Into the Cosmos Read online

  significantly, influencing many of the cultural reforms and changes in

  the world of the 1960s.

  When Soviet cosmonauts delivered their political message about the

  advantages of socialism over capitalism to Soviet audiences, they were

  preaching mostly to the converted. But when they traveled all over the

  world, then steeped in the process of decolonization and battles over civil

  rights, they also brought with them a powerful message supporting on-

  going struggles for national and racial equality, independence and anti-

  colonialism, modernization and social justice. For girls in the USSR, as

  Roshanna P. Sylvester has noted in her chapter in this book, the achieve-

  ment of the first woman in space offered a powerful inspiration and an

  affirmation of the socialist commitment to educational and professional

  equality. For women in Europe and North America the Soviet feminism

  of the 1950s and 1960s, however incomplete by today’s standards, served

  as an example of accomplishments that were not yet available to them,

  especially in the public sphere and education, and provided models to

  follow. Ideological adversaries, too, became affected by parts of the Soviet

  cultural model, as was evident (even if not explicitly acknowledged) in the

  post- Sputnik changes in educational and science policies in the United

  States, such as dramatically increased federal support and job opportuni-

  ties for scientists, government funding for science and engineering edu-

  cation, gradual expansion of racial and gender diversity in science, the

  establishment of NASA as a centralized (Soviet-type) state agency over-

  seeing research and development, and the decline of the ideology of pure

  science.27

  The discussion of space exploration has traditionally focused on the

  issues of technological competition, Cold War politics, and bickering.

  Cultural aspects of the story have arguably had a much more important

  and long-lasting impact on our lives but have as yet remained consider-

  ably understudied. This book opens up new questions and helps shift

  directions of research away from the traditional terrain toward yet unex-

  plored topics, including popular and material culture, social movements,

  and global cultural change.

  2

  Getting Ready for Krushchev’s Sputnik

  Russian Popular Culture and National Markers

  at the Dawn of the Space Age

  James T. Andrews

  By the late nineteenth century a myriad of popular science journals

  started to discuss the possibility of exploring the cosmos. This develop-

  ing space culture was a natural outgrowth of Russia’s interest with explo-

  ration on land, and subsequently air, that predated the Soviet era. By the

  Soviet 1920s a proliferation of popular books, newspaper articles, and

  pamphlets on air and spaceflight filled the popular press. In the 1930s,

  however, the state began to sponsor more nationalistic public spectacles

  canonizing aeronautical heroes and rocket designers alike.1 Although

  popular film and theater on Soviet space exploration reflected a dynamic

  upsurge in envisioning and colonizing space, under Stalin it simultane-

  ously began to reflect more nationalistic, competitive cultural paradigms.

  In the 1940s the regime’s military subsidies to developing rocket pro-

  grams would certainly peak the government’s interest as a corollary in

  space research later on. However, by the 1950s and the eventual success-

  ful launching of Sputnik, the Khrushchev regime would direct popular

  campaigns more aggressively from above in the press. In the Khrushchev

  era the space program became a national marker for the Soviet Union’s

  technological competition with the Western capitalist world (much like it

  28

  Getting Ready for Krushchev’s Sputnik  29

  was similarly for the American polity and public in the West). In essence,

  this was the only aspect of the grandiose rocket program that could be

  overtly discussed. However, even with this highly secretive and politi-

  cized context in the Cold War era, cosmic visions flourished because they

  had also been deeply embedded cultural signifiers in late imperial and

  Soviet culture—enmeshed in popular film, journals, newspaper items,

  and theater alike.

  Rocketry, Cosmic Culture, and the Public

  Russian cosmic popularization, which began with Konstantin Tsiol-

  kovksii in the late nineteenth century, borrowed from a tradition of in-

  digenous technical expertise stretching back to the late 1600s. The early

  popularizers, like Tsiolkovskii, were mostly technical specialists who

  were deeply influenced by their compatriots who had written on rocketry

  before the 1880s. The use of rockets in Russia, however, does not date

  much earlier than the late seventeenth century. Prior to the time of Tsar

  Peter the Great, Russian rockets were mainly used for fireworks display,

  particularly for members of the tsar’s immediate and extended family.2

  Russian historians of rocketry, such as V. N. Sokolsky, have argued that

  these firework displays were popular among the aristocracy in provincial

  areas of the empire as well—noting that well back into the 1670s, even

  towns such as Ustyuga held these rocket display events generally for the

  region’s nobility.3 However, in the capital cities on occasion these grandi-

  ose tsarist celebrations were interrupted when rockets exploded acciden-

  tally, often hurting those lighting the fireworks.4

  In Moscow in the 1680s the tsarist regime founded the first rocket

  works factory, where both signal and illuminating rockets were made for

  the Russian army. After the founding of Saint Petersburg in 1703, Tsar

  Peter I moved the rocket workshop to his new capital on the Baltic and

  vastly expanded the production of rockets by the early 1720s. In these

  newly constructed rocket workshops on the banks of the Neva River in

  Petersburg, hundreds of rocket specimens were produced in the first

  quarter of the eighteenth century alone. Although they still served as en-

  tertainment at celebratory events for the regime’s courtly entourage and

  the provincial aristocracy, these rockets also were created with the hope

  of serving future military forces.5 The first to actually publish detailed de-

  signs of rockets was Aleksandr D. Zasiadko (1779–1837), a talented engi-

  30  James T. Andrews

  neer and hero of the Napoleonic War of 1812. He designed, at the turn of

  the nineteenth century, a high explosive rocket as well as launchers that

  could fire six rockets simultaneously. He tested these rockets successfully

  near Mogilev and produced them at the Petersburg Pyrotechnic Labora-

  tory. After 1826 a Saint Petersburg Rocket Institute (the first of its kind

  in Eurasia) was established on Volkovoye Field near Saint Petersburg.6

  The military engineer Konstantin I. Konstantinov (1817–1871) re-

  ally helped expand the design, manufacture, and production of rockets

  not just in Saint Petersburg, but in other parts of the Russian empire as

  well. Furthermore, by the 1850s he began to popularize these notions

  through public lectures he gav
e in Saint Petersburg, particularly ones

  at the Mikhailovsky Artillery Academy. Thus in the 1850s an interested

  educated layperson (mainly officer) could hear about devices that could

  move into the air at high velocities. In 1864 the first edition in Russian

  of Konstantinov’s collected public lectures on rocketry were published in

  Saint Petersburg, then translated into French by a Parisian publishing

  house in the late 1860s.7 Konstantinov might be considered therefore the

  first popularizer of rocketry in Russia, as his works appeared in a number

  of journals in the Russian language. Konstantinov’s work, however, was

  mostly published in an array of artillery and military journals throughout

  the 1860s and 1870s.8

  In the mid- to late nineteenth century a host of Russian engineers,

  technicians, and scientists became interested in the futuristic use of

  rockets for air flight, and not solely for military purposes. N. V. Gera-

  simov, a military engineer, was the first in the late nineteenth century to

  propose using a rocket with a gyroscope inside to assure the stability of

  the projectile in flight.9 I. V. Meshchersky (1859–1935), a design engineer,

  began to investigate the physical dynamics of objects in flight with re-

  spect to their weight and the velocity they traveled through air.10 As these

  technical specialists began to dream of rockets moving through the air

  at greater speeds, visionaries started to dream of exploring the cosmos.

  It is at this crucial juncture, in the late nineteenth century, when

  public interest first started to meet indigenous Russian technical vision

  and invention. Those such as the self-taught math and physics teacher

  from Kaluga, Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, started to popularize his work in

  journals and newspaper articles so that interested Russians (beyond the

  military, the tsar’s court, and the aristocracy) could read about these uto-

  Getting Ready for Krushchev’s Sputnik  31

  pian notions. Although Tsiolkovskii’s technical ideals built on previous

  Russian conceptual ingenuity on rocketry, he was obsessed with popular-

  izing these notions. Technically, his innovation was his conception of us-

  ing liquid fuel as a propellant to catapult rockets through the atmosphere,

  as well as his equation regarding the velocity it would take to get a projec-

  tile to break through Earth’s gravitational forces into orbit. Tsiolkovskii,

  however, also wrote voluminous science-fiction novels about the cosmos

  beyond and helped expand on the developing Russian literary tradition

  in this arena. At this time there already was a rich tradition of prerevo-

  lutionary utopian science fiction in Russia—this genre intersected with

  the new and vibrant interest among educated Russians in interplanetary

  travel and stellar configurations. Beginning with the stories of those such

  as V. Taneev and V. N. Chikolev, written from the late 1870s to the 1890s,

  there were many novels written by Russians about themes as diverse as

  alien life, new forms of energy, and interplanetary travel.11 The engineer

  V. N. Chikolev wrote science-fiction tales in Russian in the 1890s, such

  as his tale about a world and cosmos transformed by technology and elec-

  tricity.12

  Editors of such journals as the Moscow magazine Vokrug sveta

  (Around the world) became particularly interested in soliciting articles

  for their readers on rocketry and the cosmos. Vokrug sveta was the most popular late-tsarist-era journal covering global exploration, and its editors

  thus took an interest in such writers as the young provincial teacher, K.

  E. Tsiolkovskii, whose visionary fiction on exploring outer space became

  popular with readers in urban areas. Around the World carried articles

  on world expeditions, geographic and geologic analysis, anthropological

  logs, space travel, and even travel log narratives of Russians visiting dis-

  tant lands. Images of traveling into outer space became part of a greater

  fascination, on the part of the Russian prerevolutionary reading public,

  with exploratory narratives in general.13 Later cosmonauts could be envis-

  aged as inheritors of the pantheon of a long line of Russian explorers and

  heroes, from Tian-Shanskii to Otto Shmidt, from the Caucasus in the

  nineteenth century to the polar north in Stalin’s times.

  One of the first space travel stories for popular consumption in tsar-

  ist Russia was Tsiolkovksii’s Na lune (On the moon), which was first serialized in Vokrug sveta in 1893. Tsiolkovskii’s novel is about our nearest celestial body, Earth’s satellite or moon. Its main protagonist is a young

  32  James T. Andrews

  astronomy enthusiast (a popular hobby in Russia at that time) who re-

  lates a dream he had while in a very deep sleep. The young man dreams

  that he and his physicist friend had been transported to the moon. There

  they travel, take observations, perform scientific experiments, and just

  enjoy their stellar adventure. Toward the end of the story, they are about

  to freeze during one of the long, cold lunar nights, when suddenly the

  young man awakes from his dream and writes it down in his journal.

  This story thus confronts men setting foot on the moon eventually, as

  they would in the late 1960s. It also provides an imaginative escape for

  its main character to go beyond what was capable at that moment—

  much like Tsiolkovskii himself, who constantly envisioned the technical

  achievements of the future.14

  An interest in outer space and air flight was only one aspect of a

  greater interest in astronomy by the Russian reader. Amateur astronomy

  societies proliferated in Russia in the decades immediately preceding the

  revolutions of 1917. The Russian Amateur Astronomy Society, founded

  in Saint Petersburg, published a widely read journal Mirovedenie (Study of the natural world) that spread knowledge on astronomy, stellar configurations, and popular information on other planets in the galaxy. This

  society helped form public viewings through its large telescope on the

  grounds of the Tenishev School in Saint Petersburg. Furthermore, it so-

  licited articles from astronomy and physics professors that could explain

  complex stellar configurations in popular, diluted form for its eclectic

  readership. Saint Petersburg professors, such as K. D. Pokrovskii and A.

  V. Bochek, wrote enticing articles on the lunar surfaces of the moon as

  well as topics as diverse as shooting stars and the origins of the planet

  Mars.15

  Although World War I (1914–18), two social revolutions in 1917, and

  a civil war (1918–20) certainly interrupted the cultivation of popular

  interest in the cosmos, the 1920s would be a time throughout Eurasia

  when interest in air flight and rocketry expanded dramatically. The air

  and cosmos fixation became a cultural craze in Soviet Russia during the

  interwar era.16 Scientific societies in Leningrad, as well as in Moscow,

  sponsored numerous events and public disputations on a variety of plan-

  ets such as Mars. Museums, such as the famed Polytechnic Museum

  in Moscow, sponsored public lectures by astronomers and physicists on

  topics of great interest: life on Mars, stellar configurations, rocket flight


  Getting Ready for Krushchev’s Sputnik  33

  in interplanetary space, and so on. People waited in long lines at the Poly-

  technic in Moscow to get tickets to some of these disputations, which

  generally featured slides and demonstrations. These lectures packed the

  large auditorium of the Polytechnic, and visitors were eager to see awe-

  inspiring photographic exhibits on the cosmos.17

  In the 1920s eclectic groups and individuals made a particularly im-

  passioned effort to popularize notions of cosmic exploration. The biocos-

  mists were interested in both spreading news on interplanetary travel

  and focusing on cosmic flight as a means to achieve immortality.18 What

  is critical about their group of amorphous followers is that it included

  both the likes of renowned scientists (such as the geochemist Vladimir

  Vernadskii) as well as influential Bolsheviks (such as Leonid Krasin, the

  individual who headed the design committee to erect the Lenin mauso-

  leum).19 Professors like N. A. Rynin in Leningrad became almost full-

  time popularizers of particularly spaceflight, while the public eagerly

  consumed journal and newspaper articles devoted to this topic.20 Rynin,

  a prolific writer on Russian rocketry and astronautics, was also interest-

  ed in organizing public astronautical societies in the 1920s. He began

  to write and publish a multivolume encyclopedia on cosmonautics that

  placed him at the forefront of the popularization of rocketry in Russia.21

  During the Soviet 1920s professional science educators also served

  as popularizers of spaceflight and rocketry. Those Russian intellectuals,

  such as the Leningrad journalist and public educator Ia. I. Perel’man,

  had more didactic purposes in mind than Rynin. Perel’man, for instance,

  published many articles on rocket science and space travel in the widely

  distributed popular journals he edited, such as V masterskoi prirody (In nature’s workshop). These articles had an educational focus, attempting

  to explain the basics of gravitational forces and rudimentary rocketry to a

  popular audience.22 Perel’man was ideally suited for this fervent venture

  because of the popularity of his book series Zanimatel’naia nauka (Sci-

  ence for entertainment), which were used as self-education for Russians.

  Their general circulation in the 1920s and 1930s numbered in the mil-