Into the Cosmos Page 46

  in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 185–202; and Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

  57. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, 259.

  58. Richard Stites has shed light on the contradictory nature of the early Soviet scientific enlightenment, arguing that the fascination with immortality and space travel

  “illustrate[s] vividly the relationship between the futuristic speculation and pathos of the period and the reality from which it arose: immortality yearned for in a land still groaning from a decade of holocaust; space flight, in a land where wooden plow and horse-cart were everyday sights”; see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 169.

  59. On the intellectual world of Tsiolkovskii, see Siddiqi, “Imagining the Cosmos”; James T. Andrews, Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii: Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009); and McMillen, “Space Rapture,” 53. McMillen describes Tsiolkovskii as “more metaphysicist than engineer.” This intertwining of mystical and technological utopianism, Svetlana Boym has suggested, is “part of a history of technology in Russia, an ‘enchanted technology’ founded on charisma as much as calculus, on pre-modern myth as well as modern science”; see Svetlana Boym, “Kosmos: Remembrances of the Future,” in Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), 83.

  60. As if to underscore the thin line between the metaphorical and the literal, the Militant Atheists raised funds for the construction of a “Bezbozhnik” airplane (later followed by a “Bezbozhnik” tank and submarine). The league ceremonially presented the airplane as a gift to the Red Army in June 1929. Resources were mobilized with calls for donations in the league’s periodicals. See “SVB v bor’be za mobilizatsiiu sredstv,” Antireligioznik, no. 6 (1935): 62. On atheist propaganda in the Soviet industrial complex, see V. N.

  Kuriatnikov, “Vlianie religioznoi obstanovki SSSR na stanovlenie neftianogo kompleksa Uralo-Povolzhia v 30-50ee gg. 20th veka,” Religiovedenie: Nauchno teroeticheskii zhurnal, no. 4 (2006): 42–47.

  61. Bezbozhnik contained articles linking flight and religion, such as “The Church and Aviation” ( Bezbozhnik, no. 8 [1935]), and illustrations of technology colonizing the sky: an airplane with “Bezbozhnik” written across the body pursuing God and a cupid as they fly off into the distance (cover of Bezbozhnik, no. 22 [November 1928]); a woman parachuting

  298  Notes to pages 173–174

  in front of a church with an airplane flying in the background, and a zeppelin serenely floating above the city. See the covers on the following Bezbozhnik issues: no. 11 (1928); no.

  2 (1935); and no. 8 (1935).

  62. See the works of Nikolai Petrovich Kamenshchikov, and Grigorii Abramovich

  Gurev’s Kopernikovskaia eres’ v proshlom i nastoiashchem i istoriia vzaimootnoshenii nauki i religii (Leningrad: GAIZ, 1933) and Nauka i religiia o vselennoi (Moscow: OGIA, 1934). See also Gurev’s articles in the atheist journal Antireligioznik: G. Gurev, “Vopros o nachale i kontse vselennoi v propagande bezbozhiia,” Antireligioznik, no. 7 (July 1926): 17–26; G.

  Gurev, “Vopros o nachale i kontse vselennoi v propagande bezbozhiia (prodolzhenie),”

  Antireligioznik, no. 9 (October 1926): 55–62; and G. Gurev, “Vopros o nachale i kontse vselennoi v propagande bezbozhiia (konets),” Antireligioznik, no. 10 (October 1926): 11–21.

  63. For instance, Kamenshchikov’s Pravda o neve: Antireligioznye besedy s krest’ianami o mirozdanii (The truth about the sky: Antireligious conversations with peasants about the origins of the world) (Leningrad: Priboi, 1931), covered such folk beliefs as “how Kuzma forecast the weather” and “the beginning and the end of the world.” Kamenshchikov’s Mir bezbozhnika (The world of the atheist) (Leningrad: Priboi, 1931) asserted the authority of science over the cosmos with chapters like “The world is not as it seems, and is not as it is presented by the church”; “The construction and evolution of the universe”; and the past and future of Earth. Besides his prolific atheist publications, Professor Kamenshchikov also set up an astronomical exhibit of Foucault’s Pendulum at the St. Isaac Cathedral in Leningrad, which briefly served as an antireligious museum. Kamenshchikov published other works that used astronomical findings in atheist propaganda as well as prominent and widely used astronomy textbooks. See N. Kamenshchikov, Astronomiia bezbozhnika (Leningrad: Priboi, 1931); Kamenshchikov, Astronomicheskie zadachi dlia iunoshestva (Moscow: GIZ, 1923); and Kamenshchikov, Nachal’naia astronomiia (Moscow: GIZ, 1924).

  64. N. Kamenshchikov , Chto videli na nebe popy, a chto videm my (Moscow: Ateist, 1930).

  65. The letter was published in Izvestiia on March 27, 1930, and reproduced in the popular science journal Mirovedenie, nos. 3–4 (1930): 141–49. A response to an alleged comment made by the pope about the repression of culture and science in the Soviet Union, the letter was a Soviet critique of the Vatican’s historical repression of astronomers and science in general.

  66. Sovremennaia arkhitektura 3 (1927): 79.

  67. Designed by architects M. Barshch and M. Siniavskii, the Moscow Planetarium, a brilliant example of constructivist architecture, was conceived as a monument to technology and scientific materialism. Considering the material conditions of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the mobilization of resources for a planetarium is a testament to the faith in the potential of scientific enlightenment. The art historian Catherine Cooke has pointed out that progressive Soviet architects hoped that the construction of the planetarium would jump-start bureaucratic inertia to promote more rational Soviet construction practices and progressive city planning; see Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde: Theories of Art, Architecture, and the City (London: Academy Editions, 1995), 133–35.

  68. Aleksey Gan, “Novomu teatru—novoe zdanie,” Sovremennaia arkhitektura 3 (1927): 80–81. Interestingly, Gan sees the theater in general as a regressive, rather than a progressive, force. The theater, Gan writes, is nothing other than a space to satisfy a primitive instinct for spectacle, an instinct that will persist “until society grows to the level of a scientific understanding [of the world] and the instinctual need for spectacle comes up against the real phenomena of the world and technology.” The planetarium, then, while still satisfying the instinct for spectacle, “goes from servicing religion to servicing science.”

  69. Ibid., 81.

  Notes to pages 174–177  299

  70. B. A. Vorontsov-Veliaminov, Astronomicheskaia Moskva v 20e gody: Istoriko-astro-nomicheskie issledovaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1986); and V. N. Komarov and K. A. Portsevskii, Moskovskii planetarii (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1979).

  71. Il’ia Il’f and Evgenii Petrov, Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev: Zolotoi telenok (Moscow: Eksmo, 2006), 456.

  72. Ibid., 458.

  73. Nicholas Timasheff’s classic work explains the abandonment utopianism for more traditional values in the mid-1930s as a “great retreat”; see Nicholas Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1946).

  74. On the reversal of Soviet church-state relations during World War II, see M. V.

  Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i sovetskoe gosudarstvo v 1943–1964 godakh: Ot

  ‘premiriia’ k novoi voine (St. Petersburg: DEAN + ADIA-M, 1995); S. Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism, and Alliance Politics, 1941–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Davis, Long Walk to Church.

  75. Emblematic of this ideological turn away from antireligious rhetoric was the dis-banding of the League of Militant Atheists and the shutting down of most Soviet atheist periodical publications in 1941.

  76. For an overview of the history of the “Knowledge” Society, see James T. Andrews
,

  “All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge (“Znanie”

  Society),” in Modern Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union, vol. 2, entry #124, edited by Donald R. Kelley (Gainesville, Fla.: Academic Press International, 1990).

  77. Lectures of the period include V. A. Shishakov, Nebo i nebesnye iavleniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovksogo planetariia, 1940); M. I. Shakhnovich, Sueverie i nauchnoe predvidenie (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1945); B. A. Vorontsov-Veliaminov, Vselennaia (Moscow: Gostekhizdat, 1947); M. V. Emdin, Nauka i religiia: Stenografiia publichnoi lektsii, prochi-tannoi v 1948 g v Leningrade (Leningrad: Obshchestvo po rasprostraneniiu politicheskikh i nauchnykh znanii, 1948); and V. A. Shishakov, Nauka i religiia o stroenii vselennoi: Nauchno-populiarnaia lektsiia s metodicheskimi ukazaniiami (Moscow: Pravda, 1950).

  78. Shkarovskii notes that atheism was barely mentioned as late as the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952; see Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i sovetskoe gosudarstvo v 1943–1964 godakh, 46.

  79. On July 7, 1954, the party issued a decree titled “On Great Insufficiencies in the Propagating of Scientific Atheism and on Measures for Its Improvement,” criticizing the low level of attention that antireligious propaganda and atheist education had received in previous decades. Yet the direction of the party line was so ambiguous that interpretations on the local level fell on both sides of the spectrum—from excessive permissiveness to excessive force against believers and the church. Reports from local organs about believers protesting state measures against them called for a second decree to provide party cadres with a more clear direction. “On Errors in Scientific-Atheist Propaganda among the People,” issued on November 10, 1954, criticized the “administrative methods” employed to harass the clergy believers. On the developments and reception of the 1954 atheist decrees by party, state, and church, see Chumachenko, Church and State in Soviet Russia, 129–34.

  80. The Third Party Program underscored the increasingly important role of “communist morality” as “the administrative regulation of the relations among people decreases.”

  See Programma Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza priniata XXII s’ezdom KPSS

  (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1971), 116–21. As the historian Stephen Kotkin has observed, in the evolving definition of socialism, the few constants were a commitment to modernization and Soviet distinctiveness. See Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic

  300  Notes to pages 177–181

  Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). On the importance of values in communist modernity, see David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). On communist morality in the Khrushchev era, see Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Arguably, then, what made Soviet modernization distinct was its promise of a morally superior modernity.

  81. Historian Mark Sandle has noted that the Third Party Program “made it clear that the definition of ‘needs’ would be highly circumscribed. The inculcation of Communist consciousness through extensive agitprop work would result in the population itself moderating their demands”; see Mark Sandle, “Brezhnev and Developed Socialism: The Ideology of Zastoi,” in Brezhnev Reconsidered, edited by Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 177.

  82. See David E. Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Study of Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975).

  83. The society had an expansive institutional structure organized around the All-Union “Knowledge” Society and extending down through the republic, regional, and local level. Corresponding local branches of the party exercised control over each local branch of the society. GARF, f. 9547, op. 1, d. 1048, l. 5.

  84. The party’s renewed interest in atheist education was also made evident by the re-introduction of “Foundations of Scientific Atheism” (Osnovy nauchnogo ateizma) in higher education. See Michael Froggatt, “Renouncing Dogma, Teaching Utopia: Science in Schools under Khrushchev,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, edited by Polly Jones (New York: Routledge), 250–67.

  85. See Estonian astronomer G. Naan’s article “Chelovek, bog i kosmos,” Nauka i religiia, no. 2 (1961): 5–10; “Veril li Tsiolkovskii v boga?” Nauka i religiia, no. 3 (1962): 25; the Ukrainian astronomer S. Vsekhsviatskii’s “Tainy nebesnykh stranits,” Nauka i religiia, no. 1 (1963): 8–13; and “Mogli li kosmonavty videt’ boga?” Nauka i religiia, no. 1 (1963). A number of articles authored by cosmonauts themselves were also published, such as Iu.

  Gagarin, “Na poroge griadushchikh shturmov,” Nauka i religiia, no. 4 (1964): 10 and K.

  Feoktistov’s “Neskol’ko slov o bessmertii,” Nauka i religiia, no. 4 (1966). The journal also dedicated an entire issue to space exploration and cosmology; see “Kosmos, kosmogoniia, kosmologiia (Podborka statei i interview),” Nauka i religiia, no. 12 (1968).

  86. See the inside cover of Nauka i religiia, no. 1 (1959).

  87. On the transfer of the Moscow Planetarium, see GARF, f. 9547, op. 1, d. 1429; and Tsentral’nyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy (TsAGM), f. 709, op. 1, d. 177.

  88. TsAGM, f. 709, op. 1, d. 177, l. 75. In 1959 the Moscow Planetarium had an income of 1,906,000 rubles, while its expenditures constituted 2,071,000 rubles—that is, it had a 165,000 ruble deficit.

  89. GARF, f. A-561, op. 1, d. 492.

  90. In 1974 planetariums across the USSR hosted 3,586,000 lectures on science in general and 897,000 lectures on atheism in particular. This includes lectures conducted beyond planetarium buildings by “mobile” planetariums. See Iu. K. Fishevskii, “Obshchestvo ‘Znanie’ i propaganda nauchnogo mirovozzrenia,” Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma 19 (1974): 76.

  91. TsAGM, f. 709, op. 1, d. 177, l. 75, Decision of the Council of Ministers (April 17, 1959) and the Mosgorispolkom (June 29, 1959).

  92. Ibid.

  93. Some prominent examples include the Gorky/Nizhnyi Novgorod Planetarium,

  Notes to pages 181–190  301

  which opened in 1948 in the space of the Alekseevskaia Church of the Blagoveshchen-skii Monastery; the Barnaul Planetarium, which was constructed in the space of the Kre-stovozdvizhenskaia Church and opened in 1950; and the Kiev Planetarium, the oldest in Ukraine, which was opened in 1952 in the former Aleksandr Catholic Cathedral.

  94. For an excellent description of day-to-day enlightenment work conducted through the planetarium, see the memoirs of Kharkiv Planetarium lecturer Natal’ia Konstantinovna Bershova, “Esli zvezdy zazhigaiut . . . Zapiski lektora Khar’kovskogo Planetariia,”

  available online at http://kharkov.vbelous.net/planetar/index.htm.

  95. In 1963 the cosmonauts A. G. Nikolaev and G. S. Titov lectured at the Moscow Planetarium. GARF, f. 9547, op. 1, d. 1324, l. 9.

  96. GARF, f. 9547, op. 1, d. 1048, l. 14.

  97. Ibid.

  98. GARF, f. 9547, op. 1, d. 1324, ll. 26–27. Based on my archival research, this unwillingness on the part of scientists, and the intelligentsia in general, to agitate against religion was evidently widespread.

  99. GARF, f. 9547, op. 1, d. 1048, l. 15.

  100. TsAGM, f. 1782, op. 3, d. 183.

  101. TsAGM, f. 1782, op. 3, d. 183, l. 4.

  102. Ibid., 6.

  103. Ibid., 7.

  104. lbid.

  105. GARF, A–561, op. 1, d. 492, ll. 25–28.

  106. Ibid., 36–39.

  107. GARF, f. 9547, op. 1, d. 1048, l. 22.

  108. Rossiiski gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), f. 71, op. 1, d. 15, l. 171.

  109. Ibid., 151–53.

  110. The first expeditions to study religiosity were conducted in the late 1950s by the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (under the guidance of the historian Aleksandr Il’ich Klibanov) and the Department of At
heism at Moscow State University.

  111. For a succinct discussion of the development of the sociology of religion in the post-Stalin period, see Mikhail Smirnov, “Sovremennaia rossiiskaia sotsiologiia religii: Otkuda i zachem?,” Religiovedenie: Nauchno-teoreticheskii zhurnal, no. 2 (Moscow 2007), and M. M.

  Shakhnovich, “Otechestvennoe religiovedenie 20-80kh godov XX veka: Ot kakogo nasled-stva my otkazyvaemsia,” in Ocherki po istorii religiovedeniia, edited by M. M. Shakhnovich (Saint Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo SPBGU, 2006).

  112. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 37, l. 31.

  113. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 156, l. 29.

  114. Ibid.

  115. Ibid., 47.

  116. Ibid., 48.

  117. Ibid., 139.

  118. RGANI, f. 72, op. 1, d. 15, ll. 151–53.

  119. M. B. Mitin, “O soderzhanii i zadachakh nauchno-ateisticheskoi propagandy v sovremennykh usloviiakh,” in Nauka i religiia: Sbornik stenogramm lektsii, prochitannykh na Vsesoiuznom soveshchanii-seminare po nauchno-ateisticheskim voprosam (Moscow: Znanie, 1958), 17.

  120. Naan, “Chelovek, bog i kosmos,” 6.

  121. Ibid., 7.

  122. RGANI, f. 5, op. 55, d. 72, l. 53.

  302  Notes to pages 190–196

  123. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 126, ll. 33–34.

  124. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 37, l. 85.

  125. V. N. Komarov and V. V. Kaziutinskii, eds., Voprosy mirovozzreniia v lektsiiakh po astronomii: Sbornik (Moscow: Znanie, 1974), 4.

  126. Gerovitch, “‘New Soviet Man’ inside Machine,” 152.

  127. RGASPI, f. 606, op. 4, d. 133.

  128. Vladimir Voinovich, “Moskva 2042,” in Utopia i antiutopia XX veka (Moskva: Progress, 1990), 387–716.

  129. Boris Groys, “Nelegitimnyi kosmonavt,” Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal/Moscow Art Magazine 65–66 (June 2007), available online at http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/65-66/kosmonavt/.