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  frog several incremental stages and proceed directly to developing the

  powerful two-stage missile R7 with a seven-thousand-kilometer reach.

  The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos  21

  This machine was capable of flying to the American continent, thus of-

  fering for the first time some possibility of retaliation and deterrence

  against nuclear bombers targeting Soviet cities.14

  At least some of the engineers at this juncture had not entirely forgot-

  ten their youthful dream of space travel that decades earlier had brought

  them into the then amateur field of rocketry design. They understood

  their chief mission to be about strategic defense of the Soviet homeland,

  not cosmonautics. But a missile with the R7 characteristics was also

  perfectly capable of delivering its payload into a space orbit. While the

  missile was still under development, Tikhonravov’s small group started

  working on parallel designs for sputniks and manned-space missions.

  In 1956, at an opportune moment when Nikita Khrushchev inspected

  and happened to be particularly pleased with the work on the R7, Korolev

  requested permission to use one of the future missile tests for a sputnik

  launch. The Soviet leader needed reassurances that such a distraction

  would not delay in any way the fulfillment of the main job, but he agreed

  to reward scientists and engineers in their desire, even if it might appear

  somewhat childish.15

  The space race did not exist yet in the minds of most politicians and

  the public, but Korolev and his top engineers worried about possible

  American competitors. They decided to forgo the wait for more sophisti-

  cated equipment and to go ahead with what their internal documentation

  referred to as the “simplest sputnik”—a rump satellite able to confirm,

  besides the fact of the space launch itself, the possibility of radio com-

  munication from orbit back to Earth through the ionosphere.16 The R7

  was still at a stage when approximately every second launch encountered

  some problems, but the one with the first sputnik happened smoothly on

  October 4, 1957, just six weeks after the first successful military test of

  the R7 as an ICBM. Even the engineers who knew that they were about

  to accomplish something important could not anticipate the enormity of

  the political tsunami that followed. Overnight, Sputnik became the chief world media sensation and a public fixation. The dream about the cosmos entered a different cultural realm—no longer a monopoly of science-

  fiction fans and a few engineers, but a matter of primary attention for

  the political establishment, mass culture and media, countless children

  and their teachers, and much of the general population across the globe.

  Rocketry and space travel became relevant for various areas of cultural

  life, endowed with many new and changing meanings and uses.

  22  Alexei Kojevnikov

  After Sputnik

  In his contribution to this volume, Asif Siddiqi has reminded us

  that the umbilical cord linking the ostensibly peaceful exploration of the

  cosmos with military programs remained its essential contradiction and

  continued to produce tensions between sometimes conflicting priorities.

  One can argue that precisely this link, often as unmentionable in public

  as it was self-obvious, made the space race a useful political trope and a

  powerful symbol for the rivalry between the Cold War superpowers. By

  talking about space, one could also symbolically invoke military might

  and threats without explicitly naming them. Political authorities in the

  USSR and the United States understood the major importance of Sputnik

  for the strategic balance in the world as well as for the world of public

  relations immediately, if only post factum. Typically the Soviets looked

  dismissively on the Western media’s propensity for sensationalism, but

  in this case they found it working in their favor and started supporting

  it with their own propaganda tools. Soviet spokesmen promoted the

  achievement nationally and internationally as a demonstration of social-

  ism’s advantage over capitalism.

  After the triumph of the first sputnik, Khrushchev was asking Ko-

  rolev for further spectacular achievements in space scheduled around the

  days of two major Soviet holidays, November 7 and May 1. The American

  leadership initially tried to downplay the event but was also worried about

  the changed dynamics in Cold War technological competition. In 1945

  the Soviets were regarded as inherently backward, but they had caught

  up in the development of the atomic bomb by 1949, pulled even with

  thermonuclear weapons by 1953, and actually surpassed “the West” in

  missile design by 1957.17 The public interest aroused by Sputnik and the Cold War mentality thus transformed the idea of space travel from an id-iosyncratic obsession of some into a chief political priority for the existing

  and eventually other aspiring superpowers. The space race began in ear-

  nest, primarily aiming at the first human flight, but as Amy Nelson has

  reminded us in her chapter in this volume, also involving animal heroes.

  From a military perspective, as the most visible side effect of the

  ICBM development, the Soviet space launches signified a gradual shift

  toward the ever more symmetrical stage in the Cold War’s strategic bal-

  ance, with the USSR achieving a modicum of nuclear counterthreat (al-

  The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos  23

  though the latter would take several more years to develop from a largely

  symbolic to a sufficiently serious one). The loss of unchallenged nuclear

  supremacy was hard for the U.S. leaders to swallow, which produced the

  dangerous outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis.18 Eventually it had to be

  accepted as a fait accompli and resulted in a relatively stable state of grow-

  ing mutual awareness that an all-out thermonuclear war would bring

  about suicide for all of humanity and could not be won in principle. The

  Soviet leadership’s acceptance of this conclusion earlier, already by 1956,

  allowed Khrushchev to announce publicly that world wars had become

  avoidable and to proclaim the policy of “peaceful coexistence” with capi-

  talism as the official Soviet strategy on the world arena.19

  Another aspect of the war mentality proved unchangeable, however.

  The generation of Soviet officials who had seen their country half de-

  stroyed, hanging by a thread, and just barely surviving in the war against

  Nazi Germany, could not settle for mere capacity for serious counter-

  strike as an adequate form of military deterrence. Their experience de-

  rived from World War II demanded nothing less than relative parity with

  the United States—that is, roughly the same actual numbers of warheads

  and delivery means. At this point the military and space priorities began

  to part ways, because after the R7 their respective demands required dif-

  ferent technological systems and increased competition for resources.20

  The Soviet political and military leaders chose as the country’s first prior-

  ity to catch up with the United States in nuclear capabilities—rather than

  to compete seriously in the militarily and economically u
seless moon

  race. Their culturally defined notion of strategic security required mass

  production of newly developed missiles that were different from those

  used in the space launches. A major commitment of efforts and resources

  toward this task dominated the entire decade of the 1960s. They finally

  saw such relative strategic parity achieved by the beginning of the 1970s,

  albeit at a quite burdensome price for the national economy. Such parity

  in turn created the grounds for détente and for the first serious negotia-

  tions with the United States on limiting the arms race.

  The space race continued to play a major role in the public percep-

  tion and the superpowers’ propagandistic bickering, where both states

  celebrated different “firsts” as their respective ultimate victories. The So-

  viets claimed the main prize on April 12, 1961, when a modified three-

  stage version of the R7 carried the capsule Vostok 1 with the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth once and landed safely after

  24  Alexei Kojevnikov

  the 108-minute flight. In the USSR, as well as in post–Soviet Russia, the

  success of the first manned flight has been valued as the ultimate victory

  in the space race, higher than any other possible achievement in space,

  including Sputnik, and commemorated annually as Cosmonautics Day.21

  In the United States the frustration over the defeat made President Ken-

  nedy announce the next national priority for country: send a man to the

  moon. Having committed tremendous resources toward this task, the

  United States accomplished it with the moonwalk by Neil Armstrong on

  July 21, 1969. After this triumph or consolation prize, political emotions

  cooled down somewhat.

  Today, fifty years later, the public fixation on manned flights can

  probably be understood as a misperception, because their actual pur-

  pose, economic usefulness, and longtime prospects—apart from the ever

  declining propagandistic value—have remained as yet rather uncertain.

  Sputniks, however, proved their practical utility almost immediately with

  spy, meteorological, and communication satellites. They have become, in

  the meantime, irreplaceable and invaluable by having changed the es-

  sential ways of human life, from allowing for global communications and

  the Internet to fostering environmental awareness of our common fate

  on the Earth. In hindsight, it would probably be more appropriate to rec-

  ognize and celebrate the first little sputnik as humanity’s revolutionary

  breakthrough into space, humble as most true moments of great explora-

  tion.

  The recent resurgence of popular interest in the Soviet space story

  in contemporary Russia has brought about new cultural meanings. For

  example, feature movies by two leading contemporary directors— Cosmos

  as Anticipation by Alexei Uchitel and A Paper Soldier by Alexei German Jr.—set their respective plots against the historical/mythological background of the early space launches, which serve as a metaphor for So-

  viet civilization as a whole.22 In the latter film the main protagonist, a

  young physician helping to train the first group of cosmonauts, is torn

  apart by inner insecurity. He sees in the realization of the space dream

  the desperate last chance to redeem the Soviet project and return to its

  original idealistic values after the excesses and distortions of Stalinism,

  yet unconscious doubts torture him and eventually lead him to death.

  Artistically interesting, both movies also reveal how hard it has become

  in the post-Soviet, anticommunist cultural climate, to understand and

  represent the beliefs and attitudes of the Soviet generation whose for-

  The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos  25

  mative years of youth coincided with and were greatly influenced by the

  dawn of the space era and Khrushchev’s liberalization. That generational

  group went by the self-appointed name shestidesiatniki, or the 1960s generation (roughly applicable to those who in 1960 were in their twenties),

  to whom the historian Donald J. Raleigh has also referred as the “Soviet

  Baby Boomers” and “Russia’s Sputnik generation.”23

  Coming of age almost a decade earlier than the American baby

  boomers, the Soviet shestidesiatniki developed a similarly strong generational mentality to distinguish themselves from older folks. Born mostly

  before the war, a great many of them were raised by single mothers and

  without fathers, who were serving or had been killed at the front. Many

  experienced great deprivation and hunger as young children during the

  war and the immediate postwar reconstruction, but they also witnessed

  fifteen years of tremendous improvement in living standards from utter

  poverty to normalcy and even relative prosperity by the 1960s. This ex-

  plains the popularity of belief in Soviet values and exuberantly optimistic

  views of the future. Science-fiction books and futuristic literature were

  once again the rage, and even Khrushchev may be said to have been car-

  ried away by the visionary mood of the time when he foolheartedly prom-

  ised the Soviet citizen Communism in twenty years.24

  They saw excesses of Stalinism as violations of the idealistic values

  of socialism, which Khrushchev had promised to restore. The shesti-

  desiatniki grew up with those values naturally, learning them in school as an already established and settled social norm, without too much of an

  alternative. Unlike the older generation, the shestidesiatniki were mostly too young during the Stalin years to have been personally forced into

  difficult moral compromises when those values contradicted with the vio-

  lent practices of dictatorship. They could thus see themselves as relatively

  uncorrupted by Stalinism and, living in peaceful time, could optimisti-

  cally and sincerely believe in a harmonious combination of Communism,

  morality, and nonviolence.25

  If this description reminds the readers of Mikhail Gorbachev, it is no

  accident, for he belongs to the same generation and his views were quite

  typical of the shestidesiatniki. What is somewhat less usual about him,

  however, is not the value system itself, but that Gorbachev was able to re-

  tain it throughout all the subsequent years deep into the 1980s. Many of

  the first Soviet cosmonauts came from that very same age group, and as

  exemplary heroes during the 1960s, they were subject to the cultural ex-

  26  Alexei Kojevnikov

  pectations of the time. Cosmonauts acted as public promoters of the So-

  viet values of atheism, feminism, and scientism. Truth and truth-telling

  received particular praise as the most desirable and required virtues dur-

  ing de-Stalinization—especially by those who had not had to burden

  their consciences with unavoidable lies during the earlier era by virtue of

  their youth.26 Mass consumerism (in its modest Soviet version) emerged

  in the 1960s as a relatively new phenomenon. Goods were still scarce, but

  the absolute amounts mattered less than the rapid upward trend, which

  the generation of the 1960s had enjoyed for the great part of their still

  very young lives. As Cathleen S. Lewis aptly tells us in her chapter in

  this book, the little collection items that b
ecame consumer goods, such

  as stamps and znachki (enamel pins) with space symbolism, served as

  markers for an important social shift.

  The cultural nexus of the 1960s would not last very long—it was

  already disintegrating by the middle of the decade. Economic growth

  slowed down considerably, while de-Stalinization and other reforms did

  not go as far as many had hoped and finally stalled, leading to widespread

  disillusionment and loss of optimism. In subsequent decades some of

  the typical shestidesiatniki would lose their naïvete and turn cynical

  or alcoholic; others would become open or closet dissidents; yet oth-

  ers maintained their beliefs quietly, waiting for more opportune times,

  like Gorbachev and some of his perestroika team. But by the time they

  marked their presence in the upper echelons of Soviet power and tried

  to reform it, popular disillusionment with the regime had already gone

  too far. Believers in its rehabilitation soon found themselves in an abso-

  lute minority. With the removal of censorship and deepening economic

  crisis in the late 1980s, the public mood quickly surpassed the reformist

  stage and proceeded toward the wholesale rejection of the system. Soviet

  cultural heritage, however, proved of much more lasting value than the

  political regime per se. Some of its parts have also been lost or rejected,

  while others, including space culture and its mythology, have survived

  and continue to develop in Russia and other post-Soviet countries, even if

  not necessarily labeled as “Soviet” anymore.

  Interestingly, some of the more profound cultural legacies of the So-

  viet opening into the cosmos can be found internationally. Whereas in the

  domestic Soviet context the propagandistic potential of Sputnik and oth-

  er successes in space mostly supported and reaffirmed the already well-

  established values, on the global arena it served as a vehicle for spread-

  The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos  27

  ing these ideas into new territories. The highly publicized achievements

  in space exploration changed the Soviet Union’s international image

  during the 1960s from an “underdog superpower,” however promising,

  to a technologically advanced one, roughly equal in imagination to the

  United States. The overall attractiveness of the Soviet model increased