Into the Cosmos Read online

  saw these pictures saw them as ham-fisted ideologically colored propa-

  ganda. But looking deeper, the pictures were much more complex aes-

  theticizations of a fundamental conflict between secrecy and publicity,

  between fixity and ambivalence. Eliminating uncertainty was central to

  creating a master narrative of Soviet space history, because that story had

  to be without defects. These defects were not simply structural, however;

  they were also aesthetic in nature. Because of this requirement, the ar-

  chitects of the official world of Soviet space created a world of limited

  visibility, wherein aesthetics and editing were conjoined in unbreakable

  relationship, one mediated by secrecy.

  In the Soviet space program, especially during the 1960s, there was

  a chasm between what was actually happening and what was being told

  about it. There were many reasons for this gap between rhetoric and real-

  ity—all governments after all seek to control information about activities

  that are closely identified with the state—but in the Soviet case the cen-

  tral explanatory factor for the chasm was secrecy. The regime of secrecy

  Cosmic Contradictions  75

  in the Soviet space program created a fundamental conundrum between

  the drive to publicize the project as much as possible and the equally firm

  insistence that everything must be kept secret. This tension was never

  fully resolved and insinuated itself into all public discussions of the space

  program for a period of almost thirty years, from the launch of Sputnik

  in 1957 to the beginnings of glasnost in the late 1980s. Secrecy played

  itself out through the elimination of contingency, through the limiting of

  individuals who were allowed to speak, and through the creation of mas-

  ter narratives. Each had its own dynamic, a contested space where actors

  sought to define their places in the public image of the space program.

  How was it that secrecy in the Soviet space program was at its peak

  during the Khrushchev thaw, a period identified with the relative loosen-

  ing of controls over free artistic expression? One explanation is struc-

  tural: besides being a period of cultural freedoms, it was a also a time of

  heightened tensions between the superpowers, manifested in a massive

  and expensive race to build strategic missiles. In the Soviet Union the

  same organizations that designed and built these weapons also designed,

  built, and launched the Sputnik s and Vostok s that launched the Soviet cosmic project. Given its proximity to weapons making, the space program

  had to be shrouded in total secrecy.

  There is another way to see this apparent contradiction. The height-

  ened secrecy surrounding the Soviet space program peaked along with

  the most successful period in the Soviet space program. This was also the

  first burst of public discourse on the Soviet space program, an explosion

  that was reflected in the euphoric and frequently hyperbolic claims about

  the program and the equally euphoric and hyperbolic response of the

  populace, measured in the thousands of supportive letters sent to news-

  papers, magazines, and the Academy of Sciences by Soviet people from

  all walks of life. For a brief period, before disillusionment set in during

  the early 1970s, the official word and the popular response mirrored and

  fed each other. The official word—what was being told about the space

  program—was at a fundamental level about “what ought to be happen-

  ing.” Here we are reminded of historian Sheila Fitzpatrick’s trenchant

  observation about socialist realism, that writers and artists were “urged

  to . . . [see] life as it was becoming rather than life as it was. . . . Ordinary citizens developed the ability to see things as they were becoming and

  ought to be, rather than as they were.”74 Soviet newspapers, magazines, and exhibitions were less a site of “performance,” as such scholars as Jef-

  76  Asif A. Siddiqi

  frey Brooks might say, but rather the principal vehicle to project the raised expectations of the thaw generation.

  To see the official press narratives on the Soviet space program, fil-

  tered through the censorship apparatus, as simply a mode for social con-

  trol of opinions is to miss the point. As the historian Thomas C. Wolfe has

  noted, the Soviet press “participated in the cultivation of a complex kind

  of subjectivity and self-concept that is not seen by the scholarly model of

  an oppressive state tormenting the lone individual with a press devoid of

  real content.”75 Here, the condition of what “ought to be” (public) was as

  important as “what was” (secret); they existed simultaneously and were

  essential to each other. For Soviet citizens during the thaw, especially

  young Soviet men and women, the notion that there was an ineffable

  and secret world behind the rhetoric provided a charge to everything said

  about the Soviet space program. It is no coincidence that that charge of

  cosmic enthusiasm was at its height during a period of high success in

  space, a time of raised expectations of the thaw, and a regime of draconian secrecy. Triumphs in space and hope for a better society were given

  an extra boost by secrecy because it lifted the ceiling on people’s aspira-

  tions and expectations of the future. Without deep knowledge of the in-

  ner workings of the Soviet space program, people believed that anything

  was possible in the near future. For a brief golden period this cosmic

  enthusiasm helped merge the visible with the invisible, the private with

  the public, and secrecy with success.

  4

  The Human inside a Propaganda Machine

  The Public Image and Professional Identity of Soviet Cosmonauts

  Slava Gerovitch

  On April 11, 1961, as Nikita Khrushchev was resting in his vacation

  residence at the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda, he received a telephone call.

  The head of the Military-Industrial Commission, Dmitrii Ustinov, had

  called to report on the impending launch of the first manned spacecraft

  with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the very next day. Just a few days ear-

  lier, on April 3, Khrushchev had chaired a meeting of the Presidium of

  the Party Central Committee, which approved the launch but did not set

  a specific date. Now the date was set, and Khrushchev began to think

  ahead about the postflight publicity that this event deserved. He flatly

  turned down Ustinov’s suggestion to bring Gagarin after the completion

  of his mission to Pitsunda. Khrushchev reasoned that this would look

  like a private event, and he wanted a spectacular public ceremony. He

  proposed instead that he would fly back to Moscow, greet Gagarin at Vnu-

  kovo airport with “as much magnificence as possible: radio, television,

  and brief speeches,” and then bring Gagarin to the Kremlin for a grand

  reception. Khrushchev also proposed organizing a welcoming mass dem-

  onstration on Red Square by assigning a specific quota of participants to

  77

  78  Slava Gerovitch

  various Moscow factories and institutions. Initially Khrushchev thought

  that the Red Square demonstration might pass without speeches, but an

  official joint resolution of the party and the government
issued the next

  day specified that speeches must be given.1

  Organizing “spontaneous” collective expressions of public enthusi-

  asm was a routine Soviet practice. When foreign dignitaries arrived in

  Moscow, people lined the streets, greeting them with flowers and waving

  flags. To ensure that an adequate number of enthusiastic citizens would

  show up, the authorities assigned fixed segments of every street along the

  route to local industrial enterprises and institutions, which were respon-

  sible for hoarding their employees and “covering” a specific section be-

  tween two designated lampposts. Employees, for their part, often viewed

  a daytime walk to their familiar lampposts as a welcome diversion from

  routine work duties.2 But the reception of the first cosmonauts turned

  out to be quite different. Instead of trying to induce public sentiment,

  the authorities faced the problem of containing the mass outpouring of

  emotions.

  On April 14, as the plane carrying Gagarin flew over Moscow, the

  cosmonaut saw thousands of people flooding the streets and squares of

  the capital. As soon as the plane touched down, a military brass band

  began to play the “Aviation March”: “Ever higher, and higher, and higher

  we direct the flight of our birds.” The song had been very popular in the

  1930s, as part of the Stalin-era “aviation culture.”3 The public ceremony of

  Gagarin’s welcome evoked the mass celebrations of Soviet aviators’ feats

  in the 1930s. The new Soviet hero—the cosmonaut—took the baton from

  Stalin-era aviation idols and carried it ever higher.

  Red Square could not contain all who came to celebrate. The govern-

  ment had planned a two-hundred-thousand-strong demonstration and

  distributed the requisite number of passes to the square. Yet thousands

  of people without passes crowded the neighboring streets.4 After the

  demonstration Khrushchev hosted a lavish reception at the Kremlin for

  fifteen hundred people, including the entire foreign press and diplomatic

  corps. At the reception Gagarin thanked the party, the government, and

  the people. He toasted to the Soviet people, Lenin’s party, and Khrush-

  chev’s health. The text of the toast had been approved in advance by the

  Presidium of the Party Central Committee.5

  After coming home from the Kremlin ceremony, Gagarin looked in

  The Human inside a Propaganda Machine  79

  the mirror and saw a different person. A young lieutenant whose name

  had been known only to a narrow group of cosmonaut trainers and space

  engineers instantaneously turned into a recipient of the highest Soviet

  honor—the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union—and a world ce-

  lebrity. Barely hiding his embarrassment, Gagarin told his wife: “You

  know, Valyusha, I did not even imagine such a welcome. I thought I’d fly

  and then come back. But I did not anticipate this.”6 He did not fully real-

  ize the extent of the transformation yet. From that moment on, Gagarin

  became a symbol, and despite his hopes and efforts to the contrary, his

  whole life was now subordinated to a single goal: to fulfill this symbolic

  function well.

  As the Soviet government kept the identity of the true leaders of the

  space program secret, a handful of flown cosmonauts had to stand—liter-

  ally on top of Lenin’s mausoleum next to Nikita Khrushchev—for the en-

  tire space program. State-sponsored propaganda of Soviet space achieve-

  ments turned such staged events as mausoleum appearances into iconic

  images of the space era, widely disseminated through television, news-

  papers, posters, and postcards. Throughout Russian history the persona

  of the explorer had conveyed a variety of ideological messages—from

  imperial power to reformist drive to socialist transformation to Commu-

  nist future.7 The cosmonaut myth played a major role in Khrushchev’s at-

  tempts to de-Stalinize Soviet society—to break up with the Stalinist past

  and to reconnect with the original revolutionary aspirations for a Com-

  munist utopia.8 In 1961, soon after Gagarin’s flight, Khrushchev ordered

  to remove Stalin’s remains from Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square and

  to change the name of the city of Stalingrad, the site of a major battle that

  turned the tide of World War II and a potent symbol of the Soviet victory

  over Nazism. As statues of Stalin were being dismantled, new monu-

  ments of the space age were erected, supplanting the collective memory

  of Stalinist terror with futurist visions of space conquests.9

  The Soviet Union’s wide use of its technological achievements in

  space exploration for propaganda purposes is well documented in the po-

  litical and cultural histories of the period. Groomed by the Soviet political

  leadership to serve as ideological icons of Communism, the cosmonauts

  presented a public face of the Soviet regime. The cosmonauts toured the

  entire world, reinforcing political ties with the socialist bloc, propagating

  Communism in the Third World, and showcasing Soviet achievements

  80  Slava Gerovitch

  in the West. Inside the country cosmonauts served as a symbol of the

  New Soviet Man—a true believer in Communist values and a conscien-

  tious builder of the bright future. The cosmonauts played an important

  role in campaigns for atheism and scientific education. They also symbol-

  ized the superiority of Soviet rocketry, whose “display value” underscored

  the might of the Soviet Union as a nuclear superpower.10

  Like any myth, which is to be believed rather than critically exam-

  ined, this popular picture of the cosmonauts was full of internal contra-

  dictions. The cosmonauts were portrayed as both ordinary people and

  exceptional heroes. All the first cosmonauts had military ranks, but their

  missions were presented as entirely peaceful. Their flights were praised

  as daring feats, while official reports of perfectly functioning onboard au-

  tomatics did not seem to leave much room for human action. Soviet space

  technology was hailed as infallible, thus seemingly eliminating any ele-

  ment of danger from spaceflight. The role of a public hero whose mission

  did not look very risky was uncomfortable for the cosmonauts, who knew

  full well the real hazards of their flights but could not talk about them.

  Most important, the cosmonauts found it increasingly difficult to

  reconcile their professional self with the ideal public image assigned to

  them. Trained as military pilots or engineers, the cosmonauts often were

  not prepared for the public roles assigned to them. They usually preferred

  training for new spaceflights rather than going on exhausting political

  speech circuits. Yet their public persona had little to do with their profes-

  sional skills. The cosmonaut myth was not about their actions in orbit

  or the technical aspects of spaceflight, but about the Soviet state. As the

  historian Cathleen Lewis has noted: “Spaceflight was merely an attention

  grabbing method with which they could gain worldwide notice.”11 This

  chapter examines the tension between the public image and professional

  identity of Soviet cosmonauts in t
he 1960s, drawing on recent literature

  on identity construction and imposture in Soviet culture.12 I focus on the

  interplay between Soviet political culture and the professional culture of

  Soviet cosmonautics. Instead of being a perfect display model for Soviet

  society, the cosmonaut myth reflected genuine contradictions and ten-

  sions of Soviet politics and culture. The question of how to fit the cosmo-

  naut into an automated spacecraft sparked an internal debate over the

  cosmonaut’s professional role.13 A similar controversy was generated by

  the attempts to fit the cosmonaut into the Soviet propaganda machine.14

  The Human inside a Propaganda Machine  81

  The Making of a Living Symbol

  For many people around the world the cosmonauts—young, ener-

  getic, good-looking masters of cutting-edge technology—became a liv-

  ing embodiment of the bright, promising future. The party leadership,

  however, wanted to make the cosmonauts into a very specific symbol—an

  emblem of the Communist dream come true. Just a few months after

  Gagarin’s historic spaceflight, the Twenty-second Congress adopted a

  new Communist Party program, which set the goal of building the foun-

  dations of Communism in the Soviet Union by 1980. This all-out drive

  toward Communism had two crucial components: the construction of

  a material and technical basis of Communism, and the education of a

  new Soviet man who would “harmoniously combine spiritual wealth,

  moral purity, and a perfect physique.”15 Who better than the cosmonauts

  could embody this new ideological construct? The Soviet media quickly

  generated a propaganda cliché: “The Soviet cosmonaut is not merely a

  conqueror of outer space, not merely a hero of science and technology,

  but first and foremost he is a real, living, flesh-and-blood new man, who demonstrates in action all the invaluable qualities of the Soviet character,

  which Lenin’s Party has been cultivating for decades.”16 In August 1962,

  Khrushchev publicly proclaimed that “hero-cosmonauts are people who

  even now already embody the wonderful traits of the member of the com-

  munist society—high intellectual culture, moral purity, and perfect phy-

  sique. Their deeds are driven by the love for Motherland, sense of public