Into the Cosmos
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