Who Was the Mysterious ‘Chief Designer’?

Sergei Korolev is rightly considered the founder of the Soviet space programme. Not surprisingly, there has been an enormous amount of scholarship devoted to his life and activities. During his lifetime, the Soviet government took extraordinary efforts to ensure that his identity – and those of other prominent space designers – was completely unknown to the public.

Soviet Communist Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev famously noted in 1958 that: “When the time comes photographs and the na...