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  German and international imperialists, who want to interrupt the build-

  ing of socialism, have been dealt a powerful blow.”75

  Titov stood shoulder to shoulder with Ulbricht, and it could not have

  come at a better time. Ulbricht expressed this explicitly, thanking Titov

  for visiting “at a time when the working people of the GDR are putting

  all their forces into strengthening the Republic and preparing for the

  conclusion of a German peace before the end of the year.”76 Furthermore,

  Ulbricht told his audience that Germans all over the republic had clam-

  ored to meet the socialist hero; lest they forget who had brought him

  there, Ulbricht reminded them: “Dear Berliners, as you can see, it did not

  take long [for Titov to come].”77 Coverage demonstrated for East Germans

  that Ulbricht and the GDR had not been shunned by the socialist world

  (as they had been for some time by the West) because of the border clo-

  sure. Instead, they could be celebrated for their protection of socialism in

  Germany and abroad. As Ulbricht argued, the border closure represented

  the commitment of the GDR to “continue to fight in confraternity with

  the peoples of the Soviet Union and all the states of the socialist camp, to

  secure peace and banish war from the lives of the peoples.”78

  In the first week of September there was much talk of peace, but this

  did not preclude the use of more aggressive language as well. GDR au-

  thorities and Titov himself emphasized the growing friendship between

  Titov and East Germans, and the “unbreakable fraternity” of the GDR and

  the socialist world.79 During the Leipzig press conference Titov expressed

  the view that his flight was but a precursor to the final goal of setting up a

  long-term, manned, interplanetary station in space, and emphasized that

  building such a station would require peace.80 He contrasted what he saw

  as the confidence and calm with the saber-rattling of the West: “Yesterday

  as we visited the [border checkpoint at the] Brandenburg Gate, there was

  upheaval on the Western side. Suddenly a tank drove up. Probably they

  wanted to terrify us with this jalopy. But we, who have created spaceships

  and rockets have no fear of tanks. If they had shown us a rocket? We

  have no fear of that because they have nothing that equals ours [ sic]. The Soviet Union pursues exclusively peaceful goals in space. We don’t need

  any razzle-dazzle. We know that the construction of socialism is the best

  demonstration and testifies to our vitality.”81

  260  Heather L. Gumbert

  Yet often, deeper warnings followed such pronouncements of peace.

  Titov drew attention to what he saw as the “recent provocations of some

  men abroad in the West” and warned that such men should not forget the

  conclusion of World War II or the effectiveness of the first Soviet missile

  weapons. Ulbricht boldly reminded the West that “whoever attacks the

  GDR is against not 17 million, but a billion people of the great family

  of the socialist countries,” who “under the slogan ‘All for one, one for

  all’ stand for peace and security.” Furthermore, he warned that: “Friends

  and enemies, especially the lovers of war provocations in West Germany,

  must say to themselves that a rocket of such enormous propulsive force

  and precision that transported our comrade Major Titov to space, can also

  ship other and bigger loads from one place on earth to another easily and

  with great reliability.”82 With that Ulbricht played on fears in the West

  that the Soviets’ lead in the space race and their development of intercon-

  tinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology jeopardized the security of

  the West, and the United States in particular, which until now had been

  relatively safe from Soviet nuclear weapons.

  The narrative strategy of drawing the GDR more closely into the so-

  cialist fold by linking Titov’s achievement and the border closure as two

  successful battles in the war against the West was only one element—and

  perhaps not the most important—of the metanarrative value of Titov’s

  visit. Receiving Titov in the GDR just three weeks after the border clo-

  sure was a propaganda coup. On the one hand, it helped ease public rela-

  tions between the East German state and its citizens, whose worlds had

  just gotten smaller. Thousands of people turned out to see Titov wher-

  ever he went. In Berlin, Leipzig, and Magdeburg the celebration of Titov

  was neutral ground upon which state authorities and the East German

  people could meet and rejoice in the aftermath of the wall. Such crowd

  scenes were a potent visual demonstration of solidarity; in fact, the SED

  fairly successfully transformed popular adulation for Titov into evidence

  of support for the East German state. This is exemplified by press re-

  ports that emphasized the signs of support for Titov that came from the

  East German population, including spontaneous whistles from passing

  locomotives and celebratory sirens emitting from Berlin factories and,

  of course, the huge crowds that appeared to greet Titov’s motorcades in

  Berlin and elsewhere in the republic.83

  The image of thousands of people lining the streets did not approxi-

  mate the assumption of many in the West that East Germans had re-

  Cold War Theaters  261

  treated to the safety of their homes and families after the border closure.

  Indeed, the national daily Neues Deutschland played this up, contrasting reports from the West German Welt am Sonntag that “in Magdeburg they

  sit under wool blankets and listen to Western radio,” with the triumphal

  pronouncement that “100 000 people” came out to see Titov during his

  visit to Magdeburg.84 The East German press thus used Titov’s visit to

  counteract the vision that Easterners lived only in a state of fear for their

  safety, desperately looking to the West for guidance.

  On the other hand, Titov’s visit opened a whole new world to East

  Germans as well, as part of the socialist bloc and ally to the country that

  had made human space travel possible. Titov’s visit was exciting, unique,

  and most important, it happened in the GDR. On September 2, the tele-

  vision news broadcast Titov’s visit to the Berlin Wall. Standing at the

  wall, he praised state authorities on their efforts to strengthen socialism,

  while Allied soldiers on the other side sought to catch a glimpse of the

  space hero. The message was, of course, that East Germans had gotten

  to experience something they never would have on the other side of the

  wall. Precisely because they lived in the East, it was possible to meet a world-class figure of international fame. Thus Titov’s visit exemplifies the

  ways in which the media, and television in particular, was able redefine

  the world of the East Germans. This post-wall GDR was no longer the

  German-centered world of the agenda of reunification in the 1950s; this

  world looked toward Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and beyond.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Paul R. Josephson, Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetoot
h?: Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989

  (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

  2. For important works on the place of science and technology in the Soviet Union during the interwar years, see Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978); Robert A. Lewis, Science and Industrialisation in the USSR (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979); and Nicholas Lampert, The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State: A Study of Soviet Managers and Technicians, 1928–1935 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980).

  For the generational change in the late 1920s and early 1930s, see also Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

  3. David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); and Loren R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

  4. See, for example, Zhores A. Medvedev, Soviet Science (New York: Norton, 1978); Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994); and Paul R. Josephson, Totalitarian Science and Technology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996).

  5. Michael D. Gordin, Karl Hall, and Alexei B. Kojevnikov, eds., Osiris, 2nd series, vol.

  263

  264  Notes to pages 3–6

  23, Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Alexei B. Kojevnikov, Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (London: Imperial College Press, 2004); and Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). See also the special issue of Science in Context 15, no. 2 (2002).

  6. For an influential Lysenko-centered narrative of Soviet science, see Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). For a useful critique of the earlier school, see Michael D. Gordin, “Was There Ever a ‘Stalinist Science’?” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and European History 9, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 625–39.

  7. James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003).

  8. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); Scott W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Asif A. Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957

  (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  9. Asif A. Siddiqi, “Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia,” in Gordon, Hall, and Kojevnikov, Intelligentsia Science, 260–88.

  10. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Daniel Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Karen Petrone, “Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades”: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); and William Husband, “Godless Communists”: Atheism and Society in Soviet Russia, 1917–1932 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000).

  11. Siddiqi, “Imagining the Cosmos.”

  12. “Velikaia pobeda v mirnom sorevnovanii s kapitalizmom,” Pravda, October 9, 1957.

  13. Donald. J. Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation: Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about Their Lives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

  14. See particularly Loren Graham’s poignant recollection of the postflight parade for Gagarin at Red Square; see Loren R. Graham, Moscow Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 18–21.

  15. For a social history of the late Stalin years, see E. Iu. Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957 (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1998).

  16. For recent works that explore the construction of Soviet national identity, see Hel-ena Goscilo and Andrea Lanoux, eds., Gender and National Identity in Twentieth-century Russian Culture (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006); David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Robert C. Williams, Russia Imagined: Art, Culture, and National Identity, 1840–1995 (New York: P. Lang, 1997); Stephen M. Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006); Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, eds., A State of

  Notes to pages 6–7  265

  Nations: Empire and Nation-making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  17. For representative English-language works, see Nicholas Daniloff, The Kremlin and the Cosmos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972); William Shelton, Soviet Space Exploration: The First Decade (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968); James E. Oberg, Red Star in Orbit (New York: Random House, 1981); Walter McDougall, . . . The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985); and James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997). The few academics who have explored the history of the Soviet space program have done so largely from a political science perspective. See, for example, David Easton Potts, “Soviet Man in Space: Politics and Technology from Stalin to Gorbachev (Volumes I and II)” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 1992); William P.

  Barry, “The Missile Design Bureaux and Soviet Piloted Space Policy, 1953–1974” (PhD

  diss., University of Oxford, 1995); and Andrew John Aldrin, “Innovation, the Scientists, and the State: Programmatic Innovation and the Creation of the Soviet Space Program”

  (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1996).

  18. See Asif A. Siddiqi’s two-volume work Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003) and The Soviet Space Race with Apollo (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), which were based on a combination of published archival sources, memoirs, official institutional histories, and journalistic accounts in the Russian media. More recently, a few historians have produced scholarship based primarily on a deep reading of primary archival sources, although these works focus on the pre-Sputnik era. See, for example, Matthias Uhl, Stalins V-2: Der Technologietransfer der deutschen Fernlenkwaffentechnik in die UdSSR und der Auf bau der sowjetischen Raketen-industrie 1945 bis 1959 (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe-Verlag, 2001); Siddiqi, Red Rockets’ Glare; and James T. Andrews, Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009).

  19. For important works on high politics during the Khrushchev era, see William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: Norton, 2003); and William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason, eds., Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000). For an older but still useful work, see Carl A. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership: With an Epilogue on Gorbachev (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

  20. For a sampling of the new work on the Khrushchev era, see Raleigh, Russia’s Sputnik Generation; Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of Destalinisation: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge
, 2006); Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat, 2nd edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008); Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007); V. A. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E.

  Sharpe, 2002); Erik Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories about Disobedient Russians (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); and Melanie Ilic, S

  ˇ usan E.

  Reid, and Lynne Attwood, eds., Women in the Khrushchev Era (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). See also Kristin Rothy-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television in the USSR, 1950–1970,” Slavic Review 66, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 278–306; Andrew B. Stone, “‘Overcoming Peasant Backwardness’: The Khrushchev Antireligious Campaign and the Rural Soviet Union,” Russian Review 67, no. 2 (2008): 296–320; Roger D. Markwick, “Cultural History under Khrushchev and Brezhnev: From Social Psychology to Mentalités,” Russian Review 65, no. 2 (2006): 283–301; and Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender

  266  Notes to pages 7–17

  and De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 211–52.

  21. For an insightful analysis of the changes in the field of Soviet history as a result of archival research, see Donald J. Raleigh, “Doing Soviet History: The Impact of the Archival Revolution,” Russian Review 61 (2002): 16–24. See also the articles in the same issue by Lynn Viola and Norman Naimark: Viola, “The Cold War in American Soviet Historiography and the End of the Soviet Union,” 25–34, and Naimark, “Cold War Studies and the New Archival Materials on Stalin,” 1–15.

  22. For useful summaries of the recent literature on the history of Soviet science and technology, see Alexei Kojevnikov, “Introduction: A New History of Russian Science,” Science in Context 15 (2002): 177–82; and Jonathan Coopersmith, “The Dog That Did Not Bark during the Night: The ‘Normalcy’ of Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Science and Technology Studies,” Technology and Culture 47 (2006): 623–37.

  23. Some historians have argued that Sergei Korolev, the dean of Soviet rocketry under Khrushchev, can be considered the “father” of Soviet rocketry, while Tsiolkovskii was the luminary and inspirational “grandfather” in the Soviet iconic pantheon. See Andrews, Red Cosmos.