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Mike Gruntman
ISBN-10:
1-4196-7085-5
84 pages with 24 photos
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Mike Gruntman
ISBN-10:
1-4196-7085-5
84 pages with 24 photos
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Books on history of rocketry and space
Space: From Firecrackers to Interstellar Flight (webcast)
Mike Gruntman
From Astronautics to Cosmonautics, 2007
Chapter 1. Astronautics Was the First
Chapter 2. Dreams about Space and Communism
Chapter 3. REP-Hirsch Encouragement Award
Chapter 5. Socialism Bites Back - this web site
Chapter 5. Socialism Bites
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Ary J. Sternfeld introduced the new word cosmonautics in a pioneering effort of early 1930s. The word is now an official name for a field of science and engineering in his country, his country by his own choice. One would think that this bright young man, a space visionary and a true believer in socialism, successfully put all his abilities to advancing spaceflight in the Soviet Union and materially contributed to the breakthrough of Sputnik and beyond. It has not happened that way, however. Sternfeld was very much lucky to stay alive.
After settling in Moscow, Ary quickly lost his job in RNII. The Soviet state would never allow him to join any work on spaceflight and rocketry. The authorities would also never permit him to leave or travel outside the Soviet Union even in order to receive honorary degrees and awards. The only exceptions would be short trips to the Communist-controlled Poland in 1956, 1964, 1967, and 1976. Poland and other “fraternal socialist countries” were considered relatively “safe” for travel of trusted Soviet citizens since they could not defect from there to the free world.
When Sternfeld published his comprehensive treatise on cosmonautics in 1937, he optimistically looked in the future. He lived and worked in his chosen country that, in his own words, was “the first to experience a socialist revolution, thus creating unlimited opportunities for social progress” (Shternfel’d 1981, 139). This was also the year when a wave of political purges had reached impeccably loyal parts of the Soviet establishment. The heads of leading Soviet rocketeers began to roll in the late 1937 and in 1938, after the patron saint and protector of the Soviet rocketry Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was arrested and shot during a purge of the communist inner ruling circle (Gruntman 2004). RNII director Ivan T. Kleimenov and deputy director Georgii E. Langemak (the translator of Sternfeld’s manuscript) were shot in January 1938. The future leaders of the Soviet space and rocket programs RNII’s Valentin P. Glushko and Sergei P. Korolev were arrested in 1938 and imprisoned for several years (Gruntman 2004).
Fig. 5.1. Cover of one of the first Soviet technical books on rocketry “Rockets. Their Design and Applications,” 1935, published by RNII’s Georgii E. Langemak and Valentin P. Glushko. Langemak translated Sternfeld’s award-winning manuscript “Initiation à la Cosmonautique” from French into Russian. Glushko was perhaps the only leader in the Soviet rocket and space establishment who supported Sternfeld in later years. Photo courtesy of Aleksandr V. Glushko. Figures and photographs are not shown here. Please see the print version of the book.
Describing his years at RNII, Ary wrote later that “there [at RNII] I worked together with S.P. Korolev, V.P. Glushko, M.K. Tikhonravov, and Yu.A. Pobedonostsev. Especially I became then friends with G.E. Langemak who translated my manuscript ‘Introduction to Cosmonautics’ from French into Russian” (Shternfel’d 1974, 11).
Georgii Langemak was a prominent leader of the Soviet missile program who headed the Leningrad branch of RNII. When it was transferred to Moscow in January 1934, he became Chief Engineer of the enlarged RNII. Together with Valentin Glushko, Langemak published one of the first Soviet technical books on rocketry, “Rockets. Their Design and Applications,” in 1935. For many years Shternfel’d never mentioned the name of Langemak in his publications or hinted at what had happened to his close collaborator. This was the common time-honored Soviet tradition of erasing form memory of and hiding connections to the people who were singled out and persecuted by the leftist state.
German and Soviet Rocketeers
[During World War II, leading German rocketeer] Wernher von Braun was arrested and spent two weeks in a prison in an internal strife among the rival factions of the Nazi Germany. Two other Peenemünde rocketeers, Klaus Riedel and Helmut Gröttrup, were arrested at the same time and later also released. Von Braun’s troubles, however, did not come even close to the sufferings of the Soviet rocketeers.
Many Soviet scientists and engineers, though absolutely loyal to the Soviet State, enthusiastic about the socialist paradise they were building, and devout Communist Party members themselves who had earlier, in the 1920s and early 1930s, cheerfully approved the extermination of millions of the “enemies of state” were now themselves arrested, tortured, murdered, imprisoned, and banished, after token trials or by executive order. The fate of these specialists was not any different from that of many millions of others, annihilated by that time by the enthusiastic socialist state (being aided, abetted, and admired, one should add, by numerous leftists in the West).
Many of those who survived the ordeal carried the fear through the rest of their lives, instilling slavish attitudes to the following generations of their children and grandchildren. Notably, some even preserved the cherished belief in the socialist ideas as the highest achievement of the human race.
Gruntman 2004, 275
Sternfeld took a temporary leave of absence from RNII in August 1937 in order to take part in designing a robot in another institute (Central Research Institute of Machine Building and Metal-Working Engineering). In the end of 1937, he first lost his job in RNII and then, in April 1938, the job in the other institute. He would never find a research-and-development employment, or any technical job, in rocketry or spaceflight.
“While the scientist [Sternfeld] did not share the tragic fate of his other colleagues in the institute [RNII], … he took … [his removal from the rocket work] as a life catastrophe” (Prishchepa 2005, 127). The socialist state could not trust a former foreigner, even a true believer in communism. Never mind that Sternfeld personally sacrificed so much to advance the cause of socialism. Being a Jew would soon make Sternfeld’s situation even worse as the Soviet state-sponsored anti-Semitism rapidly gathered strength (Kostyrchenko 1995, 2005).
Sternfeld knocked at many doors in attempt to interest the USSR Academy of Sciences and industrial institutions in his work in astronautics. All the doors remained closed to him. Sternfeld was not the first or the last Westerner who joined the glorious march to the socialist paradise and who was subsequently cruelly punished by the totalitarian leftist state.
Desperate, on 16 May 1939, Ary Sternfeld wrote a letter to the “Father of the Peoples,” the beloved Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin himself. He summoned all conceivable arguments, including those of a faithful Marxist,
Since 1929 I had been trying to emigrate to the Soviet Union desiring to work for the benefits of the working class …
I dare to ask you to help me to get a possibility to continue my works.
Already for more than 10 years I have been working on the problems of interplanetary communications [travel]. My treatise on jet [propulsion] motion and space travel (Introduction to Cosmonautics, 1937) … received an international award in astronautics (1934, Paris). I hope that my future work in this field will be fruitful.
It is necessary to say that since the death of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky [in 1935] nobody — as far as I know — works on these problems here in the USSR.
There are pitiful practitioners who claim that we know sufficiently about theoretical capabilities of interplanetary travel and that we need to work exclusively on tests in the field of rocket technology.
Such statements are deeply wrong. It seems to me that these comrades completely do not understand the guidance of the classics of Marxism about the role of theory that should shine the light on the road for practice.
One cannot deny the necessity of “purely” theoretical, i.e. perspective, work. There is no doubt that development of such seemingly theoretical problems as interplanetary communications [travel] also accelerates solution of practical problems such as, for example, ultra-high-speed travel on the ground, extra-long-range artillery, etc.
While hundreds of our people work on experimental problems of jet [propulsion] motion, nobody works on the future [problem of] motion in vacuum in the special institute [author note: Sternfeld likely meant RNII] and in other [research] groups.
On the other hand, enormous state resources [funds] are continuously directed to works on certain problems in astronomy, entirely detached from practice … As far as cosmonautics is concerned, which is essentially an “applied” astronomy, nobody works on these problems at all.
It seems to me paradoxical that at the time when the problems of interplanetary communications [travel] are so important for the Soviet public, as witnessed by large demand for articles and other [published] materials in this area, there is no possibility for normal scientific research work for one, who I am, of the few specialists [in this area] in the world.
I want to give all my knowledge and abilities to my new, true Motherland. (Shternfel’d 2002b, 34–35)
Sternfeld’s words pointing that some “pitiful practitioners” and “comrades completely do not understand the guidance of the classics of Marxism” or that “enormous state resources” were being wasted on problems “entirely detached from practice” might have easily triggered persecution of other scientists and specialists, with their heads literally rolling. With his life wrecked by the socialist state and being trapped, Sternfeld perhaps inadvertently denounced others. It is unknown whether this letter had any consequences. In any event, no response or help has come from Comrade Stalin.
Fig. 5.2. Ary Sternfeld in Moscow on 11 January 1941. Photo courtesy of Polytechnic Museum, Moscow. Figures and photographs are not shown here. Please see the print version of the book.
Translator of Initiation à la Cosmonautique on the Stalin’s list
Deputy Director of the Jet Propulsion Scientific Research Institute RNII Georgii E. Langemak translated the manuscript of Sternfeld from French. Langemak and RNII Director Ivan T. Kleimenov were arrested in early November 1937. They were executed (shot) on January 11 and 10, respectively, 1938. In 1991, the Soviet Union posthumously awarded Kleimenov and Langemak the highest nonmilitary state decorations (Hero of Socialist Labor with the Order of Lenin) in recognition of their contributions to development of (solid-propellant) rocket weapons.
The recently (late 1990s) publicized materials from the archives of the President of the USSR (Russia) shed some light on purges in RNII, the institute where Sternfeld worked for two years. These details illustrate how lucky the true Communism believer Sternfeld happened to be, in spite of the deprivations, not to perish in those years in the country of his choice.
The revealed archival documents include the spiski (or, in English, lists) of individuals which were reviewed by the members of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The infallible leaders of the enthusiastic leftist state then “recommended” the sentences for the court trials or other expedited judicial procedures to follow for those on the lists. Almost 45 thousand individuals were in those uncovered lists, mostly dated from 1936–1938. The Category 1 treatment, which meant execution, was approved for most of them.
Fig. 5.3. Georgii E. Langemak, 1898–1938, joined the Gas Dynamic Laboratory (GDL) in Leningrad in 1928. GDL evolved into a major state-sponsored effort in military rocketry. The Laboratory had almost two hundred employees in 1933, when absorbed by the newly formed RNII. Langemak became first the head of the Leningrad branch and later deputy director of RNII. Photo courtesy of Aleksandr V. Glushko. Figures and photographs are not shown here. Please see the print version of the book.
These lists of condemned people are now called Stalin’s spiski (Stalin’s lists) thus obfuscating the fully deserved credit to the socialist ideology and to the Soviet society as a whole. Although describing the fate of only a tiny fraction of millions of human beings annihilated in the Soviet Union, these lists bring personal stories to an otherwise largely impersonal abomination, continually (and conveniently for many) fading away from memories.
On one day, 3 January 1938, four members of the Politburo of the Communist Party, Andrei A. Zhdanov, Vaycheslav M. Molotov, Lazar’ M. Kaganovich, and Kliment E. Voroshilov, reviewed the lists of total 2781 people of whom they unanimously — as it invariably happened in the Marxist-Leninist state — approved the “recommendations” of Category 1, or death, to 2558 individuals. Among those were RNII’s Kleimenov and Langemak, the translator of Sternfeld’s manuscript. (On a personal note, the uncle of the author of this book was on the lists considered on that same day and he was also condemned to Category 1 and murdered.)
Fig. 5.4. Cover of the folder with the signatures of Politburo members approving Category 1 (execution) for the list that included the translator of Sternfeld’s book G. Langemak. Figures and photographs are not shown here. Please see the print version of the book.
The future leading Soviet rocketeer Sergei P. Korolev was also “recommended” to Category 1 on 25 September 1938, with the list signed by Iosif (Joseph) V. Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov. Korolev happened to be in a small group of truly lucky people who somehow — by a quirk of a bureaucratic system — were not promptly executed and eventually survived.
Although Ary Sternfeld belonged to an exceptionally “high-risk” category of Soviet citizens as a former foreigner, he was never arrested, tortured, imprisoned, banished, or murdered. He was definitely lucky to live through those times and survive. Sternfeld’s daughter, Maya, speculated that her father’s “luck” was explained by the fact that he did not work full time in any organization and thus “did not exist” for the authorities [Maya A. Shternfel’d, conversation with the author, 19 May 2006]. Without a job, Sternfeld continued the studies of spaceflight on his own, confined to the home office.
As his daughter later described, ...
from that time [1937] on and till the end of his life during the 43 years he [Sternfeld] remained a lone-scientist who spent sometimes 20 hours per day at his desk at home studying theoretical problems of spaceflight, stubbornly following his path. That he did not belong to any organization and even did not belong to a [obligatory] trade union [as practically everybody did in the USSR] saved him from Stalin’s [concentration] camps. He was not even permitted to join the armed forces [when he volunteered during the war] in spite of his request to “sign up in order to be ready at instant notice to rise to defense of my true beloved Motherland.” (Shternfel’d 2002a, 25)
So, Sternfeld concentrated on popular writings about spaceflight. His articles on astronautics and about history of Russian rocketry appeared in newspapers and popular magazines. Only once, in 1945, he published an article in a leading scientific archival journal, Doklady or Reports of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (Shternfel’d 1945). Academician Leonid S. Leibenson provided the required endorsement for publication in the Academy’s reports. The article focused on computational methods for determining propellant consumption by a rocket ascending through the atmosphere. It suggested a numeric formula for required mass of fuel for a rocket moving away from the Earth surface with constant acceleration in presence of air drag.
Without regular jobs, the Sternfeld family went through hard times. After World War II, Ary’s sister Ada from Poland helped him financially. Ada was married to a well-known Polish economist Michal Kalecki who served from 1946–1954 in the United Nations headquarters and later became a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She was the only member of the Ary’s close family who survived the war. The remaining relatives perished in the final solution prepared for the Jews by national-socialist Germany.
We do not know why exactly Sternfeld was not persecuted in late 1930s and survived. It looked like a miracle for someone with his background. Another such miracle occurred in 1951, when he could have perished in an anti-Semitic campaign launched by the all-powerful leftist state against “rootless cosmopolitans” (Kostyrchenko 1995, 2005).
In Full Swing
... Hundreds of Jewish intellectuals were arrested, notably in Moscow and Leningrad, in the first few months of 1949 ... Thereafter Jews were systematically removed from all positions of authority in the arts and media, in journalism and publishing, and in medicine and many other professions. Arrests became more and more common, striking all sorts of milieus. A group of “engineer saboteurs” in the metallurgy complex in Stalino [present Donetsk, Ukraine], almost all of whom were Jewish, were sentenced to death and executed on 12 August 1952. Paulina Zhemchuzhina, [Politburo member Vyacheslav M.] Molotov’s Jewish wife, who was a top manager in the textile industry, was arrested on 21 January 1949 for “losing documents containing state secrets” and was sent to a [prison] camp for five years. The wife of Stalin’s personal secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev, who was also Jewish, was accused of espionage and shot in July 1952. Both Molotov and Poskrebyshev continued to serve Stalin as though nothing had happened.
Courtoise et al. 1999, 244–245
Anti-Semitism always served (and is still in faithful service of) authorities in Russia (USSR) and, for that matter, in many other parts of enlightened Europe. After World War II, the state-promoted anti-Semitism was steadily growing in the Soviet Union under caring guidance and coordination by Communist Party apparatchiks and by security services. First arrests of the members of the prominent “Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” followed by tortures and executions, came in late 1947 (Courtois et al. 1999, 244). In late 1940s, the Soviet state was laying off many leading managers, scientists, engineers, writers, administrators, doctors, and other professionals because they were Jews. The campaign switched into high-gear on 29 January 1949 with the editorial in Communist Party’s Pravda. The article unmistakably singled out Jews under the euphemism “rootless cosmopolitans” and called to decisively wipe out these “worthless individuals, lacking healthy feeling of love to the Motherland and to the [Soviet] people, and having nothing except ill-will” (Pravda 1949).
This broad persecution of the Jews culminated in 1953 with an infamous cooked-up doctors’ plot by a “terrorist … gang of human-looking animals” and “enemies of the people” to “shorten lives of active leaders of the Soviet Union” (Pravda 1953). The editorial in Pravda explained that the accused Jewish doctors were “bought by the American intelligence” and were agents of “Jewish bourgeois nationalists” and that the arrest of this criminal group “unmasked the true face of slave-owners-cannibals from the U.S.A. and England.” Only Stalin’s death in March 1953 stopped the imminent bloodbath of a modern well-prepared pogrom. Subsequently, the persecution of Soviet Jews would gradually abate into less violent forms, characterizing the last forty years of the Soviet Union.
Fig. 5.5. Ary Sternfeld in his home office in Moscow, 12 December 1959. After loosing his job in RNII in 1937, he was never permitted to join the research and development effort in rocketry and spaceflight. Sternfeld remained confined to his home office, writing about space. Photo courtesy of Polytechnic Museum. Figures and photographs are not shown here. Please see the print version of the book.
The Jews employed in the emerging Soviet ballistic missile and space establishment were not immune to persecution. For example, the first Director of Scientific Research Institute N. 88 (NII-88) Lev R. Gonor was fired in July 1950 and arrested in January 1953 (Kostyrchenko 1995, 2005). (The government degree established NII-88 in Podlipki near Moscow in 1946 as the leading research institution in liquid-propellant ballistic and antiaircraft missiles (Gruntman 2004). Many top Soviet rocket designers, including Sergei P. Korolev and Mikhail K. Yangel’, worked in NII-88. The institute also housed German V-2 rocketeers brought to the Soviet Union in 1946. NII-88 was later known as TsNIIMash and the home of the Manned Spaceflight Control Center.)
At this perilous time a fellow rocketeer denounced a seemingly “harmless” writer of popular articles Ary Sternfeld. Nikolai G. Chernyshev published a short note (Chernyshev 1951) in the newspaper Kul’tura i Zhizn’ (Culture and Life), the official organ of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation of the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party. Chernyshev stated that Sternfeld misled the public that he had been awarded an international “encouragement prize in astronautics.” He then continued,
There has never been an international encouragement prize in astronautics and it does not exist. In reality, the history of this question is the following. A foreign engineer R. Esnault-Pelterie, known for his unsuccessful infringement on the priority of [the work of] Tsiolkovsky and for self-glorification, established in 1927 in France, as charity, jointly with a capitalist A. Hirsch, an encouragement prize for “the best works in astronautics.” This award has been correspondingly called the “award of R. Esnault-Pelterie-Hirsch” and not an international encouragement prize. This award was given not by an international committee, but by the French Astronomical Society.
This was the prize that was given to A. Shternfel’d in 1934 for his treatise “Introduction to Cosmonautics,” filled with admiration of foreign authorities [of spaceflight] and with disdain to achievements of the Russian and Soviet science. In this treatise, contrary to the facts, Shternfel’d claimed the priority in the field of theoretical foundations of interplanetary communications [travel] to French authors, in every possible way extolled imaginary “scientific achievements” of R. Esnault-Pelterie and suppressed [and ignored] research of Kibal’chich, Tsiolkovsky, and other Russian scientists, whose bold creative thought went substantially ahead of foreign researchers ... (Chernyshev 1951)
The veteran rocketeer Doctor of Science Nikolai Chernyshev, 1906–1953, was a prominent specialist in chemistry of rocket propellants. In 1930s, he worked in the Gas Dynamical Laboratory in Leningrad and then in RNII. In late 1940s, he joined the leading military research institute in ballistic missiles, NII-4, in Bolshevo near Moscow. In addition, Chernyshev published popular books on spaceflight (Chernyshev 1953) which made him especially “qualified” to destroy Sternfeld.
Chernyshev also loyally contributed to a major Soviet effort — in full swing since 1946 — to claim priority for Russian and Soviet scientists, engineers, and inventors. In the area of his expertise — rocketry — he wrote, for example, that “our [Russian] ancestors used military rockets in the first half of the 10th century” (Chernyshev 1951, 17). As for spaceflight, he asserted that “realization of all projects in interplanetary travel was absolutely utopian until new ideas from Russia shed new light on this problem” (Chernyshev 1951, 7).
In the middle of the state-guided anti-Semitic campaign, a denunciation by a prominent member of the establishment could have sent a Jew and suspicious former foreigner Sternfeld straight to a concentration camp. He was “expendable” and nobody would have come to his defense. Sternfeld certainly was not indispensable to be spared the calamity as were a number of leading Soviet physicists involved in the nuclear program or aircraft designers such as Sergei A. Lavochkin (of the WWII La family fighter-plane fame) and Mikhail I. Gurevich (of the later Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG fame). Being spared usually meant to be ready to publicly denounce, on request from the authorities, targeted for persecution people. Those selected “lucky” leading Soviet writers, composers, scientists, engineers, managers, and generals (Kostyrchenko 1995, 2005) usually complied when offered a chance to survive. Totalitarian socialist states never tolerate independence or dissent.
Fortunately for Sternfeld, the milder consequences of the Chernyshev article followed.
The publication by Chernyshev was a crashing blow to the reputation of Shternfel’d. His articles could not be published, the publications already in printing houses were destroyed, including an article … on the nature of the Tungus meteorite [Tunguska event of 1908]. Shternfel’d began a stubborn fight against the accusation and wrote letters to the newspapers and to Secretary of TsK VKP(b) [Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)] M.A. Suslov …
Shternfel’d reminded about his [personal] friendly relations with K.E. Tsiolkovsky and that it was he who was the first in 1930 to tell about Tsiolkovsky’s works to the French public. A.A. Shternfel’d especially emphasized that he was the first among Soviet authors who published an article about the history of Russian rockets in 17–18th centuries, and that during many years he specifically argued about the advanced [leading] role of Russian scientists and inventors in the development of artillery. (Morozova 2005, 133)
It was truly ironic that Sternfeld who had done so much for popularizing Tsiolkovsky and his achievements in the West was now viciously attacked for suppressing Tsiolkovsky’s works. Rewriting the history for political purposes was always an inalienable feature of radical brands of socialism.
Ary Sternfeld has again miraculously survived the calamity.
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