. She notes that "[Denunciation] was endemic
in Soviet life, but it became epidemic during
the Great
Purges_Colleagues denounced
. . .
colleagues. Workers denounced factory managers; students denounced professors.
. . . These denunciations accumulated in the dossiers of all Soviet citizens holding offi
496

SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
ror as a mechanism for conflict resolution. In
practice, however, terror
served to smother the conflicts, not resolve them; rocketry
and radar re
search simply limped into wartime with vestiges of the technical ambiguity
that had plagued the projects in the 1930s. It finally took intelligence infor
mation about German efforts in both rocketry and radar to alter the Soviet
leadership's view of these radically innovative weapons. Ultimately, Hitler's
engineers succeeded in resolving technical ambiguity for their Soviet com
patriots where Stalin's terror had failed.
Conflict and Terror in the Sciences
Evidence from beyond the narrow confines of industrial innovation can
also illuminate the role of scientists and engineers during the terror. Two
episodes, the case of Lysenko and a series tragic events
surrounding Soviet
astronomy, show striking similarities with the R&D cases, as well as some
differences. It would be impossible to do justice
to the intricacies of the Ly
senko affair here, but fortunately it is not necessary; many Western and
Russian historians have already done so.91 One particular dimension of that
story, however, makes for fruitful comparison with the case of rocketry. Like
rocketry, the Lysenko
case involved a struggle
to dominate a field. In biology,
the struggle
was between the pro-Mendelian agriculturists and the antige
netics supporters of Trofim Lysenko. Many of those who supported genetics
as a discipline
were arrested by the NKVD, among them the geneticist
Nikolai Vavilov, who died in prison in 1943. There is compelling evidence
that the intellectual
dispute
between the two factions served as a catalyst
for
the arrests in 1937; a number of scientists, on both sides of the debate, ap
pealed
to the Communist
Party
to intercede, and "some of Vavilov's associ
ates even wrote false denunciations of their
colleagues."92
Archival evidence
also
suggests
that Vavilov's arrest, during
the second wave of arrests in 1940,
was a direct consequence of the
struggle against Lysenko.93
In Soviet
astronomy, too, bitter
professional infighting among
astrono
cial
position
and many who did not. Sometimes
they were ignored
or dropped, but in
the conditions of 1937-38
they
often
provided
the stimulus for NKVD actions that led
to
imprisonment, Gulag sentences, and even execution."
91. See, for
example,
David
Joravsky,
The
Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass., 1979);
Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall
ofT. D. Lysenko (New York, 1969).
92. Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cam
bridge, 1993), 129. In a more recent work, historian Nikolai Krementsov falls short of
actually connecting the struggles
over
Lysenko's influence with the arrests of geneticists
in 1937 and 1940, although he notes that the purges "clearly contributed to Lysenko's
success"; Stalinist Science (Princeton, N.J., 1997), 61-63, 78-79. See also p. 322 n. 35 in
the same source, where Krementsov notes that the NKVD arrested advocates of both
positions,
not
just those who opposed Lysenko.
93. Viktorov, "Vozvrashchenie imeni" (n. 79 above), 80.
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VOL. 44
mers at the Central Astronomical Observatory
at Pulkovo
undoubtedly
helped stimulate a wave of arrests and executions in 1937-38.94 Ironically,
another major astronomical institution, the Shternberg State Astronomical
Institute, passed through the purges almost unscathed. Russian historian
A. I. Eremeeva concludes that the greater level of homogeneity and unity
among the staff at Shternberg may have contributed to their kinder fate.95
Her work is important because it suggests that the catastrophic purge of
astronomers was not
solely orchestrated at high levels of government, but
rather may have had support from some members of the com
astronomy
munity in the Soviet Union. Much like the rocketeers, Soviet astronomers
acted on their professional and institutional rivalries in ways that had tragic
consequences.
There are some key differences between the cases
involving scientists
and those involving the R&D institutions. The charges leveled at the scien
tists who were arrested, especially
the astronomers, were
frequently
couched in terms of
to
"servility
the West"; this contrasts with the accusa
tions made
against
the
rocketry
and radar
engineers,
who had almost no
contact with the international community. Additionally, it does not appear
that biologists and astronomers were
struggling
over limited material sup
port. Finally, rocketry and radar had clear military applications and thus
stronger links to industry, where the dynamic of the purges had less of a
public
dimension. Nevertheless, there are also some
striking
commonalities
across the disciplines of science and technology. First, all suggest a common
pattern of internal professional conflicts or jealousies serving
as pretexts for
denunciation and then terror. Second, was a
patronage
critical factor in
both the rise and the fall of factions within disciplines. Third, professional
conflicts within disciplines involved competing options
or benefaction of
competing institutions.
Conclusions
Three conclusions can be drawn from the evidence that has come to
light concerning Soviet rocketry in the 1930s. First, the conflict at RNII in
the 1930s undermines the linear narrative in the history of Soviet rocketry
favored by both Western and Russian historians. The new evidence suggests
94. Robert A. McCutcheon, "The 1936-1937
Purge
of Soviet Astronomers," Slavic
Review 50 (1991): 100-117; A. I. Eremeeva, "Zhizn i tvorchestvo Borisa Petrovicha Ger
asimovicha (k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia)," Istoriko-Astronomicheskie Issledovaniia 21
(1989): 253-301. McCutcheon cautions that "poor professional relations ... do not seem
likely
causes of the purge. These factors were the excuse for a purge."
95. A. I. Eremeeva, "Political Repression and Personality: The History of Political Re
pressions against Soviet Astronomers," Journal for the History of Astronomy 26, no. 4
(1995): 297-324. See also the introductory essay in the same issue by Ronald E. Doel and
Robert A. McCutcheon, 279-96.
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SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
that Soviet rocketry did not progress along
a single line of evolution that
the purges abruptly interrupted. Rather, engineers pursuing competing
technologies
came into conflict with each other throughout the decade. In
a national climate of quick militarization, one faction favored low-tech
solutions over the objections of others. These technical disagreements
not
only served as pretexts for purging key engineers at the institute but also
affected the trajectory of Soviet rocketry more profoundly than the purges.
The new evidence adds significantly
to our understanding of the appar
ent Soviet failure to parallel the technical achievements of the German V-2,
especially given their comparable levels of expertise in the early 1930s. Dur
ing the Soviet era, Soviet historians explained this failure by suggesting that
Soviet engineers had embarked on the "correct" path of technological devel
opment by producing short-range solid rockets instead of long-range liquid
ballistic missiles. Given the Soviets' resource constraints, they arguedcon
vincingly, in many casesthat developing the katiusha rockets was the best
course of action, especially in light of their battlefield effectiveness against
the Nazis. This judgment was clearly influenced in part by hindsightand
perhaps by circumstance. During the Soviet era, native historians were in a
bind. On the one hand, they were compelled to trumpet the prewar theoret
ical and practical achievements of Tsiolkovskii, Korolev, and Glushko. On the
other hand, they had to reconcile these genuine
successes with the failure to
develop large, liquid-propellant ballistic missiles, such as the German V-2.
The way out was to characterize development of the katiusha as the most
rational choicethat is, to assert that Stalin made the right decision in the
late 1930s.96 In the
post-Soviet era, with the purges
no
a
longer
taboo sub
ject, Russian (and Western) historians distinctly shifted their arguments.
Freed from the constraints of censorship, historians blamed the Stalinist ter
ror for interrupting the Soviet rocketry program. Had it not been for the ter
ror, they argued, Korolev and his associates might well have matched the
technical achievements of the German V-2.97
In both instances, Russian historians held on to the somewhat Whig
gish notion that the "correct" path of development
was that of the V-2; it
was the standard by which all rocketry development
was to be judged. They
merely substituted one argument (the purges) for another (the optimal
decision to develop solid-fuel rockets) in explaining the Soviet failure to
build a rocket like the V-2. Either way, Stalin plays the key role: according
to the older argument, he acted prudently; after glasnost', it can be seen that
he erred in arresting key engineers. But the new evidence undermines both
lines
of
reasoning.
96. For a representative
work that takes this line of argument,
see V. M. Komarov, "30
let so vremeni priniatiia resheniia o sozdanii v Germanii issledovatel'skogo
tsentra
Peenemiunde (1936g.),"
Iz istorii aviatsii i kosmonavtiki no. 54 (1986): 32-43.
97. From the Russian side, see Golovanov, Vetrov, Romanov; from the Western side,
Harford, Heppenheimer, Zaloga (all n. 5 above).
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Second, the case of rocketry adds to recent scholarship in which social
historians, looking
at newly available evidence from factories, local Com
munist
Party meetings, peasant collectives, and trade unions, have drawn
attention to conflicts within Soviet society that existed before the Great
Purges and were
independent of them. This new work suggests that these
internal tensions within Soviet
governmental, industrial, and Communist
Party institutions fueled the purges.98 My analysis of the case of Soviet
rocketry places scientists and engineers into this framework, challenging
prior assumptions
that
during
the purges there was
a
only one-way rela
tionship between the state and the so-called technostructure. Speaking of
Soviet artists, historian Peter Kenez wrote: "We are attracted to the
image
of
the lone artist struggling against
a repressive system and ultimately falling
victim to the . . .
tyrant. However, even a
cursory examination will show
that the artists were not simply victims but also architects of the system that
destroyed
them. The Soviet
system
succeeded in . . . making
almost every
one into an
accomplice."99
Much the same could be said of the scientists
and engineers working
at RNII, where the divisions between the technos
tructure and the
political
structure were nebulous at best. Recent evidence
from other scientific fieldsparticularly the development of radar, biolog
ical research, and
astronomysuggests very similar patterns. Conse
quently,
our conventional understanding of the Soviet scientist as a victim
of the state's ruthlessness appears far too simplistic. The scientist, it seems,
was too often willingly doing the cruel work of the state.
Third, the case of Soviet rocketry in the 1930s contributes to a broader
understanding
of how radical innovation evolves under
great social, polit
ical, and economic strain. The Soviet
rocketry program's principal
hall
mark was a lack of commitment from high levels of government; in this it
contrasts to its German counterpart. But top-level patronage had both a
positive
and
negative
influence.
Rocketry enjoyed
the benefits of patronage
when Tukhachevskii's influence was on the rise but suffered the worst of the
purges when Tukhachevskii's fortunes suddenly declined. For the two years
from 1932 to 1934, Tukhachevskii provided key leadership to accelerate
R&D work on rocketry. Once he relinquished control over RNII, however,
Soviet
rocketry
lost its
primary sponsor. The lack of commitment, com
bined with an unfavorable industrial climate and limited resources, pro
duced deadlocked conflicts. In the Stalinist era, managers could not deal
with such conflicts in a productive
manner. Instead, terror served as a tool
for conflict resolution. Even as it tragically destroyed the lives of several
engineers
at the institute, terror never
fully
resolved the conflict.
98. See, for example, Getty
and Manning (n. 65 above); Gabor Tamas
Rittersporn,
Stalinist
Simplifications
and Soviet
Complications:
Social Tensions and Political
Conflicts
in
the USSR, 1933-1953 (New York, 1991); Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin's
Russia: 1934-1941 (New Haven, Conn., 1996).
99. Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917-1953
(Cambridge, 1992), 252.
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SIDDIQI I Technology,
Conflict, and Terror in the Soviet Union
Ironically, similar tensions plagued the Soviet missile program from the
1950s onward. People like Korolev and Glushko played key roles in those
disputes, just as they had twenty years before in the 1930s. But in the 1950s,
with a high level of state commitment, an industrial climate that did not
privilege immediate returns, and the absence of terror, the technical intel
ligentsia resolved these conflicts in a way that did not hinder the primary
goals of the program. As a result, in 1957, the Soviets launched a small
metal ball into orbit, opening
the era of space exploration.
501