For Whom the Bell Tolls

Last month, on Russia’s School Day, Boris Yeltsin, now 66, announced he would not seek another term as President of Russia. In thus passing the torch to the next generation, Yeltsin’s political career began its slow descent to the year 2000.

Forty years ago, the 26-year-old Boris Yeltsin was working as a construction engineer in Sverdlovsk. His communist party and political careers would not begin for another five years. I mention this simply to provide some historical perspective. For it was forty years ago this month, on October 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union put a beeping, 22-inch, 184-pound sphere – Sputnik – into orbit around the earth. It was the first man-made satellite put into orbit – rushed there by Khrushchev and Korolev to beat the threat of an imminent American launch. One month later, Sputnik II would carry the dog Laika into orbit – the first mammal to live (and die) in space.

Soon after these achievements, the pages of USSR (this magazine’s state-owned predecessor) proclaimed the Sputniks as a symbol of world (and especially Soviet) scientific progress (publishing the drawing at left). “They are a favorable portend for the future,” USSR wrote.

Unfortunately, the effect was quite the opposite. Sputnik’s simple radio signal, heard as the satellite passed overhead, conveyed a terrifying reality in those early days of the Cold War: the ability to put a satellite into orbit meant the ability to create, launch and deliver intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying nuclear weapons (in fact, a prototype of an early Soviet missile had flown 6000 miles across Russia to Kamchatka two months prior to Sputnik). Sputnik ended up accelerating the nuclear competition and fueling the Cold War.

In fact, the Cold War was to reach its apogee almost exactly five years after the launch of Sputnik 1 – 35 years ago this month. On October 22, 1962, the US and Russia nearly came to nuclear blows over Russia’s secret placement of missiles in Cuba. While the superpowers backed away from the precipice, their nuclear arsenals would nonetheless multiply for another 25 years before serious disarmament began.

It is a maxim of politics that, with each decision you make in office, you alienate some constituency, for every political decision has a loser. Thus, the longer a leader is in office, and the more difficult decisions he makes, the greater the chances he will leave office under a cloud. Such was certainly the case with Mikhail Gorbachev, who, while widely admired in the West (which “won” the Cold War thanks to some of his decisions), is largely disliked inside Russia (which “lost”). And, if recent polls are any indication (see Note Book, page 5), Yeltsin may share the same fate, certainly among the large sections of the Russian populace that has lost out under market reforms.

But history will look favorably on both Russian leaders for the positive transitions that proceeded under their rule. Consider just two results of Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s decisions, ironic on this anniversary of Sputnik and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Whereas 40 years ago Americans were awestruck by the understated beep of Sputnik, today Americans and Russians live (and struggle) alongside one another in a Russian-made space station. And, whereas for 25 years both the US and Russia lived in fear of an imagined “missile gap,” today Russian military rockets launch American satellites.

Hardly the sort of world many people – including a 26-year-old engineer from Sverdlovsk – would have imagined possible 40 years ago ...

– Paul Richardson