> program's leadership

Sergei Korolev

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev

Great engineer and bureaucrat... pretty rare combo.

There is a solution to this universal problem: strong military supervision and strong aligned incentives of the workers to cooperate (serving the country, avoiding gulag); see american and soviet nuclear bomb projects. In case of soviet space program, this worked too, soviets had a lot of success, only the american program was more successful in the later years. It would be interesting to see some analysis why that was - was it more powerful country economy, or better organizational patterns in the program?

> In case of soviet space program, this worked too, soviets had a lot of success, only the american program was more successful in the later years.

A lot of that had to do with America deliberately holding back, to the point of putting ballast in Team von Braun's rockets, so that the Soviets would be the first to orbit the Earth and thus not be able to argue endlessly about the US violating their airspace with its satellites. And there was internal military rivalry in America's early response to Sputnik, the Navy had been designated as the service to first get into orbit, but they failed quite dramatically, then Team von Braun was given "rush, rush" orders to get something, anything into orbit ASAP.

A whole lot of post-WWII history pertains to bitter fighting between the War Department/Army, the Navy, and the independent Air Force spawned from the Army.

Meanwhile, based on reading some Wikipedia articles, the Soviet space program was riven by grudges going back to the Great Purge. Turns out denouncing your fellow engineers and helping to put them in the GULAG where they suffer greatly does not encourage smooth relations after WWII.