Important terms and phrases appearing throughout the RED FILES are explained below.

Apollo

The American moon program. Estimate cost 24-30 billion dollars.

Assembly

It provides the greatest power in getting the rocket off the ground as it fights gravity.

Booster

The first stage of a multi-staged rocket powered launching.

Glasnost

Openness or candor. The more honest discussion of the Soviet past; A campaign of truth telling begun by Mikhail Gorbachev. Glasnost allowed archives and secret information to be published.

Gulag

The System of Prison, Labor and Concentration Camps Spread across the Soviet Union. Officially most were "corrective labor colonies." Rooted in the exile in Siberia system of the tsarist period, the GULAG was organized by the Communist government in 1918 and vastly expanded under Stalin. GULAG is a Russian acronym for a department of the secret police, "chief administration of corrective labor camps."

ICBM

Intercontinental ballistic missile. A missile that can fly across continents. Flight times are short, measured in minutes.

KGB

Soviet political police. Abbreviations of Russian for Committee for State Security. Many refer to it as the Cheka, its operatives as Chekisty, these names come from the original Bolshevik organized agency created in December 1917 by V.I.Lenin's revolutionary government under the leadership of Felix E.Dzerzhinsky ("Iron Felix"). Cheka stands for The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. The Soviet government reorganized the Cheka in 1922. Over the years it had many different names. During the worst period of Stalin's bloody regime when its agents murdered millions it was called the NKVD, The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs. In the years of great terror some feared even to whisper the letters NKVD; some referred to it as the Okhranka, The Guards, the name for the tsarist era secret police; others called it "the organs." During WWII the NKVD changed its name briefly to NKGB. At other times it was called or was part of the GPU, OGPU, GUGB, MVD, MGB. A post-Stalin reorganization created the KGB formula in 1954.

Kremlin

Literally it means "fort". Every early Russian City had one. Moscow's Kremlin started as wooden stockade. Traditionally, it is dated from 1147. The Kremlin often refers to top rulers of the Soviet Union or Russia, just as Americans say, "The White House announced today."

Laika

"Barker."The name of mixed Terrier breed female dog sent into space on Sputnik-2.

NKVD

See KGB.

Sharashka

Special GULAG camp where well-fed prisoners worked on scientific and engineering projects. Often called a "golden cage" by inmates.

Korolev worked on aircraft design in TsKB-39. A.I.Solzhenitsyn well described a sharashka in the novel The First Circle.

Sputnik

Originally the Russian word for "fellow traveler". Russians now use it to mean a satellite.