Into the Cosmos Read online

  If, as Walter A. McDougall has famously suggested, the advent of the

  space age caused a cleavage in natural history comparable to the Devo-

  nian leap that created the first land-dwelling animals 360 million years

  ago, Vysheslavsky’s poem helps us understand why the unenviable but

  perhaps inevitable task of opening that breach for humanity fell to the

  courageous canine scout.93

  Part III

  The Soviet Space Program and the Cultural Front

  

  7

  Cosmic Enlightenment

  Scientific Atheism and the Soviet Conquest of Space

  Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock

  Listen!

  If, stars are lit—

  Then—someone needs it?

  Then—someone wants them to exist?

  Then—someone calls these bits of spit

  pearls?

  “Listen!” by Vladimir Maiakovskii

  If, as Oscar Wilde said, a man is half of what he is and half of what

  he wants to be, wrote the Russian writer Viktor Pelevin, “then the So-

  viet children of the Sixties and Seventies were all half-cosmonauts.”1 Im-

  ages of cosmonauts—on newly erected monuments, the walls of schools,

  pins, postage stamps, or the mosaics that decorated metro stations—en-

  sured that most Soviet citizens living through the space age had “one

  foot in the cosmos,” their everyday realities “a tent camp, in which people

  lived temporarily, until the sun city was built.”2 Most Soviet people lived

  somewhere along the spectrum between their everyday existence and the

  socialist realist “dreamworld” promised by Marxism-Leninism.3 Some-

  times, as Pelevin notes, cosmonauts came alive on television, waving to

  the crowd before launching into the sky. As they stood in their space

  suits at the rocket entrance, one accessory, a piece of cosmonaut equip-

  ment, seemed especially interesting to the young Pelevin—the small,

  159

  160  Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock

  pot-bellied titanium suitcases that the cosmonauts carried with them.

  The question of their contents—star charts, codes, secret weapons?—

  only added to the general mystery and symbolic power that captured the

  imagination of Pelevin and millions of people both within and outside

  the Soviet Union. For Soviet citizens in particular, the achievements of

  the Soviet space program were proof of what had just recently existed in

  the realm of hope and possibility. Cosmonauts were the incarnation of

  utopian promises, surrounded by an aura of potentiality. Set in various

  ideological contexts, they were used to confirm Soviet political, economic,

  and technological supremacy in the Cold War.4

  But the ideological capital of cosmic exploration reached beyond

  the material—a fact that quickly became apparent to Soviet ideologists.

  The potential of man’s “conquest of the cosmos” to enthrall the imagi-

  nation, to fill a spiritual longing, became a subject of investigation and

  discussion. In an extensive web of “Communist education” conducted in

  schools, libraries, Communist youth organizations, and young cosmo-

  naut clubs, Soviet youth were presented with hagiographies of cosmo-

  nauts, whose modeled lives were meant to have a transformative effect on

  the next generation of Soviet citizens. What made cosmonauts such an

  effective model for the average Soviet citizen was that they were socialist

  realist heroes come to life.5 Much like their forefathers in the 1930s, the

  Soviet aviators, cosmonauts made the fantastical world of socialist real-

  ism more real and seemed to herald the arrival of Communism.6 Indeed,

  socialist realism and socialist reality were never closer than in the age of

  cosmic enthusiasm, and the relationship between Soviet cosmonauts and

  Communist ideology was reciprocal. In April 1961, Yuri Gagarin blessed

  Communism by dedicating his historic spaceflight to the Twenty-second

  Party Congress. Three months later, during the congress, Khrushchev

  shocked and enthralled Soviet society when he introduced the Third Par-

  ty Program and announced that “the present generation of Soviet people

  would live under Communism,” which he predicted would be built with-

  in two decades.7

  Khrushchev’s confident assertions were accompanied with alarm

  within the party ranks. Despite more than forty years of Soviet power—

  during which the party-state secularized bureaucracy and education, con-

  ducted several antireligious campaigns, and promoted atheism as part of

  the broader enlightenment mission—many Soviet citizens continued to

  Cosmic Enlightenment  161

  turn to religion.8 As Khrushchev stressed in his congress speech, “sur-

  vivals” of the former worldview, “like a nightmare, hold sway over the

  minds of living creatures, long after the economic conditions which gave

  them birth have vanished.”9 The Marxist schema whereby religion would

  die out when its social and economic roots had been eliminated needed

  revision. It was not enough to develop socialism’s material-technical

  base—the Third Party Program underscored—to build Communism,

  the spiritual world of Soviet society had to be transformed. Among the

  other ideological functions of cosmic exploration, then, atheists mobi-

  lized Soviet space achievements to affirm the correctness of the “sci-

  entific materialist worldview.” The philosophical significance of man’s

  new ability to leave the Earth—the cosmonauts’ literal “storming of the

  heavens”—was intended to deal the final blow to religion, which, against

  Marxist predictions, continued to frame the everyday cosmologies of

  many Soviet citizens.

  Numerous studies have applied the conceptual frameworks of reli-

  gious studies to the analysis of ideological regimes, yet scholars of religion, ideologies, and secularization have generally ignored the role of atheism

  in Marxism-Leninism. While on the surface Marxism-Leninism outlined

  a clearly materialist conception of the world, the relationship in Com-

  munist ideology between the material and the spiritual, the profane and

  the sacred, was far from unambiguous. In rejecting the religious cosmos,

  Soviet ideologists were left to see if it were possible for scientific materialism—which laid bare the constitution of the natural world—to mobilize

  the enthusiasm and belief that had for ages been cultivated and harnessed

  by religions. Indeed, while Communists generally saw Marxism-

  Leninism as a science that repudiated metaphysics, the questions Soviet

  theorists inherited from religion were as much philosophical as they

  were scientific. Could scientific materialism be infused with a spiritual

  component and remain scientific and materialist? Did belief in the Com-

  munist project unequivocally demand religious unbelief (and vice versa)?

  By investigating the use of space conquest and cosmonauts in the

  practical application of atheist education, this chapter examines Soviet at-

  tempts to create and inculcate an atheistic Communist cosmology. It also

  analyzes the obstacles they encountered along the way. While the overlap

  of the Soviet space age with the revival of the campaign against religion


  during the Khrushchev-era “thaw” were no coincidence, the precise na-

  162  Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock

  ture of the relationship between these discrete phenomena—how they

  influenced, reinforced, and undermined each other—has not yet been

  examined. When taken in concert, the proclamation of the open path

  that human space travel opened to the future, and the inherent admission

  that tradition—in the form of “survivals”—still exercised a hold over the

  minds of Soviet people, produced a contradictory picture.

  On the one hand, according to the widely accepted narrative of mo-

  dernity, the march of progress—industrialization, bureaucratization, the

  development of the welfare state, and the achievements of science and

  technology—should have rendered religious beliefs, indeed all beliefs

  that addressed themselves to supernatural forces and relied on faith, both

  intellectually obsolete and practically unnecessary. In the Marxist vision

  of modernity in particular, the transformation of the economic and ma-

  terial base of society, which, in the Soviet case, meant the construction

  of socialism, should have transformed the consciousness of individual

  citizens, leaving no room—and perhaps just as importantly, no need—

  for religious faith. Surely, this logic went, the triumphs of science and

  technology, exemplified by Soviet space conquests, proved the boundless

  potential of humankind. Soviet cosmonauts triumphed over nature not

  by God’s will but by the power of reason and enlightenment.

  On the other hand, the persistent fact of Soviet religiosity—a fact that

  became an ever more apparent part of Soviet reality as the regime began

  to investigate this question on the ground—was an unsightly stain on

  the light of a secular modernity guided by human reason and developing

  according to patterns revealed by Marxist scientific study of society. Faced

  with this contradiction within the Marxist-Leninist ideological blueprint,

  the Soviet elite had to make a choice. Either the narrative had to be made

  to fit social reality, or social reality had to be made to fit the narrative.

  This was a familiar crossroads, one that had shadowed the regime from

  its inception, and would continue to create a tension within Soviet ide-

  ology until the regime’s revolutionary demise. Much like their counter-

  parts elsewhere, then, Soviet political officials, sociologists, and cultural

  workers struggled to understand and manage changing landscapes of

  religious and political beliefs, and to reconcile these with prevailing ideo-

  logical narratives. An examination of their approaches provides a reveal-

  ing comparative perspective on the universal questions addressed by all

  modern societies.

  Cosmic Enlightenment  163

  “The Sky Is Empty!”

  In October 1962—five years after the Soviet Union launched Sput-

  nik, the Earth’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957; a year and a half after Soviet cosmonaut No. 1, Yuri Gagarin, completed the first

  manned spaceflight on April 12, 1961, to be followed shortly after, in

  August, by German Titov, Cosmonaut No. 2; and two months after cos-

  monauts No. 3 and 4, Adrian Nikolaev and Pavel Popovich, completed

  the first group orbit of the Earth—the Soviet popular journal Science and

  Religion published a lengthy editorial taking stock of the “first Cosmic Five-Year Plan.”10 “Five Years of Storming the Heavens,” as the editorial

  was called, marveled at Soviet accomplishments in an area that had until

  recently only existed in the realm of fantasy: human space travel.11 More

  specifically, the editorial readdressed the question that had been haunt-

  ing the imagination of both East and West in the course of these five

  space years: How did it come to be that the Soviet Union managed to do

  what “tsarist Russia could not even dream about”—namely, “the accom-

  plishment of such heroic feats in the fight for progress, the competition

  with more technologically and economically developed countries”?12 Why

  was it that it was Soviet cosmonauts who managed to fulfill the long-

  cherished dream of humankind, when they “ceased to envy the bird” and

  flew, “relying not on the power of [their] muscles, but on the power of

  [their] reason”?13 And finally, what did it mean that the first man who

  “stormed the heavens” was “Gagarin—steelworker, son of a steelworker,

  from a peasant family, Russian, Soviet, Communist, [and] ‘godless’”?14

  In the ideological opposition of two world systems that defined the

  Cold War, Gagarin’s alleged “godlessness,” and the godlessness of cosmo-

  nauts in general, was not insignificant. The editorial claimed that Soviet

  supremacy in space had a direct connection to the system’s “scientific,

  materialist, and therefore . . . atheist worldview”—indeed, that this was

  “the logic of modern history.” Humankind’s path to the cosmos was lined

  with the “fierce resistance of religion,” yet “he chased out the mythical

  god from the boundaries of the earth,” made nature submit to his will,

  and “became a giant, victorious over the elements, directing the laws of

  nature and society.” Finally, when he mastered the Earth, humans began

  their conquest of the heavens, the “holy of holies.” Material objects “cre-

  164  Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock

  ated by the sinful hands of the godless” broke through to the celestial

  spheres, and humankind, “whose insignificance the clergy has reiterated

  for centuries, is accomplishing spaceflights, creating and controlling ar-

  tificial planets, and conquering the cosmos.”15 This teleological narrative

  left little room for interpretation or doubt—it called for believers to aban-

  don their “dark superstitions” and it urged atheists to combat religion,

  which remained an obstacle in the path to the enlightened society of the

  Communist future. With the dawn of the space age, atheists were mo-

  bilized to intensify atheist education, so that “the sun of Reason” would

  shine upon those who lagged behind the march of human progress.16

  The narrative of secularization presented secularism as a force that

  both made possible the scientific and technological feats of the space program and made impossible the continuation of religious beliefs. This was a prominent and, importantly, not exclusively Soviet, response to space

  exploration. It cast the cosmic implications of human space travel as an

  advancement of science and technology that marginalized divine activity

  from everyday life, leaving a cosmos that, in the words of the sociologist

  Peter Berger, “became amenable to the systematic, rational penetration,

  both in thought and activity.”17 Yet as science progressively conquered the

  heavens and collapsed the “sacred canopy,” it also undermined the ex-

  istential foundations of individual life, leaving a “sky empty of angels”

  that became “open to the intervention of the astronomer, and, eventually,

  of the astronaut.”18 Examined within the framework of religious belief,

  space journeys raised questions about man’s place in the cosmos and the

  function of religiosity in modern life. In the Soviet Union
these new is-

  sues gave birth to a new genre within popular scientific literature that

  explored the philosophical implications of human penetration into the

  cosmos in publications with provocative titles like The Conquest of Space

  and Religion, Science and Religion on the Meaning of Life: Answers to Questions, or Space, God, and the Infinity of the Universe.19 Within the context of the space age, interactions between science and religion also shed light

  on the rise and wane of cosmic enthusiasm and perhaps even on the life

  cycle of Soviet utopianism in general.20

  Stories that conformed to the master narrative of cosmic enlight-

  enment—that Soviet space travels destroyed the boundary between the

  terrestrial and celestial and transformed the primitive cosmologies of

  believers—were gathered and widely publicized in press, radio, and tele-

  vision. The formula was reproduced in popular periodicals that attacked

  Cosmic Enlightenment  165

  religious worldviews by giving voice to scientific experts, cosmonauts,

  ordinary citizens, and even former clergy. Indeed, the argument was be-

  lieved to be all the more convincing if it came from the mouth of a Soviet

  everyman, or, even better, an apostate convinced by scientific achieve-

  ments to abandon religious beliefs.

  Even before Gagarin became the first person in space, Science and

  Religion published a letter to the editor from one Ivan Andreevich Dov-

  gal, a worker from Cherkassy region, who argued that the penetration of

  artificial satellites into outer space was a powerful argument against reli-

  gious belief. Dovgal wrote that “the persistent religious beliefs of his co-

  workers truly made him incredulous; he could not understand how they

  could continue to believe in a heaven after death in light of the fact that

  Soviet satellites circling the Earth at great heights have not discovered

  any heaven, that the Soviet rocket, flying around the sun, likewise did

  not discover heaven.”21 Such rhetoric became much more common after

  Gagarin’s flight, when humans who had traveled to space could report on

  what they saw (or, more accurately, did not see) in the skies. An editorial

  in the central state newspaper, Izvestiia, exclaimed: “Yuri Gagarin really has given a terrible headache to believers! He flew right through the heavenly mansions and did not run into anyone: neither the Almighty, nor