The Dark Side of the Moon Race : PETER NEVSKY AND THE TRUE STORY OF THE RUSSIAN MOON LANDING, <i> By John Calvin Batchelor (Henry Holt: $23; 498 pp.)</i>

Remember when the race for the moon seemed the pivotal event of our age? When Neil Armstrong’s footfall on that bleak and dusty satellite promised to be the greatest achievement of 20th-Century man, the first step of a great human leap outward from our home planet? At least that’s what Walter Cronkite told us in 1969, and we believed him.

Although we heard predictions that space exploration would eventually become routine, almost no one foresaw that it would come to seem . . . well, trivial . Who could have guessed in those starry-eyed years that the big space news of 1993 would be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name on the side of a rocket, advertising his new movie?

John Calvin Batchelor remembers the glory of those days, and resurrects it in his thrilling new novel, “Peter Nevsky.” Batchelor’s genius is to avoid trying to inflate the American side of the space race to the proportions of legend, a task which defeated both Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. (Remember Mailer’s “Of a Fire on the Moon”? Of course you don’t. And the real heroes of Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” weren’t the bland, cookie-cutter astronauts, but the daredevil flyboys like Chuck Yeager who performed their heroics within earth’s atmosphere.)

Batchelor, whose 1985 novel, “American Falls,” was a meticulous rendering of spying and skul duggery on the edges of the Civil War, has gone further this time: He’s written a historical novel that invents its own history, and used his imagination to fill in the blanks. He tells the story of a Russian moon landing that failed spectacularly just hours after Neil Armstrong planted his boot in the Sea of Tranquility, and he writes with such confidence and narrative gusto that we believe it might have happened just this way.

The obsessive and paranoid secrecy surrounding the Soviet space program frees the author to invent almost anything, from a bloody civil war between the Cosmonaut Corps and the dark forces of State Security, to the lovely detail of Soviet rocketeers at a desert test site employing camels to lower rocket engines into place.

For his narrator/hero Batchelor has created Peter Nevsky, the 22-year-old orphaned son of the Soviets’ greatest World War II air ace. Nevsky has dedicated his young life to becoming as great a flier as his father and his “uncles,” three hard-nosed pilots known as the “Martian Troika” for their ruthless resemblance to the god of war. These three, Oryolin, Strogolshikov, and Zhukovsky, survived the war and Stalin’s camps to become the cold-hearted, hot-tempered heroes of the Soviet space program.

We meet young Nevsky on his way to join the Cosmonaut Corps at Starry Town, the Soviet equivalent of Houston’s Manned Space Flight Center. On the deck of a transport barge, he gazes “with the power of a boy-man’s eyes to see the quarter moon so sickle-shaped and gilt-edged that it was like an icon blazing above the citadel of the Russian empire.”

The action of this action-filled novel begins almost at once. A drunken bargeman wrecks the boat, stranding Nevsky on the banks of Novgorod. Seeking shelter from a band of hooligans in the ancient cathedral of St. Sophia, he encounters a frightening woman, a “most Russian beauty,” Madame Eudaemonia Romodanovsky, whose eyes burn with “decades of anger, lust, betrayal, and viciousness.” After the hooligans set upon this odd pair, they are rescued by the black-jacketed goons of State Security and their black-eyed leader, General Iagoda. (The wordplays on daemon and Iago are not unintentional; Batchelor delights in broad strokes.)

Before releasing young Nevsky, Iagoda instructs him to carry a message of truce to his “uncles,” the three great cosmonauts. By agreeing to be the messenger, Peter knows he has already compromised himself, for in this Russia between the revolutions, any communication with informers and stooges turns you instantly into a stooge or informer yourself.

What Batchelor is after here is not merely an exciting man-to-the-moon saga, although he has delivered that. “Peter Nevsky” aspires to be also an allegorical treatise on the history of the Soviet Union, which the author depicts as a “dictatorship of bosses . . . a pointless, meaningless crush of bosses” masquerading as a utopian society.

A less ambitious novelist might have been satisfied to trace the breathless maneuvers and setbacks leading to the doomed lunar mission. Batchelor overlays the whole with a complicated second story concerning Peter, Iagoda, Madame Romodanovsky, the Martian Troika and the beautiful Katya, a former cosmonaut who turns upon her masters and the corrupt Soviet system just as Peter falls hopelessly in love with her.

Jammed with enough betrayal, intrigue, murder, corruption and mayhem to satisfy a reader of Tolstoy, “Peter Nevsky” booms and trembles and blusters, largely to great effect; but occasionally it falls flat on its face. The biggest problem is Katya, who’s meant to be a mysterious beauty, a nobly tortured dissident. Too often she’s just a whiner, a two-faced intellectual with a mighty big opinion of herself, and this reader kept wondering why on earth Peter finds her so fascinating. Another problem is Madame Romodanovsky, who is constantly invoked as the human embodiment of evil but doesn’t get enough time onstage to fill out the role.

Batchelor shows his greatest strength with his male characters. When he assembles the cosmonauts in Starry Town for a briefing, you can smell the damp sweaters and cigarette smoke, you can hear the “uncles” swaggering and posturing, and you feel grateful for the sense that you have been transported to somewhere real and yet fantastic, somewhere you’d never be able to go on your own.

There are wonderful set-pieces throughout this long, muscular novel: a confrontation between the Martian Troika and the puffed-up official types from Moscow; a daring and brutal assault on a Communist Party headquarters to free a kidnaped scientist; a food riot in a Kazakhstan town; the thunderous first test of the “Tsar Cannon,” the giant moon-bound rocket, and a tense, chilly weekend when a Siberian radio outpost is set upon by bandits. Oddly, the least satisfying sequence is the climax, a last-gasp frontal assault on the moon--which everyone involved knows is strictly a one-way trip. This adventure is told secondhand, years after the fact, because this very clever author has boxed himself in: He can’t have his narrator crashing into the moon and then surviving to tell us the tale.

I can’t think of many novelists who would leap so far from their own turf to take such a chance as this, and I can’t think of anyone who could have brought it off as well. As told by John Calvin Batchelor, the Russian side of the race for the moon seems anything but trivial. It seems critical to all our histories. To witness the history of the space race through the eyes of a Russian cosmonaut is exhilarating, a terrific reversal of our previous experience, rather like seeing the earth for the first time from the moon.