Into the Cosmos Read online

first living being in space (Laika the dog), the first probe to impact on

  the surface of the moon ( Luna-2), the first to take pictures of the far side of the moon ( Luna-3), and the first to land and take pictures of the surface of the moon ( Luna-9). For a time at least, the Soviet space program seemed youthful, bursting with energy, and limitless in its capacity to

  dream. The technical achievements were equally matched by a massive

  industry of popular enthusiasm, as the state-sponsored media produced

  hundreds of thousands of books, pamphlets, and posters, sponsored mu-

  seum exhibits, and most important, sent their young hero cosmonauts to

  proselytize for the space program and its chief sponsor, the Communist

  Party of the Soviet Union.

  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, historians have produced

  many works on the Soviet space program, benefiting from a surfeit of

  6  James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi

  information inaccessible during the Soviet period. Few of these works,

  however, situated Soviet efforts to explore space within Soviet society and

  culture; most of the literature has focused on geopolitical concerns (“the

  space race”) or narrowly constructed questions of technological develop-

  ment, and have left unquestioned reductive assumptions about the con-

  tingent connections between national identity, Soviet culture, and space

  exploration.16 In both Russia and the West the topic of Soviet space ex-

  ploration has generally attracted techno buffs or political historians. The

  former display a uniformly positivist fetish for technology, terminology,

  and teleology, while the latter assume that politics alone determined the

  nature of the program. Both avoid culture as a focus of study unless as

  an essentializing category to describe ideology (that is, Marxism).17 Prob-

  ably the most salient characteristic of this canon has been an overreliance

  on secondary literature and the inaccessibility of primary archival source

  material.18

  The aim of this book is to transcend the shortcomings of the anteced-

  ent scholarship on the Soviet space program and to examine the many

  ways in which space exploration contributed to the construction of a dis-

  tinct set of markers of Soviet identity at the national, community, and

  personal levels. The contributions do this by situating the study of the

  Soviet space program as part of an understanding of broader social and

  cultural responses to massive statist initiatives in Soviet history. Their

  goal, however, is not simply to relocate space exploration within the

  broader currents of Soviet history, but more critically, to use deeply en-

  trenched and iconic aspects of space exploration to shed light on critical

  questions about the nature of postwar Soviet society—particularly the

  Khrushchev era—including such aspects as national identity, memory,

  mythmaking, gender, public culture, consumer culture, and the institu-

  tionalization of secrecy.

  Scholarly study of the Khrushchev era has typically focused on two

  broad thematic priorities: the cultural dimensions of the “thaw” (focus-

  ing particularly on the activities of newly hopeful intelligentsia who ben-

  efited from the looser limits on artistic expression) or politics at the high-

  est level (with Cold War milestones such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and

  the Berlin Crisis of 1961 as the stock stopping points).19 The post-Soviet

  archival revolution has allowed historians to explore this gap between art

  and politics and to investigate a wider variety of questions on the social,

  cultural, and economic history of the period. This volume is part of this

  Introduction  7

  newer literature on the Khrushchev era whose aims are to bring fresh

  methodological tools (including archival research) to bear on a period that

  has typically been overshadowed by the scholarly fetishization of Stalin-

  ism. The recent literature on the Khrushchev era has been wide-ranging

  and ambitious, seeing the Khrushchev era less as a response to Stalinist

  excesses than a time with its own complex currents that defy easy gener-

  alization and periodization. Novel work on such topics as de-Stalinization

  campaigns, culture and power during the thaw, social, cultural, and edu-

  cational reforms, the nature of protest and rebellion, atheist campaigns,

  mass communications, and gender relations have answered old questions

  and raised many new ones.20 This volume hopes to add to that scholar-

  ship and answer two broadly defined and interconnected questions: Why

  did space exploration resonate so deeply among the Soviet populace dur-

  ing the Cold War? And what does this deeply embedded current of fasci-

  nation say about Soviet society and culture in the post-Stalin years?

  The contributors, predominantly historians of modern Russia and

  Europe, have mined a vast trove of untouched archival and published

  sources from Russia, accessible only since the archival revolution of the

  1990s, to bring a unique perspective to Soviet history. At the same time,

  they benefit from the substantive body of post-Soviet scholarship on the

  history of the Soviet Union, literature that, based itself on archival re-

  search, has raised new and provocative questions on the nature of state,

  society, and culture of Russia under Communist rule.21 Similarly, the

  provocative questions raised by contemporary scholarship on the history

  of Soviet science and technology, particularly its fresh reformulation of

  the relationship between science and ideology, also inform the work in-

  cluded in this book.22

  The volume is divided into three broad thematic components, each

  represented by a set of chapters. The first introductory part, consisting of

  pieces by Alexei Kojevnikov and James T. Andrews, provides broad cul-

  tural context. At one level both of these contributions work as historical

  overviews, but they also introduce many of the strands of Soviet space

  culture taken up in more detail by others in this volume. Kojevnikov com-

  bines thoughtful personal reflections with a brief and impressionistic

  tour through the entire vista of Soviet space aspirations of the twentieth

  century. The heart of his chapter is a meditation on the generation of the

  1960s (the shestidesiatniki), their hopes, their disappointments, and their nostalgia. Andrews, meanwhile, grounds the volume in the inchoate

  8  James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi

  cultural beginnings of cosmic enthusiasm, going back to the pre- Sputnik

  underpinnings of popular interest and popularization of space notions,

  while also looking forward into post-Stalinist times. He argues that,

  stretching back to the eighteenth-century era of the Romanov tsarist dy-

  nasty, Russians had a fascination with the possibility of air and space

  flight. He believes it was an inherent part of Russians’ more general

  fascination with exploration: on land, air, and in the cosmos. This fascina-

  tion continued across the 1917 revolutionary divide but began to take on a

  nationalist component in the Stalin era of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet even

  during the Khrushchev era of Cold War competition, Andrews believes

  ordinary Russians exhibited a sincere fascination with
space topics in the

  press, on film, and in popular books—a preoccupation helped in part by

  the central symbolic role played by Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, considered by

  many to be the “father” or Ded (grandfather) of space exploration.23 In the end Andrews articulates an overarching theme—namely, that cosmic enthusiasm had been embedded deeply in Russian culture both before and

  after Sputnik’s launching as evidenced by popular journals, magazines,

  plays, movies, and other diverse venues.

  These two chapters set the stage for the heart of this volume, eight

  additional contributions divided into two parts. In the first part Asif A.

  Siddiqi, Slava Gerovitch, Andrew Jenks, and Amy Nelson look at the gaps

  between myth and reality in the Soviet space program and the role of the

  state apparatus in bridging this gap. Here, the focus spans the gamut

  from the personal to the institutional. In the second part of the book,

  Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, Roshanna P. Sylvester, Cathleen S. Lewis,

  and Heather L. Gumbert broadly cover the space program’s engagement

  with popular culture, looking at issues as diverse as religion, gender, con-

  sumerism, and the appropriation of Soviet space culture for Cold War

  imperatives.

  The first four chapters take up a deeper engagement with the state’s

  role in the Soviet space program, particularly its management of the rela-

  tionship between myth and reality, between public and private. The Soviet

  space program differed in one key regard from its American counterpart

  in its fetishization of secrecy. Almost every aspect of the program was

  a closely guarded secret during the Cold War. Using secrecy as a lens,

  Siddiqi deconstructs the process by which state managers tried to create

  an “official” narrative of the space program. By revisiting the debates over

  what was considered secret and what was deemed innocuous, he looks at

  Introduction  9

  the prevailing tensions and chasms between the secret and public nar-

  ratives of the Soviet space program. The basic conundrum for managers

  was how to publicize the program as much as possible while keeping

  it secret as much as possible, a tension that was sustained throughout

  the Soviet era. The resourcefulness of Soviet cosmonauts in the light of

  equipment failures presented a particular challenge to Soviet journal-

  ists because the heroism of men (desirable to advertise) had to be con-

  trasted with the failure of machines (unacceptable to advertise). Siddiqi

  argues that a “public relations commission” of the Soviet space program,

  organized in 1968 to arbitrate and dictate on the “proper” nature of infor-

  mation disseminated to the public, was only partially successful in man-

  aging public opinion despite the draconian limits on open discussion on

  the space program.

  Myth and reality, and the state’s arbitration of the boundaries be-

  tween the two are the subject of Gerovitch’s and Jenks’s chapters, which

  explore the problem of identity and the Soviet space program. Recently,

  a number of scholars have explored the historical connections between

  identity, self-fashioning, and the Soviet state.24 In her recent monograph

  on identity and imposture during the interwar years, Tear off the Masks, Sheila Fitzpatrick has explored the tensions between Soviet citizens’ self-identifications and the external signifiers bestowed from above during

  the interwar years.25 Other scholars, such as Jochen Hellbeck, have inves-

  tigated the ways in which Soviet citizens (particularly aspiring Commu-

  nists) wrote their own biographies and thus thought deeply about their

  own subjectivity.26 Building on this literature, Gerovitch and Jenks look

  at similar issues of identity, myth, and social constructs by analyzing the

  role of the cosmonaut in the era of the Cold War. Gerovitch examines the

  public image of cosmonauts during the Khrushchev era, focusing specifi-

  cally on the struggles they faced in finding an empowered voice within the

  context of highly prescribed technical roles defined for them. Gerovitch

  argues that the popular picture of the cosmonauts as propaganda icons

  masked a serious inner tension between the public image and the profes-

  sional identity of the cosmonauts. Trained as military pilots or engineers,

  the cosmonauts often were not prepared for the political careers awaiting

  them.

  Jenks’s piece on first Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin touches on

  the regime’s mythmaking and contrasts this process to Gagarin’s inner

  struggles within this constructed image of the heroic icon. Although

  10  James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi

  Gagarin may have accepted his high-profile public Soviet persona as

  an honest Soviet hero, his personal life was riddled with ambiguity and

  struggle. Gagarin’s ambivalent persona was a post-Stalinist reflection of

  earlier life stories from the pre-1941 era. In her recent work on Soviet

  diaries, narratives, and life-stories, the Russian historian Natalia Kozlova

  has reminded us that people learned to speak and act “Soviet” on the

  surface, yet these Soviet heroes and heroines (as well as everyday people)

  had life histories that have managed to elude fixed meanings.27 Jenks also

  deconstructs Gagarin’s penchant for telling audiences the “truth-lie,” a

  lie that is justified because it was told in the service of a greater (usually, nationalistic) purpose. Jenks finds that the relationship between political and personal morality was not always a predictable one in a culture

  whose central pillar was cosmonaut hagiography—that is, overlooking

  the weakness and shortcomings of the early cosmonauts. Both pieces by

  Jenks and Gerovitch illustrate the difficulty of these choices (and how

  the state could constrain their choices, as the literary critic and historian

  Alexander Etkind has argued) in the context of the struggle between their

  public and private personas.28

  Amy Nelson in her chapter on celebrities, canines, and the Cold

  War argues that because animals could seemingly tolerate the stresses

  of space, space dogs such as Laika played an important role in the Cold

  War “space race.” Her contribution uses their celebrity and sacrifice to

  explore the interpretive possibilities and methodological challenges of in-

  corporating animals into the history of the human past. Beyond the sci-

  entific significance of the canine cosmonauts, Nelson argues that these

  dogs captured the public imagination in ways that reinforced Cold War

  rivalries, and in the process the dogs’ achievements and feats celebrated

  human technological advances. Furthermore, their achievements also

  raised nagging questions about the ethical treatment of animals and the

  relationship between dogs and humans.

  The chapters in the second part focus on the public culture of the

  Soviet space program. After the successes of Sputnik and Gagarin, the

  party and government closely identified the successes of the space pro-

  gram with the perceived successes of the Soviet state. Officially sanc-

  tioned campaigns tapped into the genuine populist enthusiasm for space

  achievements in service of particular agendas. One of these agendas

  was atheistic
education, a phenomenon explored by Victoria Smolkin-

  Introduction  11

  Rothrock. By exploring the use of space successes and cosmonauts in

  the practical application of atheistic education, she recreates the attempts

  of Soviet ideologists to produce and inculcate a kind of Communist cos-

  mology. As Khrushchev’s campaign against religion overlapped with the

  state’s promotion of cosmic themes, Soviet political officials sought to

  align the two in service of each other. Smolkin-Rothrock finds that the

  results of such campaigns were entirely unexpected and contrary to the

  original intentions of the planners.

  Roshanna P. Sylvester analyzes the state media’s profiling of women

  cosmonauts—in particular, their public image and their functioning as

  role models for young Soviet girls. On June 16, 1963, Valentina Teresh-

  kova, a twenty-six-year-old Soviet “everywoman” blasted into orbit aboard

  Vostok 6, thus becoming the first woman in space. Sylvester’s chapter

  studies this crucially important period in Cold War history to understand

  the impact Tereshkova’s flight had on the imaginative landscape of the

  girls who dreamed of following their heroine into the cosmos. Her re-

  search, based on an exhaustive study of popular articles in family- and

  child-oriented newspapers and periodicals, suggests that Soviet girls

  in middle childhood harbored a genuine enthusiasm for Tereshkova’s

  achievement and were a “captive and engaged audience” for the insistent

  claims of Soviet empowerment of female Soviet citizens. At the same

  time, Sylvester emphasizes that just after Tereshkova’s mission press cov-

  erage already revealed a marked ambivalence about the role of girls and

  women in the Soviet Union, particularly in fields of science and technol-

  ogy. That there was no subsequent state commitment to further female

  cosmonaut missions only confirmed this ambivalence.

  In her contribution on the material culture of the Soviet space pro-

  gram, Cathleen S. Lewis situates the production and consumption of

  collectible ephemera within the broader cultural shifts that took place

  during the Khrushchev thaw. Such historians as Susan Reid have re-

  cently discussed the social transformations in the Khrushchev era with

  regard to artistic and consumer culture.29 Lewis sees the infatuation with