Into the Cosmos Page 28
than his absence.
The unexpected results of atheist education brought to light the de-
gree to which agitators were missing a clear sense of their audience. In-
deed, one of the most frequent criticisms of atheist propaganda was that
too much energy and too many resources were spent preaching to the
choir of unbelievers who constituted the vast majority of lecture audi-
ences.107 As Soviet atheists began to work out new programs, they recog-
nized that they needed to acquire knowledge about the religiosity of So-
viet citizens. At a Central Committee conference, Aleksandr Osipov—a
former professor of theology at Leningrad Theological Academy who had
publicly broken with religion and become one of the most famous athe-
ists of the Khrushchev era—highlighted that the difficulty of atheist work
was finding the appropriate tone for an audience spread across a broad
spectrum of education: “Every propagandist encounters both [types of]
persons. . . . Three days ago in Kiev, [I] simultaneously [received] two
notes [from the audience]: ‘What do you think about Feuerbach’s theory
of atheism?’ And next to it [another note], ‘So tell me, former little father,
do witches exist in the world?’ Laughter could be heard in the hall. ‘So
that,’ Osipov pointed out, ‘is our range.’”108
Speaking at the same party conference, the cosmonaut German Titov
concurred that on the whole atheist agitators were unprepared to conduct
Cosmic Enlightenment 185
effective propaganda. Even cosmonauts, Titov admitted, had not done ev-
erything to ensure that the results of their flights were productive for ide-
ological purposes. When, after returning from a flight, cosmonauts were
asked whether they had encountered god, he realized that their assertion
that they had not remained unconvincing, especially to believers. Yet,
Titov pointed out, cosmonauts did not have the tools to give their asser-
tion more force, because of their fundamental ignorance about religion.
I do not know even one prayer and have never even heard one, because I, like
all of my cosmonaut friends, grew up in our socialist reality and studied in
our Soviet schools. Later, when I was getting higher education, and now at the
Academy, no one ever spoke to me about this religion—and it seems to me that
the situation is similar in all educational institutions.
And if by chance I came across some books, then, with rare exception . . . these books were so boring that, unless there was a real necessity, one doesn’t really want to read them. (Laughter in the hall, applause).
We consulted with our boys, the cosmonauts, . . . and we realized we had to
petition the Ideological department to help us acquire bibles. (Laughter). Now
we have received them, and I have a bible in my library, because when I speak
in public, especially abroad, we find ourselves in difficult situations. This is why we discussed whether cosmonauts, in the course of their studies and
training, should somehow be informed a little about all this God and religion
business.109
In a brilliant inversion Titov’s request for Bibles for cosmonauts under-
scored the basic fact that atheist education could not be conducted with-
out a fundamental familiarity with religious history and dogma, as well
as with the transformations taking place in religion under modern condi-
tions.
Because an accurate understanding of their audience was vital to the
success of their work, atheists believed it imperative to learn about the
quantity and quality of the population’s religiosity. For these purposes,
statistics and episodic reports provided by local Komsomol and party or-
gans as well as “Knowledge” Society lecturers and CAROC and CARC
representatives only told part of the story. Beginning in the late 1950s, a
massive effort was coordinated to educate atheist educators. Publications
on religion and atheism increased exponentially. The journal Science and
186 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
Religion concentrated its efforts on providing the material on the history of religion and atheism as well as methodological recommendations for
effective propaganda. Regular workshops, conferences, and seminars for
training atheist cadres began to be held in both central and local-level
enlightenment organizations and party organs. Finally, cultural enlight-
enment workers, folklorists, ethnographers, and sociologists “went to the
people” on expeditions whose primary purpose was to study the role of
religion in everyday life.110
The party’s ideological interest in the religiosity of Soviet citizens
precipitated a “reanimation” of the sociology of religion—a field that had
been practically dormant since the mid-1930s.111 The need to gather ac-
curate information in the practical absence of a generation of sociologists
specializing in religion required both a new cohort of trained cadres and
a revived discussion of sociological methodology. Councils, sectors, and
groups for the study of religion and atheism were formed in the Institute
of History, the Institute of Philosophy, and the Institute of Ethnography
of the Academy of Sciences and their republic-level equivalents. Socio-
logical research of religion and atheism was given priority on the agenda
of the Academy of Social Sciences of the Central Committee of the Com-
munist Party (AON), the party’s top institution for training ideological
cadres, which eventually formed a separate Institute of Scientific Athe-
ism in 1964. Ethnographic and sociological expeditions lasted anywhere
from several days to several weeks, and usually consisted of researchers
being placed with families that had been identified as believers to observe
their everyday lives and interview individual members. Researchers were
occupied with several fundamental questions: What was the worldview of
believers, their understandings of the origins of nature, the social world,
and humankind’s role in it? What were the worldviews of former believ-
ers and what brought about their break with religion? And finally, what
kept believers tied to religion despite the mounting scientific evidence
against religious conceptions of the world, of which space exploration
constituted such an essential part (figure 7.2)?
Cosmic Contradictions
Beyond widely disseminated atheist conversion narratives of believ-
ers who broke with religion as a result of space conquests, researchers
discovered that the effect of Soviet space achievements on the everyday
Cosmic Enlightenment 187
Figure 7.2. Mobile planetarium lecture at a dairy farm, Kharkiv region, Ukraine, in the early 1960s. Source: Image courtesy of Kharkov Planetarium imeni Iu. A. Gagarina.
cosmologies of ordinary people was considerably less linear and logical
than they had imagined and expected. Indeed, many reports described
their frustration at the stubborn superstition they encountered on the
ground. One local party worker relayed a conversation he had with a sec-
tarian woman in Irkutsk who, when told that a rocket was being launched
to the moon, replied: “This never happened and will never happen. God
w
ill not allow a foreign body to come to the moon.” When asked whether
she would abandon her belief if a rocket actually went to the moon, she
only replied: “This never happened and will never happen, because it is
impossible.”112
Sociological research on the cosmologies of believers, conducted in
the village Tretie Levye Lamki in the Tambov region, revealed that in
those rather rare instances where believers considered the opposition of
science and religion at all, most of them saw no contradiction between
their belief in Soviet space achievements and religion. A typical example
was fifty-two-year-old Anna Ivanovna Dobrysheva, whose answer to most
of the researcher’s questions was “Who knows?” She did not understand,
even after repeated explanations by the researcher, the contradiction be-
tween the religious and the scientific worldview. As the researcher de-
188 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
scribed in his report, Dobrysheva “believes in spaceflights, but cannot
seem to understand why [atheists] don’t believe in God and why they op-
pose science and religion.”113 In her view “if we [believers] believe you
[atheists], then you need to believe us as well.”114
One of the more “unbelieving” interview subjects, Petr Alekseev-
ich Meshukov, was described as “not belonging to a religion although
he keeps icons [in his home],” and in his understanding of the natural
sciences is said to “fully support Darwin’s theories about the origins of
man, which, when he is in an unsober state, provokes him to call people
who offend him ‘a degenerate product of simian genealogy.’”115 Regard-
ing various processes in the natural world, he “has some vague notion,
although is certain that ‘god has as much connection to them as the tale
of a crocodile does to a person.’”116 Overall, the position of the villagers
interviewed was best summed up in the words of one Matrena Petrovna
Arkhipova, who stated that “Communists are good in every way, except
that they don’t believe in God, [and] that is bad.”117 In what became a pe-
rennial thorn in the side of Soviet atheists, believers—even when they
believed in the achievements of the Soviet space program—still managed
to reconcile it with their religious worldviews.
Cosmonaut German Titov encountered a similar situation during
the numerous occasions when he was expected to clarify the contents of
the cosmos to waiting audiences.
The fact that ordinary inhabitants of Earth have been to the skies, the holy of holies of all religions, the space of God, has an enormous effect on believers, does not leave any one of them indifferent, and forces them to deeply think
about their views and convictions. And many believers are struck by the fact
that god did not manifest in response to the fact that ordinary mortals intruded into his estate.
I would also like to cite one letter which a sixty-seven-year-old inhabitant of Kazan wrote to us. He sent it simply to the address “Cosmonaut.” He writes this:
“I am already sixty-seven years old, I am illiterate, and yet I would nonetheless would like to be taken on a cosmic flight. I understand that I can contribute
nothing from the point of view of science, so to speak. But yet, it is said, that there is no God. I believe that there is no God, but all the same, as the years wear on, I would like to make certain that God doesn’t exist.”
Cosmic Enlightenment 189
(Animation and laughter in the hall.)
Ilyichev: Trust, but verify.118
No one could argue, Titov concluded, that the scientific achievements of
Soviet spaceflights had been amply and correctly highlighted in Soviet
enlightenment work, but the atheist significance of space exploration had
yet to be fully explained. It seemed, then, that even when believers were
enthralled with the technological achievements of Soviet space explora-
tion, they continued to miss the correct philosophical conclusions.
Problematically, from the point of view of atheist agitators, neither
did the church. Congresses gathered to discuss the evolving relationship
between science and religion that emphasized the danger of the church’s
“accommodation” of scientific and technological advances and the at-
tempts of religious organizations in general to “adapt” to the modern
world. At a conference convened in Moscow in May 1957, shortly before
the USSR launched Sputnik, M. B. Mitin, the chairman of the “Knowl-
edge” Society, stressed that the battle with religion had transformed and
was no longer (primarily) political, but ideological. In light of these de-
velopments, Mitin warned agitators to be vigilant to the evolving tactics
of religious organizations that “prefer not to openly speak out against sci-
ence, [and] to present themselves as ‘friends’ of science, striving to ‘prove’
the connections between science and religion, the possibility of unifying
the two, based on mutual respect and ‘noninterference’, . . . and seek to
prove that science and religion are not opposed to each other, but on the
contrary, need one another.”119 In response, atheist agitators were urged
to clarify for audiences the irreconcilability of science and religion, to
stress that while the religious worldview proclaimed the finite nature of
the universe, scientific materialism revealed its infinity in both space and
time. In lectures that critiqued religious conceptions of the beginning
and end of the world, popular among propaganda workers at the time,
agitators were encouraged to critique the religious notion of the primacy
of the spiritual over the material.120 Once it was taken as fact that the cos-
mos followed the same laws as the Earth and were composed of the same
materials, the Estonian astronomer G. Naan put forth, “nothing heavenly
really remained in the ‘heavens.’”121
Yet sociological studies suggested that the transformations that took
190 Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock
place within the mind of a believer did not necessarily follow this same
logic. Indeed, research on sermons in the Vladimir province described re-
ligious functionaries who either dismissed the relevance of space achieve-
ments for religion, or, worse yet, presented Soviet space achievements in
a religious context. A report of the Council for the Affairs of Religious
Cults, for example, described a Belorussian Catholic priest who refuted
the notion that space achievements provided proof of God’s nonexistence:
“Nature has not yet been fully studied by man, [and man] is not yet able
to control it. Then there exists some sort of power that controls nature.
Sending satellites and people to space does not mean that there is no God.
God exists, but he is invisible and not in man’s likeness.”122 Archbishop
Onisim of Vladimir-Suzdal diocese, however, underscored the need of
propagandizing the great achievements of Soviet spaceflights, especially
to the rural population. Archpriest L. A. Taranovskii was purported to
proclaim: “Flights to space are new proof of God’s great power, and the
idea that cosmonauts did not notice God, well, it is not as if he sits in one
place. One cannot see God, he is a spirit. And if life
on other planets is
discovered, then their existence also involved the participation of God, he
is all-powerful. Even if God walked on the shores of the river Kliazma,
people still would not believe that this is God.”123
Many agitators complained that the church was more difficult to
combat when it attempted to coexist peacefully with science, because
then religion managed to co-opt technological progress and paint it as a
manifestation of God’s will. According to this position, God performed
his work through unbelievers, and “the unbelieving Gagarin flew to space
because it was advantageous to our God.”124 Yet what worried Soviet athe-
ists even more was when religious organizations responded to scientific
progress by making the boundary between the material and the spiritual
more defined, and in effect, claiming for religion a “monopoly” over the
spiritual world.125 These unexpected and contradictory reactions of both
ordinary believers and the church to scientific achievements forced athe-
ists to question their understandings of religion and their predictions
about its future in modern society. It also forced them to reconsider their
belief that science was the most powerful weapon in atheist work, and
turn their hopes to the transformative potential of philosophy to cultivate
the Communist worldview of the future.
Cosmic Enlightenment 191
The Dystopian Cosmos
The Soviet leadership presented space achievements as material
proof of the great strides the country was making toward Communist
modernity, but their new attention to the persistence of “survivals” in the
consciousness of Soviet citizens, as well as the efforts to exorcize these
with more and better atheist education, cast a (not entirely intentional)
light on the distance that separated the new Soviet person paraded on
the world stage from the ordinary Soviet people in the audience. Indeed,
reconciling the ambitions of Khrushchev-era utopianism with the unset-
tling fact that the “human material” that was supposed to actualize these
ambitions was still profoundly riddled with “survivals” required an auda-
cious leap of faith. For this reason the optimism of the party’s ideologi-