Into the Cosmos Page 2
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