Into the Cosmos Page 3
space-themed memorabilia as part of this broader post-Stalinist phenom-
enon, where Soviet citizens were beginning to participate in a modern,
leisure consumer-oriented process made possible by relative economic
prosperity. She finds that although space-themed artifacts embodied a
return to a more modernist aesthetic reminiscent of the immediate post-
12 James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi
revolutionary era, the message that they conveyed was a “conservative”
one, reinforcing rather than challenging the status quo of the socialist
regime and thus at odds with the hopeful ethos of the thaw.
In the final chapter on the public culture of Soviet space aspirations,
Heather L. Gumbert explores the spatial and cultural dimensions of the
visits of Soviet cosmonauts to the Berlin Wall in the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) during the Cold War. Beginning with German Titov’s
historic visit to the Berlin Wall in 1961, and subsequently with Yuri Gaga-
rin’s follow-up visit, the GDR could share in the larger metanarrative
struggle with the West (the “space race”), a competition at one level about
the technical superiority of one global camp over another. Using a rich
array of media sources, Gumbert argues that Titov’s visit to the Berlin
allowed East German leaders to redefine GDR’s place in the European
context, by reinforcing their allegiance to the larger socialist bloc even as
the physical borders with the West were becoming ever more imperme-
able. Her chapter is a rare and insightful exploration of how the socialist
bloc appropriated Soviet space symbols as a tool to legitimize socialist
rule.
Part I
The Space Project
Cultural Context and Historical Background
1
The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos
Alexei Kojevnikov
In the late 1990s, when I arrived as a postdoctoral fellow at the
California Institute of Technology, I found the small Russian-language
community of mostly graduate students in Pasadena holding its annu-
al parties on Soviet Cosmonautics Day. Never mind that in the Soviet
Union itself, the day of April 12, when Yuri Gagarin first flew into space
in 1961—although remembered and commemorated—had not been a
major official holiday or a day off for workers. The students who gathered
to celebrate did not necessarily see themselves as Soviet or even Russian,
coming as they were from different post-Soviet countries. But, in part
because some of them worked and studied at the nearby Jet Propulsion
Lab, and in part due to its continuing post-Soviet appeal, Soviet Cosmo-
nautics Day served as a cultural marker of their community and of some-
thing they shared in background and identities, however else defined.
Upon my coming to Canada ten years later, a university colleague
introduced me to the country by presenting a local newspaper clipping.
The source’s title and the exact date of the publication had been cut
off, but the printed story reported the results of alleged research by the
15
16 Alexei Kojevnikov
British Association for the Advancement of Science about different na-
tions’ propensity for humor. According to a supposedly thorough three-
month investigation with thousands of volunteers, of the roughly forty
thousand jokes, Canadians liked the following one the best: “When NASA
first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint
pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA sci-
entists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero
gravity, upside-down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass
and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C. The Russians
used a pencil.”1
To my own culturally shaped taste, the joke appeared more realistic
rather than outright funny. But this episode also attests to the continuing
mythological appeal of the Soviet breakthrough into the cosmos, which
does not wane with the decades, even though its meanings have changed
with time, place, and community. As the historical dust settles, Sputnik
and Gagarin increasingly attain the status of the symbol of Soviet civiliza-
tion in its moment of ultimate glory and historic accomplishment, simi-
lar to what for other civilizations, old and new, would be represented by
the pyramids, the Great Wall, the Santa Maria, evolution, and the atomic bomb. As pertains to such myths, they are constantly rehearsed, retold in
dogmatic or deviating ways, and often debunked and denied. This chap-
ter sketches out some of the cultural and anthropological aspects of Sovi-
et efforts related to space exploration as they developed over the decades.
Before Sputnik
In addition to his obsessive dream of space travel, Konstantin Tsiol-
kovskii had another dream that was almost as dear to him: he wished to
own a cow.2 The lifestyle of a schoolteacher on the outskirts of the pro-
vincial town of Kaluga was similar to rural life in many respects. Having
a cow for Tsiolkovskii would have been, as for many Russian peasants in
nearby villages, the sign of his large family’s relative well-being, a guar-
antee his children would have a daily meal, and a security investment in
case of emergency or disaster, especially during the turbulent and hun-
gry years of the Civil War. This detail—related by Alexander Chizhevskii,
Tsiolkovskii’s good acquaintance, younger admirer, and biographer—
reminds us that Russian dreams about space developed from the scarcity
rather than abundance of resources. Indeed, they almost exactly coincid-
The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos 17
ed with the period of most severe deprivations caused by the social, po-
litical, and military crises of the first half of the twentieth century. Even
the lavish expenditures of the more stable 1960s, when state enthusiasm
for space programs reached its peak, exuberant as they seemed to Soviet
contemporaries, by others’ standards were meager at best.
Tsiolkovkii’s commitment to his space dream reflected a kind of es-
capism that arose from the cultural context of the time. Historians have
commented on various aspects on his philosophy—religious, scientistic,
progressivist—but have not paid much attention to a recurrent theme of
catastrophism in his writings. At least since the time of the revolutionary
collapse of the old regime in 1917, Tsiolkovskii increasingly believed that
the human race must be prepared technologically to leave the solar sys-
tem by the time it, too, would be collapsing. Many others who, like him,
had survived the combined dangers of World War I, the revolution, and
the civil war were prone to obsessive thinking about the cataclysmic his-
torical event they had lived through and often metaphorically exaggerated
it into global and cosmic terms. Tsiolkovskii generalized the existential
experience of his contemporaries into cosmic dimensions: the universe,
for him, was eternal, but stars were not, and any particular solar system,
including ours, was destined to die (or rather die
and be reborn peri-
odically).3 The very survival of humanity in the long run thus depended
on its mastery of spaceflight. Tsiolkovskii’s younger friend Chizhevskii
was also thinking in somewhat related ways, as he searched for an ex-
planation and rationalization of contemporary events. In the early 1920s
he developed a theory based on massive historical data that such global
disasters as famines, epidemics, wars, and major social disturbances oc-
curred periodically on Earth depending on natural causes: they peaked
with solar activity, on average every eleven years.4
Neither of these views squared very well with the official Soviet ideol-
ogy. Chizhevskii’s theory was explicitly criticized as non-Marxist; many
of Tsiolkovskii’s millenarian ideas had to be censored when reported in
the official press. The meaning of his preaching that could be publicly en-
dorsed in the early Soviet decades was restricted largely to pedagogy, sci-
ence fiction, and popularization. As an amateur inventor in the fields of
aviation and rocketry, he remained throughout his entire life rejected by
professional and academic elites. But as the historian James T. Andrews
has described in his newest book, Red Cosmos, Tsiolkovskii’s enthusiasm for space travel inspired many younger students and children, encourag-
18 Alexei Kojevnikov
ing their general interest in science and technology. In his earlier work
Andrews revealed the novelty of approaches and the impressive scope of
Soviet efforts in education, propaganda, and popularization of science
among the masses during the revolutionary decades.5 As part of these
highly valued and politically supported activities, Tsiolkovskii’s devotion
and lifelong enthusiasm for flight in the air and in space received official
endorsement as exemplary and inspirational, especially for the younger
generation, albeit without mentioning that many of his concrete designs
and proposals had not been found practical or developed enough to be
actually realized.
But inspiring they were, and the culture of the 1920s supported a
genuine popular enthusiasm for science fiction and travel to other plan-
ets. Similar attitudes developed in several other countries contemporane-
ously, but in the Soviet Union they enjoyed a particularly strong appeal
due to their resonance with other utopian temptations of the time—be
they political, social, or technological.6 Young kids growing up in revo-
lutionary Russia did not have the same existential experience as Tsiol-
kovskii and were more likely to partake in the dream of space travel as
part of the general optimistic vision of humanity’s bright future on Earth,
rather than as a way of escaping to other worlds from an unavoidable
cosmic calamity.7 A few of them were not only reading and dreaming but
also tinkering and materializing some of Tsiolkovskii’s ideas in metal,
assisted by whatever little infrastructure the Soviet educational establish-
ment could provide for youth activities in the field of amateur techno-
logical creativity. Several local groups of engineering students engaged
in small-scale rocketry construction as an after-hours hobby, while oc-
cupied with more respectable and practical topics in their regular class
assignments. Thirty years later, some of these young amateurs would
become the leading designers of the Soviet space project, including Val-
entin Glushko, Sergei Korolev, Mikhail Tikhonravov, among others.8
Their utopian fervor receded considerably after the early 1930s, with
enthusiastic visions of a bright but distant future overshadowed by the
much nearer and frightening prospect of the looming war. With the threat
of a military conflict with Nazi Germany becoming ever more real, an
increasing part of all thoughts and activities in the Soviet Union turned
toward military preparations. Discussions about future travels to other
planets, and even science fiction as a literary genre, almost disappeared
for about two decades, while practical or more precisely military aspects
The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos 19
of rocketry came to the forefront. The German army had developed a seri-
ous interest and investment in rocketry research in the 1920s during the
Weimar republican period, already before Hitler came to power, because
this branch of weaponry was not explicitly prohibited under the terms
of the Versailles peace. The Soviet military started showing its interest
later, possibly alarmed by the German efforts, but the status of rocketry
research remained somewhat controversial. In particular, the notorious
tendency of rockets to stray off the course made many military experts
skeptical about their potential use as anything more than an auxiliary
weapon. To some, especially among artillery professionals, shells looked
like much more reliable and useful projectiles.
Nevertheless, the Soviet command gathered existing amateur rocket
tinkerers into a special institute/design bureau, thus for the first time
granting them professional recognition and institutionalization. The very
same military priorities, however, reoriented rocket engineers toward
technological tasks and designs quite different from the ones needed for
spaceflight. Opinions clashed over which possible weapons were practi-
cal and realizable under severe time and resource constraints as the war
drew nearer. The routes actually taken reflected important differences in
technological culture between Russia and Germany. The German project
invested heavily in the technically daunting task of solving the problems
of guided and long-distance flight. The resulting famous missile, gen-
erally known as the V2, could fly several hundred kilometers and stay
more or less on target if the latter was roughly the size of London. This
engineering feat constituted a true technological revolution with great
potential and promise for the future, yet as far as the ongoing battles of
World War II were concerned, was still largely impractical as a weapon
and a waste of resources.9 Prewar disagreements among Soviet rocketry
specialists ended up in favor of a different weapon choice, colloquially
known as katyusha. A battery of trucks, each equipped with a couple doz-en small rockets, could fire in salvo thousands of unguided projectiles
over a distance of only a few kilometers across the front lines. As much
as this design was technologically primitive, cheap, and less prestigious
from the engineering point of view than the V2, it proved much more
effective as an actual weapon during the war, in particular in situations
where large concentrations of troops made precision less important than
area coverage, such as the Stalingrad and the Berlin operations.10
Yet even before the katyusha system could prove its value in battle,
20 Alexei Kojevnikov
many from the leadership and staff of the military rocketry institute were
executed or arrested as part of the broad purges in the Soviet military in
1937 and 1938. Several key engineers survived, but Korolev and Glushko
spent the war years as arrestees working on aircraft design—apparently
&
nbsp; aviation was a better established and recognized (hence also less risky
politically) technology on which to work.11 Soviet science and engineering
in the wartime could barely afford the luxury of long-term, grand, and
uncertain endeavors and focused primarily on improving mainstream
technology that was crucial for the ongoing conflict, rather than future
wars. Large-scale and forward-looking projects of the kind exemplified
by the atomic bomb received full attention and support in the USSR only
after the end of the war. In 1945 the Soviet rocketry team reassembled,
too, this time in occupied Germany, to study the enemy’s experience and
war trophies. The German breakthrough with the V2 then inspired the
Soviet Union as well as the United Kingdom and the United States to
launch their respective programs that aimed first at replicating and then
developing the guided missile technology further.12
The best of the war bounty—the chief engineers from the German
missile team along with most of the surviving V2s—was acquired by the
United States in Operation Paperclip. Having obtained much less, the
Soviet military relied mostly on its own engineers, who began by study-
ing the remaining fragments of equipment and documentation in Ger-
many, and in 1946 they moved to a secret research center in Kalinin-
grad, near Moscow. Despite the initial handicap, in ten years the Soviet
team managed to surpass its German-American rivals in developing the
world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Part of the expla-
nation comes from the urgent importance of rocketry for the Soviet side
due to the asymmetrical strategic balance during the earlier half of the
Cold War. American bombers from airbases located in Europe and Asia
could deliver their nuclear payloads to cities deep inside Soviet territory,
while the USSR lacked any forward bases from which aircraft could reach
American shores. In an attempt to accelerate the development of an al-
ternative delivery system, the Soviet officials set the target payload for a
future nuclear ICBM as early as 1953, before they actually knew the exact
mass of the hydrogen bomb, on the basis of an approximate higher-end
estimate of three tons.13 The assignment pushed Korolev’s team to leap-