Into the Cosmos Read online

  48. Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990), 171–72.

  49. See Paul R. Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture,” in Science and the Soviet Social Order, edited by Loren R. Graham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 180–85.

  50. For a look at the relationship between science, technology, and propaganda under Khrushchev, see Michael Froggatt, “Science in Propaganda and Popular Culture in the USSR under Khrushchev (1953–1964)” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 2006). See also Cathleen S. Lewis, “The Red Stuff: A History of the Public and Material Culture of Early Human Spaceflight in the USSR” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2008).

  51. See Josephson, “Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture,” for his interesting analysis of these letters and debates. For an example of this genre of critique of space travel, see a worker’s letter to Komsomol’skaia Pravda published under the name Aleksei N., “Ne rano li zaigryvat’s lunoi,” Komsomol’skaia Pravda, June 11, 1960, 1. Also see Slava Gerovitch,

  “New Soviet Man Inside Human: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism,” in Osiris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), vol.

  22, 135–57.

  52. See Il’ia Ehrenburg, “O lune, o zemle, o serdtse,” Literaturnaia gazeta, January 1, 1960, 3–4.

  53. For an overview of the cultural and public/civic thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, see Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture (Cambridge: MIT

  Press, 1964). For a more recent anthology of the contours of cultural history in the Khrushchev era, see Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (New York: Routledge, 2006).

  54. See Paul R. Josephson’s analysis of public display of big science in the former Soviet Union in Josephson, “Projects of the Century in Soviet History: Large Scale Technologies from Lenin to Gorbachev,” Technology and Culture (July 1995).

  55. Also see S. Ostrovskii, “Pesenka o sputnike,” Kul’turno-prosvetitel’naia rabota 1

  (1958): 30–33.

  56. These claims ranged from the ludicrous assertion of the invention of the electric light, radio, and telegraph, to more specific scientific assertions that Soviets discovered,

  272  Notes to pages 43–50

  for instance, a variety of such disciplines as structural chemistry. Loren Graham believes most of these claims were abandoned later in the Brezhnev era in the 1960s and 1970s.

  However, he has rightfully asserted that a few of those disciplinary claims (particularly revolving around certain scientific figures) should be investigated more seriously and need to be further analyzed in isolation of the general nationalistic assertions. See Loren R.

  Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 142–43.

  57. See Roald Z. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), 4–6, 181–82.

  58. See Valentin Glushko’s reminiscences in his grandiose history of the Soviet space program, The Soviet Encyclopedia of the Spaceflight (Moscow: Nauka, 1969). Glushko published this encyclopedia under the pseudonym G. V. Petrovich.

  59. See Loren R. Graham, Moscow Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 18–19.

  3. Cosmic Contradictions

  1. For the purposes of this discussion, I use “secrecy” to mean deliberate and selective nondisclosure of information. Within this rubric one might consider not only the range of items kept secret, but the degree to which a given piece of information is kept secret. For a discussion of possible definitions and classifications of secrecy, see Raymond Hutchings, Soviet Secrecy and Non-secrecy (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987), 7–35.

  2. “Zapiska M. A. Suslova, M. V. Khrunicheva i dr. v TsK KPSS o predstavlenii pro-ekta soobshcheniia TASS o sozdanii iskusstvennogo sputnika Zemli” (August 23, 1955), in Sovetskaia kosmicheskaia initsiativa v gosudarstvennykh dokumentakh, 1946–1964 gg. , edited by Iurii M. Baturin (Moscow: RTSoft, 2008), 67–68.

  3. “Announcement of the First Satellite,” in Behind the Sputniks: A Survey of Soviet Space Science, edited by F. J. Krieger (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1958), 311–12.

  4. For recent scholarship on the thaw, see Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith, eds., Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev (London: Routledge, 2009); Iurii Aksiu-tin, Khrushchevskaia ottepel’i i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v sssr v 1953–1964 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004); Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); 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); and Erik Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories about Disobedient Russians (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

  5. “Dekret o pechati” (November 10, 1917), in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury: Dokumenty i kommentarii, edited by Tat’iana M. Goriaeva (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), 27–28.

  6. “Polozhenie o glavnom upravlenii po delam literatury i izdatel’stva (Glavlit)” (June 6, 1922), in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzuri, 35–36.

  7. Jonathan Bone, “Soviet Controls on the Creation of Information in the 1920s and 1930s,” Cahiers du Monde russe 40, nos. 1–2 (January–June 1999): 65–89.

  8. Arlen V. Blium, “Forbidden Topics: Early Soviet Censorship Directives,” Book History 1, no. 1 (1998): 268–82. For Glavlit in general, see Leonid Vladimirov, “Glavlit: How the Soviet Censor Works,” Index on Censorship (Fall–Winter 1972): 31–43; and Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell, eds., The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973).

  Notes to pages 51–54  273

  9. “Iz ukaza prezidiuma verkhovnogo soveta sssr ob otvetstvennosti za razglashenie gosudarstvennoi tainy i za utratu dokumentov, soderzhashchikh gosudarstvennuiu tainu”

  (June 9, 1947), in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury, 93–94. For the Kliueva-Roskin affair, see Nikolai Krementsov, The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Vladimir D. Esakov and Elena S. Levina, Delo KR: Sudy chesti i ideologii i praktike poslevoennogo stalinizma (Moscow: IRI RAN, 2001); and V. D. Esakov and E. S. Levina, Staliniskie ‘sudy chesti’: Delo ‘KR’ (Moscow: Nauka, 2005).

  10. Yoram Gorlizki, “Ordinary Stalinism: The Council of Ministers and the Soviet Neopatrimonial State, 1946–1953,” Journal of Modern History 74, no. 4 (December 2002): 699–736.

  11. For example, when a document was lost in a missile design bureau in the fall of 1954, this decree was invoked as a means to bring the situation under control. See Dmitrii F. Ustinov to Central Committee (October 21, 1954), Russian State Archive of the Economy (RGAE), f. 8157, op. 1, d. 1691, ll. 135–36.

  12. Stephen Lovell, The Russian Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan Press, 2000), 45.

  13. Ibid., 6.

  14. “Iz spravki glavlita ob itogakh raboty za 1963–65 gg.” (August 20, 1965), in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury, 371–76.

  15. For an extensive survey of the pre- Sputnik literature on space exploration in the 1950s, see Asif A. Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 301–13.

  16. N. P. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos: Kniga pervaia, 1960–1963 gg. (Moscow: Infortekst IF, 1995), 19.

  17. Iu. V. Biriukov, “Vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia po primeneniiu reaktivnykh letatel’nykh apparatov k osvoeniiu stratosfery,�
�� Iz istorii aviatsii i kosmonavtiki, no. 4 (1965): 30–39.

  18. Three biographies appeared in 1969: Ol’ga Apenchenko, Sergei Korolev (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969); A. P. Romanov, Konstruktor kosmicheskikh korablei (Moscow: Politizdat, 1969); and P. T. Astashenkov, Akademik S. P. Korolev (Moscow: Mashinostroenie, 1969).

  19. “Postanovlenie sekretariata TsK KPSS ‘O povyshenii otvetsvennosti rukovoditelei organov pechati, radio, televideniia, kinematografii, uchrezhdenii politicheskii uroven’

  publikuemykh materialov i repertuara” (January 7, 1969), in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury, 188–91.

  20. “Zapiska otdelov propagandy, kul’tury, nauki i uchebnykh zavedenii TsK KPSS o khode vypolneniia postanovlenii TsK KPSS, napravlennykh na usilenie kontrolia za idei-no-politicheskim urovnem knizhnogo rynka, radio, televideniia i kinematografii” (June 27, 1977), in Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury, 210–12.

  21. For a brief period in the mid-1960s, Glavlit was subsumed under a new level of bureaucracy, the State Committee for Print.

  22. In 1966 this department became the Department of Agitation and Propaganda.

  23. Mikhail Suslov served in this position from 1953 to 1957 and then again from 1966

  to 1982.

  24. The historian S. A. Mikoian, the son of Politburo member A. I. Mikoian and editor of the journal Latinskaia amerika, recalled that it was possible to challenge Glavlit directives but not those issuing from the Central Committee. See Sergo A. Mikoyan, “Erod-ing the Soviet ‘Culture’ of Secrecy: Western Winds behind Kremlin Walls,” Central Intelligence Agency, available online at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of

  -intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/fall_winter_2001/article05.html.

  274  Notes to pages 54–60

  25. Iaroslav Golovanov, Korolev: Fakty i mify (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), 688.

  26. Here I draw on some of the work of Hutchings in Soviet Secrecy and Non-secrecy; see, particularly, 230–39.

  27. “Direktivna zamestitelya ministra oborony sssr no. 45520ss ob obespecheniya sekretnosti provodimykh rabot po raketnomu vooruzheniyu” (July 28, 1955), in Zadacha osoboi gosudarstvennoi vazhnosti: Iz istorii sozdaniia raketno-iadernogo oruzhiia i raketnykh voisk strategicheskogo naznacheniia (1945–1959 gg.): Sbornik dokumentov, edited by Vladimir I. Ivkin and Grigorii A. Sukhina (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), 485–88.

  28. John Barber, Mark Harrison, Nikolai Simonov, and Boris Starkov, “The Structure and Development of the Defence-Industry Complex,” in The Soviet Defence-Industry Complex from Stalin to Khrushchev, edited by John Barber and Mark Harrison (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan Press, 2000), 21.

  29. For secrecy in the Soviet defense industry, see also Mikhail Agursky, The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex, Jerusalem Papers on Peace Problems, No. 31 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1980), 12–16; and Mikhail Agursky and Hannes Adomeit, “The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex,” Survey 24, no. 4 (Spring 1979): 106–24.

  30. Barber et al., “Structure and Development of the Defence-Industry Complex,” 21.

  For military secrecy, see also Arlen Blium, Kak eto delalos’ v Leningrade: Tsenzura v gody ot-tepeli, zastoia i perestroika, 1953–1991 (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2005), 35–39.

  31. See, for example, two reports prepared in the fall of 1959 summarizing Western speculations on the location of the new Soviet launch base. See “Soobshcheniie No. 863

  sluzhebnogo vestnika inostrannoi informatsii TASS o publikatsiiakh v zarubezhnoi presse o sovetskom raketnom poligone v Kazakhstane” (September 17, 1959), and “Stat’ia inzhener I. Pokorny ‘Tekhnicheskie svedeniia o kosmicheskoi rakete’” (undated), both in Zadacha osoboi gosudarstvennoi vazhnosti, 839–44.

  32. The officers were V. D. Iastrebov and A. A. Maksimov. See memoirs of V. D. Iastrebov in Nachalo kosmicheskoi ery: Vospominaniia veteranov raketno-kosmicheskoi tekhniki i kosmonavtiki, vyp. vtoroi, edited by Iurii A. Mozzhorin and others (Moscow: RNITsKD, 1994), 320–21.

  33. This institutional arrangement has been long known, based on information from such defectors as Leonid Finkel’shtein who, under the pen name Leonid Vladimirov, wrote a number of sensationalist exposés of the Soviet system in the late 1960s and 1970s. Before his defection to Great Britain in 1966, Finkel’shtein had been a journalist for the Soviet popular science journal Znanie-sila (Knowledge is power). See Vladimirov, “Glavlit.” For his monograph on the Soviet space program, filled with many inaccuracies, see Vladimirov, The Russian Space Bluff: The Inside Story of the Soviet Drive to the Moon (New York: Dial Press, 1973).

  34. Journalist Evgenii Riabchikov notes that in 1957 an academy scientist, the academician E. K. Fedorov, was responsible for approving the publication of information on the international geophysical year, the international scientific program that served as a back-drop to Sputnik. See E. Riabchikov, “Zaria kosmicheskoi ery,” Ogonek, no. 40 (1987): 1–3.

  35. Memoirs of Iu. A. Mozzhorin in Nachalo kosmicheskoi ery, 276.

  36. See the letter from Smirnov, Afanas’ev, Zakharov, Dement’ev, Zverev, Kalmykov, Butoma, Shokin, and Keldysh to the Central Committee (July 1967) and the draft of an attached decree, RGAE, f. 4372, op. 81, d. 2519, ll. 132–37.

  37. Viktor V. Favorskii and Ivan V. Meshcheriakov, eds., Kosmonavtika i raketno-kosmicheskaia promyshlennost’: Zarozhdenie i stanovlenie (1946–1975 gg.) (Moscow: Mashinostroenie, 2003), 237.

  38. Ibid., 233–34.

  Notes to pages 60–66  275

  39. Iurii A. Mozzhorin, Tak eto bylo . . . (Moscow: ZAO ‘Mezhdunarodnaia programma obrazovaniia,’ 2000), 298.

  40. A third person, Vladimir Senkevich, also served as Mozzhorin’s deputy for the

  “press group” from 1962 to 1973.

  41. “Nagrady-dostoinym,” Voenno-promyshlennyi kur’er (October 27–November 2, 2004).

  42. In a letter dated June 9, 1964, to the Central Committee, Ustinov, Smirnov, Tyulin, Biriuzov, Keldysh, and Korolev recommended displaying the Vostok, the Vostok descent module, its cosmonaut catapult, the Vostok flight plan, and the Elektron satellites in exhibitions in the United States. See RGAE, f. 29, op. 1, d. 3443, ll. 1–2.

  43. “Postanovlenie Soveta Ministrov sssr ‘O podgotovke sovetskoi vystavki “chelovek v kosmose” dlia demonstratsii v zarubezhnykh stranykh’” (November 26, 1965), in Sovetskaia kosmicheskaia initsiativa, 307–8. See also Maiorov to Baibakov (November 13, 1965), RGAE, f. 4372, op. 81, d. 1239, l. 11. A later Central Committee and Council of Ministers decree dated July 15, 1966, approved a further set of artifacts acceptable for display, this time at an exhibition in Montreal. Despite initial recommendation that the Vostok rocket (with the code name 8A92) be displayed, officials later recanted their initial decision and withdrew permission to display the vehicle. See “Spravka po vsemirnoi vystavke 1967 g. v Kanade (g. Montreal’)” (March 14, 1967), RGAE, f. 4372, op. 81, d. 2519, l. 37.

  44. Mozzhorin, Tak eto bylo . . . , 301–2.

  45. “All Soviet Rockets Orbited by Troops, Soviet General Says,” New York Times, November 30, 1967.

  46. At points other writers were also included in this select club. They included S. A.

  Borzenko and N. N. Denisov ( Pravda), B. P. Konovalov and G. N. Ostroumov ( Izvestiia), N. A. Mel’nikov ( Krasnaia zvezda), Ia. K. Golovanov and V. M. Peskov ( Komsomol’skaia pravda), and V. Golovachev ( Trud).

  47. Mozzhorin, Tak eto bylo . . . , 304.

  48. German Nazarov, “You Cannot Paper Space with Rubles: How to Save Billions” (in Russian), Molodaia gvardiia, no. 4 (1990): 192–207.

  49. The journalist Angus Roxburgh has noted the following characteristics of the Soviet secrecy system: it sought to maintain the sanctity of the public image of the Soviet

  “system”; there was an absence of discussion on alternatives to party policy; an absence of information on the personal lives of party officials; no reporting on disputes; and no discussion on policies identified by the party as “progressive.” See Angus Roxburgh, Pravda:
Inside the Soviet News Machine (New York: George Braziller, 1987), 73–75.

  50. Slava Gerovitch, “‘New Soviet Man’ inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism,” in Osiris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), vol. 22, 135–57.

  51. Asif A. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 454–60.

  52. N. P. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos: Knigaia vtoraia, 1964–1966 gg. (Moscow: TOO Infortekst, 1997), 174–75.

  53. Soviet Space Programs, 1962–65; Goals and Purposes, Achievements, Plans, and International Implications, Prepared for the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, U.S.

  Senate, 89th Cong., 2nd Sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 1966), 557.

  54. N. P. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos: Knigaia tret’ia, 1967–1968 gg. (Moscow: OOO IID

  ‘Novosti kosmonavtiki’, 1999), 35–36.

  55. N. P. Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos: Kniga chetvertaia, 1969–1978 gg. (Moscow: OOO IID

  ‘Novosti kosmonavtiki’, 2001), 54–55.

  276  Notes to pages 66–76

  56. See, for example, Leonov’s claims about Soviet moon missions made while in Japan in June 1969. See Kamanin, Skrytyi kosmos: Kniga chetvertaia, 1969–1978 gg. , 63–64.

  57. Harry Schwartz, “Soviet Reticent on Space Chiefs,” New York Times, October 5, 1959.

  58. Golovanov, Korolev, 553. Emphasis mine.

  59. Christian Lardier, “Soviet Space Designers When They Were Secret,” in History of Rocketry and Astronautics, AAS History Series, vol. 25, edited by Herve Moulin and Donald C. Elder (Novato, Calif.: Univelt, 2003), 319–34.

  60. For American astronauts and the challenges of public relations, see, for example, the “tell-all” memoir of former astronaut Walter Cunningham, The All-American Boys (New York: Macmillan, 1977).

  61. The First Man in Space, translation No. 22, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, May 1, 1961. See also Peter Smolders, Soviets in Space (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1973), 115.

  62. Iaroslav Golovanov, Zametki vashego sovremennika, tom 1, 1953–1970 (Moscow: Dobroe slovo, 2001), Knizhka 16, available online at http://epizodsspace.airbase.ru/bibl