Into the Cosmos Page 25
Archangel Gabriel, nor the angels of heaven. It seems, then, that the sky
is empty!”22
Testimonies by space travelers about the contents of the cosmos on
both sides of the political divide inevitably carried ideological weight,
and were a crucial, if peculiar, component of Cold War politics. Soviet
Communists capitalized on Soviet space firsts to promote the truth of
scientific materialism, arguing that Soviet atheism removed the hurdles
to space technology that still constrained the capitalist world with its re-
ligious reverence. Such statements were intended to provoke and indeed
did get responses from both the religious and the secular communities
in the West. American astronauts, politicians, and even NASA officials
countered Soviet attempts to marry space exploration with religious un-
belief by describing American space missions using religious rhetoric.
Furthermore, they famously emphasized the religious worldviews of
American astronauts in public press conferences and publications, and
explicitly cast their belief in a higher power as compatible with scien-
tific and technological progress. As the spiritual debate between the two
world systems escalated, leaders on both sides weighed in on the issue
166 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
of space exploration and human cosmology. The Soviet Union had asked
Gagarin and Titov to keep an eye out for heaven, Khrushchev told the
American press, and the cosmonauts reported that “there was nothing
there.”23 President Kennedy, meanwhile, chose the Presidential Prayer
Breakfast to tell those gathered that religion was “the basis of the issue
that separates us from those that make themselves our adversary.”24 Their
differences on the matter were cast as central indicators of their opposi-
tion in worldview and way of life.25
Pronouncements attributed to Gagarin about the cosmos being de-
void of God and angels took on a life of their own, and the claim that
Gagarin made these statements came to be accepted as fact.26 Meanwhile,
German Titov’s actual statement, at the Seattle World’s Fair on May 6,
1962, that during his spaceflight he “look[ed] around very attentively”
but did not detect any deities caused a minor sensation in the American
and foreign press. Accompanied by his announcement that he did not be-
lieve in God, but “in man, his strength, his possibilities, and his reason,”
Titov’s words made him into the most public atheist cosmonaut.27
Titov seemed to accept, perhaps even to cultivate, this role. Shortly
after he accomplished the second Soviet space journey, a short article was
published in Science and Religion, titled simply, “Did I Meet God?”28 Authored by the cosmonaut himself, the article provided a direct answer to
a question that he was asked often, wrote Titov. The universe opened up
to man, Titov pointed out, not to “a ghostly inhabitant of the heavens,”
and he himself hoped at least to make it to the moon. During his flight,
he told readers, he heard a radio program in Japan that was discussing
“god, saints, and other sly things.” He wanted to send them a greeting,
but then thought, “What’s the point? What if they think that it’s true, that
God does exist?” Regardless, Titov continued, “the prayers of believers
will never reach God, if only because there is no air in that place where
he is supposed to exist. So whether you pray or you don’t, God will not
hear you. I never met anyone in space, and of course, it is impossible that
I could have.”29
After successful Soviet spaceflights, letters about the effect of space
achievements on religious worldviews poured into newspapers, journals,
and the mailboxes of cosmonauts themselves.30 The Science and Religion
editorial cited letters from former believers—often elderly women but
sometimes “sectarians” and even priests—who described how their be-
liefs were called into doubt by scientific evidence received in enlighten-
Cosmic Enlightenment 167
ment lectures and, in particular, by what they learned about Soviet space
travel. One letter, from E. Danilova, a seventy-three year-old woman from
Kuibyshev province, fit the conversion narrative so perfectly that it was
not only printed in Izvestiia, but then cited and reproduced in numerous later publications, lectures, and even party meetings.31 Written in a colloquial even folksy tone, Danilova’s letter described her thoughts on the
day of Gagarin’s flight:
On the 12th of April, in the morning, I was sitting on a little stool and heating the oven. Suddenly I hear the call sign on the radio. My heart stopped: could
something have happened? . . .
And suddenly I hear: Man is in space! My God! I stopped heating up the oven,
sat next to the radio receiver, afraid to step away even for a minute. And how
much I reconsidered over the course of these minutes . . .
How can this be?—Man wants to be higher than God! But we were always told
that God is in the heavens, so how can a man fly there and not bump into Elijah the Prophet or one of God’s angels? How can it be that God, if he is all-powerful, allow such a breach of his authority? . . . What if God punishes him
for his insolence? But on the radio they say he has landed! Thank God—he’s
alive and well! I couldn’t hold myself back and crossed myself.
Now I am convinced that God is Science, is Man.
Yuri Gagarin overcame all belief in heavenly powers that I had in my soul. He
himself inhabits the skies, and there is no one in the sky more powerful than
him. Glory to you, Soviet man, conqueror of the skies!32
Nikolai Fedorovich Rusanov, a former priest who after Gagarin’s
flight renounced religion and became an active atheist agitator, described
his own path toward faith in science as a journey of liberation. In a 1962
letter to the editor of the party journal Kommunist, Rusanov cast himself as a “‘prodigal son’ who has returned, after his delusions, to the unified
Soviet family.”33 Traveling around Russia as a lecturer, Rusanov was one of
many former priests and seminarians who contributed to atheist educa-
tion by publicly proclaiming their break with religion. Rusanov described
himself in the twenty years of his previous (religious) life as having been
“removed from the world, bringing no benefit to myself, to society, or the
government.” It is only after he opened his eyes to the disgraceful, scan-
dalous lives of the clergy and the “glaring” contradictions between the
168 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
Bible and science that he gradually lost his belief. “Is it even possible,” Ru-
sanov asks, “in this century of the atom, of artificial satellites, the century of the conquest of the cosmos, of flights to the stars, to believe in [the idea]
that somewhere there is a God, angels, devils, an ‘afterlife’?”34 In light of
these scientific discoveries, Rusanov writes, religious belief is impossible,
and the clergy, which knows this, continues to serve the church because
of financial incentives. Rusanov’s narrative, typical of the times, depicted
the church as fundamentally tainted by corruption and hypocrisy, and
religious belief as inherently deluded and antisocia
l.35 As a result, atheist
education gained a missionary urgency.
The people want to know the truth about religion, especially now, when it is
becoming clear to many that religion is a lie and many cease to believe in God.
It is in this period that it is necessary to make antireligious propaganda more aggressive, to have more individual conversations with believers, more accessible lectures that would force the believer to think about his situation, so that he understands the harm of religion, so that he knows how he is deceived by
the clergy, so that he is convinced that man’s life is guided not by God but by man himself. It is man who, without the help of God, builds a new and joyous
life. The believer should not wait for a heavenly paradise, because it does not and will not exist, but an earthly paradise, which will be built within the next fifteen to twenty years here, in our godless Soviet country. The name of this
paradise is Communism.36
Conversion narratives such as Danilova’s and Rusanov’s are both
striking and peculiar for their conflation of what are typically considered
two distinct, even contradictory, modes of thought—the scientific and
the magical. Danilova’s rhetoric, despite her newly found faith in science,
can hardly be described as secular. It is imbued with an exalted language
that replaces religious faith with a millennial belief in the redemptive po-
tential of scientific progress and substitutes one charismatic figure in the
heavens (God) with another (Gagarin). Likewise, Rusanov, with his con-
viction that a Communist paradise is immanent, uses an exalted, almost
evangelical, language. In such conversions, one could argue, the object of
devotion had been transformed but not the pattern of thinking.
On the one hand, conversion testimonies of this nature—whether
they came from ordinary people, scientists, cosmonauts, or priests—were
often pronounced crude and simplistic even at the time by religious, secu-
Cosmic Enlightenment 169
lar, and even some Soviet atheist commentators.37 On the other hand, ru-
minations about the metaphysical implications of human space travel fell
within a long tradition that saw technological developments as a means
to achieving utopian ends—extraterrestrial colonization, overcoming
death, the evolution of a qualitatively new kind of human being, or any
combination of the above. The relationship of the magical and the sci-
entific is not only central to human thought about space travel; it is also
inseparable from the technological utopianism of the founding fathers
of rocket science. This paradoxical coexistence of the religio-magical and
the scientific-technological propelled space enthusiasm in the public
imagination. Such metaphysical claims not only provoked strong, polar-
ized responses, but also caused both believers and atheists to reexamine
their assumptions about the relationship between science and religion
and the nature of an individual’s faith in either or both. And nothing had
the potential to enact the drama of the individual’s place in the cosmos
than the stories of actual individuals who physically traveled to the fron-
tiers of the technologically possible and the philosophically imaginable.
Pioneers of the Universe, Cosmic Horror, and the Soviet
Moral Universe
In November 1960, on the cusp of history’s first manned space-
flight, the journal Vorposy filosofii (Problems of philosophy) published an article that explored the “social and humanistic” significance of man’s
conquest of the cosmos, titled “Man in the epoch of cosmic flights.”38
The author, Ernst Kolman—a Czech-born professor of mathematics and
an old Bolshevik who had once been a confidant of Lenin and a student
of Einstein—put forth a set of prognoses about the future of space ex-
ploration.39 He saw human space travel as the “first steps” toward man’s
final triumph over nature and the exploration and gradual colonization
of outer space.40 In a mystical tone reminiscent of Russian Cosmism, the
scientific-utopian philosophy that had been popular in the early twenti-
eth century, Kolman proposed that humankind, standing at the top of
the evolutionary ladder, mastered technology to conquer nature, thereby
making it possible to overturn the trajectory of biological development.
“Why then,” Kolman asks, “would he be unable to turn the course of
events, to overcome death, which like a mystical fate threatens him?”41
Kolman explored the necessary moral, physical, and temperamental
170 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
makeup of the potential cosmonaut, and suggested the possible physi-
ological and psychological effects of space journeys.42 He took it as self-
evident that space travel would produce different effects based on
whether the space traveler came from a capitalist or a socialist society,
and suggested that produced persons better equipped for the hardships
of space exploration.43 Naturally, Soviet “pioneers of the universe” would
have a highly collective mentality and superb control over machinery, but
they would also be immune to certain emotions—fear, cowardice, lone-
liness, or the sense of abandonment. “In their consciousness,” Kolman
wrote, “there will be no room for any kind of religious survivals, and ev-
erything ‘supernatural’ will be alien to them.”44 Most important, the ideal
socialist cosmonaut would not be susceptible to the “atavistic, mystical
feeling of ‘cosmic horror,’” but would manifest an entirely new percep-
tion of the world.
Kolman’s description of the “horror” that threatened those who con-
fronted the cosmos brought attention to the philosophical and psycho-
logical dimensions of cosmic conquests and, after Gagarin’s flight, dis-
cussions about “cosmic horror” echoed in the semipublic world of the
official Soviet intelligentsia. A “Knowledge” Society Plenum that took
place on April 20–21, 1961, underscored the significance of Soviet space
victories for the inculcation of the “Communist worldview.” Mark Bor-
isovich Mitin, a prominent Marxist philosopher in the Soviet academic
establishment, described “cosmic horror” as an affliction that was pro-
foundly foreign to the worldview of Soviet cosmonauts.45 The essence of
“cosmic horror”—the panic that threatens to overtake the space traveler
when he observes his own planet from beyond—was “characteristic of
that mood which currently exists in the capitalist world.” This unearthly
emotion, moreover, was itself “a bright expression of the collapse of hero-
ism in which bourgeois philosophy finds itself,” and of the “horror [and]
despair that grips those who think about the course of events . . . that
the world of capitalism is rolling toward absolute annihilation.”46 Soviet
scientific materialism, however, “inspires man with boundless perspec-
tives, gives him faith in knowledge, gives him that conviction with which
man accomplishes his heroic deeds.” This is why, Mitin puts forth, when
Gagarin was asked what he saw during his trip in space, he said he saw
“great beauty.”
While “cosmic horror” was presented as the dominant moo
d of the
capitalist world, Gagarin’s wonder at the beauty of the universe was pre-
Cosmic Enlightenment 171
sented as the “mood of the Soviet person, who constantly opens new ho-
rizons.” The mission of ideologists, Mitin emphasized, was to harness
the charisma of Soviet space achievements and of heroic cosmonauts,
and to “present [the audience] with the proper appraisal of events, to show
them the meaning of what has occurred, [and] to tie these events with
our socialist system, for only socialism can give birth to such people,
such technology, and such heroic deeds.”47 The cosmonaut A. A. Leonov
described the emotional, psychological, and physiological effect produced
by his own space travel. He emphasized that during his famous space
walk, he did not succumb to the primitive, reflexive fear of infinite space
that humankind inherited from its animal ancestors; and was able to “re-
move the psychological barrier upon existing the spaceship” as a result
of his training. Instead of “cosmic horror,” Leonov likened his space walk
to “swimming above an enormous colorful map.”48 Soviet cosmonauts,
as ideal products of socialism and model Soviet citizens, coauthored sci-
entific publications, published statements about their own paths to athe-
ist conviction, and even weighed in on immortality and the meaning of
life.49
The War of Science and Religion in Soviet Atheism
The Bolshevik assumption of power revolutionized the relationship
between religious and secular institutions and beliefs. Administratively,
Bolsheviks secularized the country’s bureaucracy and educational insti-
tutions shortly after October 1917. Culturally, atheism was recast from a
radical intellectual platform, as it had been under the imperial order, into
its opposite—a state-supported ideology promoted through the entire bu-
reaucratic apparatus of the new regime.50 During the first two decades
of Soviet power, atheist propaganda approaches—most prominently co-
ordinated by the Communist Youth Organization (Komsomol) and the
League of Militant Atheists—generally fell into two categories: politically