Regional Soviet newspapers in 1980 were reporting an unusually large number of deaths of rocket scientists, and the obituaries were running a bit later than usual.
Donald Graves, who collected facts and data about the Soviet Union with a zeal matched by few others in the United States government, noticed the reports and suspected something was up. Several high-level officials who had an interest in Soviet space matters had also recently died, but the dates and places of the deaths had been obfuscated.
Putting bits of information together, Graves soon realized the scientists and officials had died simultaneously, probably in an accident at the Plesetsk launch site. Graves, widely considered one of the best American Kremlinologists of the era, wrote and circulated a memo about his findings to his State Department superiors and other high-ranking U.S. officials. The official Soviet news media said nothing.
The rest of the world learned nine years later that more than 50 people had been killed when a Vostok rocket exploded during fueling at Plesetsk, the world's largest space facility, on March 18, 1980.
Graves, 79, died of cancer of the salivary gland July 2 at his home in Washington.
"He was an analyst of the pre-computer age and was one of the great minds in the Department of State who thoroughly knew his subject," said James Collins, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation. "His judgment was valued by people who wanted real insight into the Soviet leadership."
It might be hard to imagine in this age of instant information retrieval, satellite-enhanced eavesdropping and easy duplication of documents how difficult it used to be to collect verifiable facts about the Soviet Union.
Graves, and others like him, would pore over hundreds of newspapers published in the Soviet republics and obtained with great difficulty. He treasured a hard-to-obtain directory of the Supreme Soviet, which contained about 50 words of biography and a low-quality photo of each legislator.
Graves, a slight, bespectacled and taciturn man who spoke with painstaking care, owned "the most important shoe boxes in town," a Washington Post magazine cover story reported in 1982. Inside the boxes were 800 index cards containing the career histories of individual Soviet officials, data gathered over years from a multitude of public sources.
