I've been reading "Rockets and People" by Boris Chertok from this collection, and would recommend it. Chertok was a high-level engineer in the Russian Space in

I've been reading "Rockets and People" by Boris Chertok from this collection, and would recommend it. Chertok was a high-level engineer in the Russian Space industry, and its a much different story than the American side of things, with engineers having to work through a constant churn in the leadership caused by the purges, and than having their factories literally packed up and moved to avoid the German invasion, and than the scarcity of the post-WWII years. (on the downside, Chertok really likes pausing the narrative to map out the exact bureaucratic flow-chart of the different agencies and departments involved in rocket development, which is pretty tedious, but I've found I can just skim those sections without losing the ability to understand the rest of the story.)