Into the Cosmos Read online

  Into the Cosmos

  Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies

  Jonathan Harris, Editor

  Into the Cosmos

  Space Exploration and Soviet Culture

  Edited by James T. Andrews

  and Asif A. Siddiqi

  University of Pittsburgh Press

  Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

  Copyright © 2011, University of Pittsburgh Press

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Printed on acid-free paper

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Into the cosmos : space exploration and Soviet culture / edited by James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8229-6161-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Astronautics—Soviet Union—History. 2. Astronautics and state—Soviet Union.

  3. Astronautics—Social aspects—Soviet Union. 4. Popular culture—Soviet Union. I.

  Andrews, James T., 1961– II. Siddiqi, Asif A., 1966–

  TL789.8.S65I58 2011

  629.40947—dc23 2011020849

  The research and writing of chapter 6, Amy Nelson’s “Cold War Celebrity and the Courageous Canine Scout: The Life and Times of Soviet Space Dogs,” was supported by a Summer Humanities Stipend and a Jerome Niles Faculty Research Award from Virginia Tech and by the Summer Research Laboratory on Russia and Eastern Europe at the University of Illinois. Portions of this chapter appeared previously in “The Legacy of Laika: Celebrity, Sacrifice, and the Soviet Space Dogs,” in Beastly Natures: Human-Animal Relations at the Crossroads of Cultural and Environmental History, edited by Dorothee Brantz (University of Virginia Press, 2010), 204–24.

  “Our space epic has convincingly revealed to the world the upbringing of a new person—spiritually beautiful, courageous, devoted to

  communist ideals, and having a high sense of internationalism.”

  — Pravda, November 4, 1968, describing

  the profession of the cosmonaut

  Contents

  Acknowledgments ix

  Introduction: Space Exploration in the Soviet Context 1

  James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi

  Part I. The Space Project: Cultural Context and Historical Background

  1. The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos 15

  Alexei Kojevnikov

  2. Getting Ready for Khrushchev’s Sputnik: Russian Popular Culture

  and National Markers at the Dawn of the Space Age 28

  James T. Andrews

  Part II. Myth and Reality in the Soviet Space Program

  3. Cosmic Contradictions: Popular Enthusiasm and Secrecy

  in the Soviet Space Program 47

  Asif A. Siddiqi

  viii  Contents

  4. The Human inside a Propaganda Machine: The Public Image and

  Professional Identity of Soviet Cosmonauts 77

  Slava Gerovitch

  5. The Sincere Deceiver: Yuri Gagarin and the Search

  for a Higher Truth 107

  Andrew Jenks

  6. Cold War Celebrity and the Courageous Canine Scout:

  The Life and Times of Soviet Space Dogs 133

  Amy Nelson

  Part III. The Soviet Space Program and the Cultural Front

  7. Cosmic Enlightenment: Scientific Atheism and

  the Soviet Conquest of Space 159

  Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock

  8. She Orbits over the Sex Barrier: Soviet Girls and

  the Tereshkova Moment 195

  Roshanna P. Sylvester

  9. From the Kitchen into Orbit: The Convergence of Human Spaceflight

  and Khrushchev’s Nascent Consumerism 213

  Cathleen S. Lewis

  10. Cold War Theaters: Cosmonaut Titov at the Berlin Wall 240

  Heather L. Gumbert

  Notes 263

  Contributors 317

  Index 321

  Acknowledgments

  The editors would like to first and foremost thank Peter Kracht, edi-

  torial director of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Peter read the entire

  manuscript and offered insightful organizational and editorial commen-

  tary on the work that was invaluable. Dr. Jonathan Harris, professor of

  Russian politics at the University of Pittsburgh and the series editor of

  the press’s Series in Russian and East European Studies, also read the

  manuscript carefully, offering critical advice at the early stages of revi-

  sion. We thank him for his support of the project and for bringing it to

  the attention of the editorial board.

  This project was first conceived as an edited volume at the American

  Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) convention

  in Washington, D.C., in 2006, when both editors began a conversation,

  as a result of several panels, about the possibility of deepening the litera-

  ture on the cultural history of the space age. We thank the tremendous

  diligence of our contributors and commend their patience with our sev-

  eral rounds of editorial commentary and revisions. We wish to thank two

  anonymous reviewers for the press whose lengthy and supportive critical

  ix

  x  Acknowledgments

  commentary helped us with the final product. Lastly, we thank our re-

  spective families for their patience through the many drafts of this book

  and accepting the time it took as we moved toward final publication.

  Into the Cosmos

  Introduction

  Space Exploration in the Soviet Context

  James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi

  During the Cold War the space program represented an important

  marker of Soviet claims to global superpower status. The achievements

  of Sputnik and Gagarin were synonymous with a new and dynamic Soviet

  state no longer hobbled by the devastations of the Great Patriotic War.

  The Soviet government devoted enormous resources not only to perform

  its space achievements but also to publicize them in domestic and foreign

  arenas. Cosmonauts toured the globe, international space-themed exhibi-

  tions extolled the technological panacea of modern socialism, and books

  about the benefits of Soviet space technology surged out of official pub-

  lishing presses. The rhetoric underlying this extraordinary program of

  public engagement worked on at least two interconnected levels. On the

  one hand, the claims made by official mouthpieces were also assertions

  about the legitimacy, power, and vitality of the Soviet state. These claims

  depended on an understanding that space technology (and science, in

  general) represented a powerful and easily understood measure of the

  future-oriented sensibility of a nation-state. On the other hand, embodied

  in the artifacts of the Soviet space program—the spacecraft, the rock-

  ets, the statues, the posters, the books, the souvenirs, and the text—were

  1

  2  James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi

  particular symbols and stories about the resonance of cosmic travel in

  Soviet culture; as symbols they spoke in new and powerful languages,

  and as stories they cradled the anticipations and hopes of Soviet citizens.

  The in
tersections of these two phenomena—one focused on the state

  and the other centered more on culture—serve as the primary context

  for the works in this volume. Through interrogations of the connections

  between the material and the symbolic elements of the Soviet space

  program—associations operating at the individual, community, and na-

  tional levels—the contributions in this volume offer fresh insight into an

  unexplored element of Soviet history, the triangular relationship between

  science, state, and culture in the postwar era. Many authors have written

  about the Bolshevik state’s love affair with science and technology. A mea-

  sure of technological utopianism had already emerged in tsarist Russia at

  the turn of the century, but after the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917,

  this fascination embodied a millenarian mantra.1 Some of this obsession

  with the power of science and technology to remake society was rooted

  in crude Marxism, but much of it derived from the Bolsheviks’ own vi-

  sion to remake Russia into a modern state, one that would compare and

  compete with the leading capitalist nations in forging a new path to the

  future.

  Here, the tools of capitalism—Ford’s mass production, Taylor’s sci-

  entific management, the Wright brothers’ airplane—were value-neutral

  systems that could be relocated into a socialist context without the ex-

  ploitative costs of capitalism; science and technology could, in this way,

  be delinked from one ideology and connected to another. The Bolsheviks

  never adhered to a singular and sustained vision of the role of science

  and technology in building the new Soviet Union; on the contrary, the

  Communist Party’s approach was neither monolithic nor consistent.

  For example, in the 1920s, during the time of the New Economic Policy

  (NEP), the Bolsheviks reluctantly embraced the old prerevolutionary sci-

  entific elite, conceding that their skills might be of use during a period of

  reconstruction. But by the 1930s, after the Cultural Revolution, Stalinist

  imperatives resulted in a backlash against the old intelligentsia who were

  seen as being divorced from the “real” problems of socialist construction.

  Instead, party directives embraced a more populist stance on science and

  technology: “technology for the masses,” in the words of a popular adage

  of the day.2

  Introduction  3

  The traumas facing the scientific and engineering communities

  during late Stalinism have been well documented. During the Cold War

  pioneering scholars of Soviet science, such as David Joravsky and Loren

  Graham, underscored the important relationship between ideology and

  Soviet science.3 Yet most laypeople typically understood this connection

  within the Soviet context as discrete and unidirectional. For example,

  the “failures” of Soviet science, including the disastrous case of Lysenko

  and the ban on genetics research from 1948 to 1964, represented stark

  examples of the negative influence of ideology on science. Meanwhile,

  the successes of Soviet science were seen as exceptions where Soviet sci-

  entists succeeded despite the draconic and limiting structures imposed

  on them.4 But recent scholarship on Soviet science has completely over-

  turned such views.5 Besides returning agency to the scientific community

  and investing our understanding of the role of scientific and engineer-

  ing practice under Stalin with deeper complexity and nuance, the most

  important corollary of this new literature has been to dislodge the percep-

  tion that the Lysenko affair was emblematic of Soviet science as a whole.6

  If the relationship between science and the Soviet state (and indeed

  the lack of delineation between the two) has been a subject of much fresh

  inquiry, mass engagement with science and technology during Soviet

  times, including popular (and populist) enthusiasm for science, has until

  very recently been a marginalized field. Mass campaigns involving sci-

  ence and technology were not anomalies during the interwar years but

  part and parcel of prevailing Soviet culture. James T. Andrews’s recent

  work on public science has underscored the ways in which public en-

  thusiasm was not simply a result of structured state directives but had

  significant foundation in genuine mass interest in the powers of science

  and technology.7 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Scott W. Palmer, and Asif A.

  Siddiqi have explored specific dimensions of public engagement with

  science and technology—with automobiles, airplanes, and spaceships,

  respectively—deepening our understanding of how Soviet scientific en-

  thusiasm was a peculiar combination of the mundanely practical and the

  grandiosely symbolic.8 This new work has not been monolithic. Where

  Siegelbaum sees automobile users as appropriating automobile technol-

  ogy in ways unanticipated by the state, Palmer views the state as a more

  powerful force in using fascination with aviation to distract the populace

  from the earthly realities of the day. Siddiqi’s work on cosmic enthusi-

  4  James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi

  asm in the 1920s suggests that such popular fascination often stemmed

  out of deeply mystical notions fundamentally at odds with the Bolshevik

  project.9

  Mass enthusiasm for science and technology in Soviet times had

  its own peculiarities, but this can be best understood as part of broader

  (usually) state-sponsored campaigns to encourage large segments of the

  population to invest their work and life with the transformative spirit

  of the Bolshevik project. The most obvious touchstones here include

  Stakhanovism, but there were many others, such as the celebration of new

  secular holidays and festivals, popular campaigns focused on atheism,

  stratospheric and arctic exploration, literacy initiatives, and industry-

  related programs such as the shock worker movement.10 Historians who

  have investigated these phenomena have contended that mass enthusi-

  asm for these causes were not cynically fostered by a monolithic state

  exerting power over a passive populace; rather, it was the result of earnest

  bottom-up zeal that often mutated into forms at odds with the original

  intention of the campaigns.

  Soviet cosmic culture can best be understood as the outcome of

  similar processes, with two overlapping and often conflicting phenom-

  ena, a massive state-directed project, the actual space program, and an

  equally vast popular response, one whose existence was fundamental

  to the sustenance of the former. As a number of scholars have shown,

  popular interest in cosmic themes in Russia long predated any statist

  intervention. From the late nineteenth century on, Russian readers were

  first introduced to cosmic themes, particularly through the imported

  science fiction of such Western icons as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

  This interest exploded after the Bolshevik Revolution (although not nec-

  essary because of it) as the gospel of the “patriarch” of “cosmonautics,”

  Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, was taken up by a younger generation of activ-

  ists. Cosmic fascination in the 1920s took many forms: societies, e
xhibi-

  tions, film, novels, posters, poems, and paintings, for example.11 Inter-

  rupted by the exigencies of industrialization and then the Great Patriotic

  War, Soviet popular enthusiasm for the cosmos again bloomed in the

  postwar era, particularly after Stalin’s death. The launch of the Sputnik

  satellite on October 4, 1957, signaled not only the birth of the space age,

  but also evidence of directed state intervention into the idea of space-

  flight. Sputnik’s trail in the night skies over the Soviet landmass was clear proof that the Soviet state—the party and the government—had

  Introduction  5

  made possible the dreams of generations of space dreamers. As the space

  program became first and foremost identified with state imperatives and

  ideologies, it became a tool for posturing on the international stage of the

  Cold War, a point succinctly reinforced by the headline in Pravda, five days after the launch of Sputnik: “A Great Victory in the Global Competition with Capitalism.”12

  Within the Soviet Union the satellite and its successors invested

  the rising hopes of a new postwar “Sputnik generation” with a power-

  ful icon.13 Having passed through the hopes and disappointments of

  the Khrushchev era, the project of spaceflight was one of the few state

  policies that united all in its utopianism, heroism, and iconography. By

  the time cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin returned to Moscow after his historic

  flight into the cosmos in 1961, more people assembled in Red Square to

  welcome him than had for the parades celebrating victory in the Great

  Patriotic War.14 Sputnik, like Gagarin, represented a powerful symbol for restoring Soviet pride in the aftermath of the economic, social, and political shocks of late Stalinism.15

  Sputnik inaugurated the first triumphant decade of Soviet space

  exploration, as one after another, Soviet space exploits inscribed a new

  glorious cosmic future into the fabric of popular imagination. A row of

  hero cosmonauts circled the Earth in increasingly ambitious adventures

  in their Vostok and Voskhod spaceships. After Gagarin there was the first daylong space mission of German Titov, then the first “twins” in space,

  Andrian Nikolaev and Pavel Popovich, and then the first woman in space,

  Valentina Tereshkova. There were other nonhuman successes too: the