Into the Cosmos Page 11
of judging whether a named author was a fiction or flesh and blood.59
One outcome of the practice of using pseudonyms, as well as the equally
ubiquitous practice of using melodramatic identifiers such as “Chief De-
signer” or “Chief Theoretician” or of the custom of omitting the biog-
raphies of authors, was the emergence of a culture of surrogacy in the
literature on the Soviet space program, one that gave Soviet space-themed
public culture a kind of disembodied voice. Even during the 1960s, it was
apparent to many that the people speaking on behalf of the Soviet space
program were not deeply connected to it. The discourse had a given and
received quality about it, lacking agency; one could say that there was
much said about the Soviet space program but it wasn’t clear who was
saying it.
The one exception to this rule was, of course, the cosmonauts, since
they were the most visible face of the space program. But secrecy pre-
sented a set of problems for the public role of cosmonauts. Like their
American counterparts, cosmonauts represented the most compelling,
appealing, and effective instruments of the space program. Space travel-
ers on both sides of the Iron Curtain had to deal with massive bureau-
cratic structures that sought to manage their public activity.60 Because
of secrecy, however, the cosmonauts’ public stance evolved in markedly
different ways from the astronauts. The inhibitions on cosmonauts were
numerous and onerous: they could not be photographed with their space-
ships, they could not describe them, they could not speak of those cos-
68 Asif A. Siddiqi
monauts who had not flown yet, they could not talk about the military
foundations of the space program, they could not refer to the rockets that
launched them on their glorious voyages, they could not talk about future
plans with any specificity, and so on. Many cosmonauts wrote memoirs,
aided by ghost writers and with censors peering over their shoulders,
but they mirrored the patterns of the general literature on the space pro-
gram—context without content. The handicaps they faced were ably un-
derscored by the occasional press conferences. The following exchange
between journalists and first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin at his first post-
flight press conference exemplifies the flavor of the public discourse:
—When were you informed that you were to be the first candidate?
— I was informed in due time. There was plenty of time for training and preparation for the flight.
—You said yesterday that your friends, pilot-cosmonauts, are ready to complete
new cosmic flights. How many pilot-cosmonauts are there? More than a dozen?
— In accordance with the plan for the conquest of cosmic space, our country is preparing pilot-cosmonauts. I think that there are enough men to accomplish a series of flights into space.
—When will the next spaceflight take place?
— I think that our scientists and cosmonauts will undertake the next flight when it is necessary. 61
Journalist Iaroslav Golovanov, who was at this press conference, noted
in his personal diary that Gagarin seemed “terrified of saying the wrong
thing, all the time looking back at [public spokesperson] academician
Evgenii Konstantinovich Fedorov, who struggled to pretend that he had
some direct relevance to this historic event. The most interesting thing
I learned at that press conference was that [Gagarin] weighed 69.5 kilo-
grams.”62
Cosmonauts in general faced the conundrum of being the most pow-
erful and simultaneously the most powerless representatives of the So-
viet space program. They were instruments of political power, coming to
symbolize in their bodies new Soviet power and prestige, ambassadors of
Soviet socialism to both the Eastern bloc and the Western world. Their
utterances, occasionally militaristic and politically minded, were more
potent than a dozen Pravda editorials. The cosmonauts were, in many
Cosmic Contradictions 69
senses of the word, the elite of the Soviet space program, in a society that
officially disavowed them. The problem of blurred boundaries between
being an elite and being a hero was not a new one—famed Soviet aviators
in the 1930s negotiated these categories skillfully—but they did not deal
with an all-encompassing regime of secrecy. The early aviators carried
out their record-breaking exploits in full view of the world, often landing
to welcome receptions in foreign lands.63 Their machines were not only
visible manifestations of their achievements but also measures of the
power vested in the hands of the aviators. Secrecy divested modern-day
cosmonauts of this power—they after all could not pose in front of their
spaceships nor be seen at the literal spaces where they performed their
heroism, at the launch pad and in their spaceships. They were powerless
because of the draconian limitations imposed on their public discourse,
for they could never speak freely about anything.
At the same time, although the cosmonauts’ public statements, their
only tangible instrument of agency, were constricted by secrecy codes,
their language was overcompensated, almost overripe, with meaning. I
use the word “meaning” here only in the broadest sense, the way that “sig-
nified” is more important than the “signifier,” to use linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure’s terms. The variety of the signified was left to the imagina-
tion of the consumer, the public, opening up immense possibilities for
interpretation. By dint of their vagueness and reach for a grand narrative
(of socialism, technology, human evolution, and so on), the words of cos-
monauts achieved a level of public, political, social, and cultural reso-
nance that the words of astronauts never did. Secrecy gave cosmonauts’
statements a potency of meaning that they might have lacked had they
been mired in the details of their missions. Despite the ruthless secrecy
and censorship, the many cosmonaut biographies of the 1960s and 1970s
communicate an enthusiasm, generalized but irresistible, that undeni-
ably infused the great Soviet cosmic project of the 1960s with a kind of
fervor and energy—and mystique—which a completely open program
would probably have lacked.
The final dimension of the secrecy regime was the creation of a sin-
gle master narrative with a set of fixed stories, highly teleological, with all roads inevitably converging to a single transcendental point. The central
concern was to ensure that alternative interpretations of received knowl-
edge from official sources were eliminated; the public had to believe in a
singular story with no ambiguity about the events, goals, and meaning of
70 Asif A. Siddiqi
the Soviet space program. In describing Soviet censorship in the 1930s,
the historian Jan Plamper has described the “abolition of ambiguity” as
a “secondary censorship mode,” a powerful practice that emerged dur-
ing the early Stalin era when the party “not only saw to it that heretical
cultural products be kept from public view [but] also sought to control the
interpretation of those products
that actually were allowed to circulate in
society.”64 One way of enacting this secondary form of censorship was to
use the selective publication of information to construct a master nar-
rative of Soviet space history, one that encompassed priority (before the
Americans), progress, and purpose.
The master narrative of Soviet space exploits came under many
threats. One of the most rancorous controversies stemmed from an ad-
versarial stance between censors and writers on one side and the space in-
dustry designers on the other. In the early 1980s Mozzhorin’s press group
began to compile essays for a comprehensive encyclopedia on the history
of space exploration. More than three hundred eminent authors con-
tributed to the manuscript, planned for publication in 1982, the twenty-
fifth anniversary of the space age, but Mozzhorin found fault with many
of the works for “popularizing Western achievements” too much. Such a
book might put the master narrative of Soviet achievements in space, of
unchallenged preeminence, in jeopardy.
Surprisingly, many leading Soviet designers, including the powerful
Valentin Glushko, opposed this move, believing that such a stance would
actually cheapen Soviet accomplishments. Mozzhorin continued to stand
steadfast, at one point even delaying the publication because he object-
ed to publishing the names of important Soviet space designers whose
names were ostensibly still secret.65 Despite the best efforts of Glushko
and others, the number and length of essays on the American space pro-
gram were reduced while the same were increased for Soviet efforts in
space. After a long protracted battle between the censors and designers
that even drew in the attention of Politburo members, the book, neutered
and sliced up, was issued in 1985, the last gasp of the Soviet master narra-
tive of cosmic conquest.66 It was only after glasnost and particularly after
the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the secrecy regime fell apart, that
multiple, contradictory, and personalized narratives of the history of the
Soviet space program flooded into the public consciousness, “privatiz-
ing memory,” and creating a market of different accounts that were now
valued and traded.67
Cosmic Contradictions 71
Figure 3.1. This image of first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin shows another cosmonaut (Grigorii Neliubov) airbrushed out of the background. Because he had not actually flown in space and was still in training, his existence was censored out of the official Soviet narrative of the mastery of space.
These three features of the secrecy regime in the Soviet space pro-
gram—eliminating contingency, creating a limited space of visibility,
and maintaining a master narrative—deeply affected not only the con-
tent of Soviet space culture but also its aesthetic qualities, as particularly
manifested in the imagery associated with Soviet space exploits. Because
the cosmonaut could not be shown next to or in his (or her) spacecraft,
Soviet publishers had to be creative in communicating the new and mod-
ern symbiosis of man, technology, and adventure that the Soviet space
program represented. This creative process was recruited in service of
two requirements: to highlight a particular ideological stance; and to not
raise any questions in the reader’s mind that “something” was missing.
72 Asif A. Siddiqi
Cosmonaut photographs from the 1960s typically emphasized some fa-
miliar tropes of the cosmonaut as a family man—a modest, hard-working
and diligent student, one who is agile in training, able to inspire large
crowds, and at home with working people. Most of these images are high-
ly stylized and many of them are staged; few had any overt technical asso-
ciations. Many were embellished with penciled accents as was common
for Soviet publications of the period, sometimes to emphasize particular
points in a specific picture or to airbrush out aesthetically displeasing
features.
Editing or altering images was a common practice, largely to sanitize
them of any object or person that violated secrecy codes, a tradition in-
herited from the Stalinist-era practice of whitewashing important party
and government officials from official pictures.68 Despite the looser cul-
tural restrictions of the Khrushchev’s thaw, the space program retained
this particular Stalinist trait as unflown (and hence, still secret) cosmo-
nauts were “disappeared” from various pictures whose full vistas were
not published until the 1980s or 1990s.69 In some cases, the adjustments
were purely aesthetic: a man might be positioned farther from another
to eliminate clutter, or a speech by an air force general might be edited to
delete mistakes in his diction (figure 3.1).
Soviet artists and model builders were notorious for producing ver-
sions of Soviet spacecraft that often had little or no connection with re-
ality. This practice, ubiquitous in the early 1960s, opened the way for
some outlandish depictions of Soviet spacecraft, including a supposed
Vostok spacecraft shown at air shows or documentary films that bore
little resemblance to any real spaceship but that had quite striking and
even beautiful fins attached to one end.70 The tension between aesthet-
ics and secrecy was most starkly evident in the work of Soviet “cosmic”
painter Andrei Sokolov, probably the most well-known “space” artist of
the period. Sokolov later remembered that because he had no security
clearance, he had to paint from his imagination about the Soviet space ex-
perience. Once, when he painted a rocket in flight, the painting was cen-
sored without explanation. Many years later he discovered that because
his image approximated a real space rocket, it was not allowed for pub-
lic consumption. Sokolov’s experience provides a telling counterpoint to
that of Aleksei Leonov, the cosmonaut turned painter, who was intimately
familiar with secret technology. According to Sokolov, Leonov “deliber-
ately distorted reality [in his paintings] because of the requirements of
Cosmic Contradictions 73
Figure 3.2. To celebrate Aviation Day in July 1961, Soviet authorities approved the display of a Vostok spaceship at an exhibition in Tushino. The object approved for display had little resemblance to the actual spacecraft and included superfluous additions such as an aero-dynamic fin added to the rear. Source: Soviet Space Programs: Organization, Plans, Goals, and International Implications, prepared for the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, U.S. Senate, 87th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, May 1962).
censors, sketching deformed trusses on the launch pad and improbable
satellites.”71 The contrast between Sokolov and Leonov encapsulates how
secrecy mediated the relationship between artist and the art in the world
of secret space: because of secrecy, those who were not privy to secrets
had to be careful about unleashing their imaginations, while those in the
know had to let their imaginations run free so as not to give away those
secrets (figure 3.2).
In addition to editing images, many key events—including, for ex-
ample, meetings of the State C
ommission that oversaw the launches of
the Vostok and Voskhod spaceships with cosmonauts on board—were restaged (or in some cases prestaged) for the cameras. After Gagarin’s
flight, for instance, Korolev was refilmed talking to Gagarin by radio, con-
fidently holding a microphone and reciting the exact words he had said
during the actual launch. Gagarin’s prelaunch speech, supposedly given
at the launch pad right before entering his spacecraft—flowery and hy-
perbolic—was actually recorded much earlier in Moscow.72 Famous Soviet
journalist Anatalii Agranovskii vividly described a scene where a truck
driver at a farm stops to hug and congratulate the mother of cosmonaut
number two, German Titov, after his launch. Official photographers in-
74 Asif A. Siddiqi
sisted on retaking the whole scene with both the truck and the driver’s
clothes washed, and finally denuded the scene of any spontaneity when
they objected to the fact that the truck driver’s vehicle was an American
Studebaker—that is, unacceptable to be seen in print.73 The final image
retained only a ghost of its original intent to capture the joy of a passerby
and the gratitude of a cosmonaut’s mother.
In all of these and many other cases, the object of re-creation was
at one level designed to remove the messiness inherent in everyday life.
Images would reflect the fact that the project of Soviet space exploration
was literally a cosmic adventure far above and beyond the mundanities of
daily existence, one where events unfolded with meaning and delibera-
tion without imperfection and ambiguity, much like the machines and
the men who orbited the Earth. Here, the elimination of spontaneity and
ambiguity was not simply a structural process but also an aesthetic one.
The style of images, film, and text on the Soviet space program created
a singular kind of aestheticism that rendered the Soviet space program
unusually static and devoid of color. All the vast rhetoric, images, films,
posters, and the like on display for the populace at the height of the space
race were designed to inspire. But if their dynamism was immediate, it
was also only surface deep; beneath the text and the images were lives
where life itself seems to have been struck out. Western audiences who