Into the Cosmos Page 8
ible hole about information in the present.3
Secrecy was not simply a regime for preventing the transmission
of information from one community to another; it also encapsulated an
Cosmic Contradictions 49
ongoing discursive metacommentary about the relationship between the
space program and the Soviet populace in the 1960s. In every proclama-
tion about a new achievement in space, in every declaration about the
heroic work of a cosmonaut, and in all ephemera of the culture of Soviet
cosmic travel was embedded a conversation about the acceptable limits of
secrecy. Yet because of secrecy, the Soviet space program was victim to a
fundamental contradiction resulting from two countervailing impulses.
On the one hand, party and government officials sought to promote the
space program as much as possible, aided by rhetoric that repeatedly con-
nected the triumphs of the space program with the power of socialism.
On the other hand, those selfsame officials accepted the need to maintain
deep secrecy about almost all aspects of the enterprise. These antitheti-
cal impulses gave the Soviet space program, both in its internal work-
ings and its public image, a peculiar quality that distinguished it from its
American counterpart. The discourse surrounding the space effort was
characterized by a “rhetorical tension” that was never fully resolved but
embodied and amplified by the frequently ambiguous messages about
the program’s goals, successes, and values.
This chapter explores this “rhetorical tension” to answer a funda-
mental question: how was it that the Soviet space program—the central
advertising emblem of postwar Soviet Union—was shrouded in the high-
est secrecy and drowned in draconian censorship at the very time when
the controls over cultural production were at their most liberal, during
the Khrushchev “thaw”?4 Any possible answer to this question must lie in
a deep exploration of the creation, uses, and repercussions of the secrecy
regime in the Soviet space program—in particular, the edicts, prohibi-
tions, and procedures of Glavlit, the main censorship body within the So-
viet government, that were embedded throughout the entire Soviet media
apparatus, including those publications that consistently extolled the glo-
ries of the Soviet space program to the populace in the 1960s and 1970s.
The chapter explores the motivations and rationales behind the strict se-
crecy regime in the space program that were rooted in the larger culture
of institutional secrecy in the Soviet Union that originated in the 1920s,
soon after the October Revolution. It deconstructs the practice of secrecy
as manifested in the space program—its main characteristics, how it op-
erated, explicable patterns, and most important, the effects of the secrecy
regime for the public understanding of Soviet cosmic exploits during the
1960s and 1970s. Official pronouncements—whether communicated at
50 Asif A. Siddiqi
a press conference, depicted in a postage stamp, or recounted in a mu-
seum placard—were the end results of deeply contested visions of the So-
viet space program. These expressions did not reflect a monolithic stand
on such issues as modernity, progress, technology, and socialism; rather,
they were the outcome of negotiation between various parties invested in
maintaining, reinforcing, or undermining secrecy.
Glavlit
Drawing from a long tradition of censorship during the imperial era,
the Bolsheviks put their particular imprint on the control of information
immediately after coming to power. Only days after the storming of the
Winter Palace, on November 10, 1917 (“new style,” referring to the Grego-
rian calendar, which was adopted in Russia in 1918), the Bolshevik Party
issued a “Decree on the Press,” which, conceding that the “bourgeois
press” was “no less dangerous than bombs and machine-guns,” prohib-
ited all press that advocated “open resistance or disobedience against the
workers’ and peasants’ government.”5 The culmination of this process
was the formation in 1922 of the Main Administration for Literary and
Publishers’ Issues (Glavnoe upravlenie po delam literatury i izdatel’stva,
or Glavlit) as part of Narkompros, the governmental body in charge of
cultural activities.6 Throughout the 1920s Glavlit displayed a noticeable
latitude in what was allowed for publication, in line with the economic
liberalism of the New Economic Policy (NEP) era, although simultane-
ously the party apparat encoded new rules governing and limiting the
circulation of information within the party structure. A whole host of
military, economic, political, and “general” information was blanketed
under various degrees of classification.7
As the historian A. V. Blium has noted, the “era of total secrecy . .
. began” by the late 1920s, near the end of the NEP era.8 Glavlit’s work
expanded in leaps and bounds, helped by special “lists” ( perechen’), which themselves were secret, that enumerated the types of information that
were considered secret, such as statistical information on the homeless
and unemployed, information about sanitary conditions in jails, crime
statistics, numbers of suicides, and so on. All “real” economic informa-
tion, particularly at the national level, was also shrouded in secrecy, while
all descriptions of calamities or accidents, especially those dealing with
lack of food, were prohibited from publication. Already by the late 1920s
Cosmic Contradictions 51
any information that privileged the West or showed Western industry in
a favorable light, at least as compared with the Soviet Union, was excised
from publication. Acting on these lists, Glavlit issued a barrage of direc-
tives to control the flow of particular types of information.
The repressive climate in the late Stalin years brought more draco-
nian secrecy measures into law. Concern over revealing scientific secrets
may have played a role in this process. After the infamous Kliueva-Roskin
affair, when information about a supposed “cure” for cancer was passed
on to American scientists during a brief period of openness in 1946, the
Supreme Soviet issued a decree the following year intensifying the penal-
ties for revealing “state secrets.”9 In March 1948, Stalin signed a Council
of Ministers resolution that enacted a total ban on all information that
touched on state interests. The fact that the decree itself was classified top
secret was emblematic of the nature of secrecy in the Soviet context. As
the scholar Yorlam Gorlizki has noted: “Stalin pressed the [new secrecy]
campaign beyond any rational limits so that it assumed a completely in-
consistent and illogical form.”10 He notes that the Council of Ministers
was flooded with inquiries, “some quite farcical,” about the kind of infor-
mation that needed to be kept secret. Even evidently innocent informa-
tion about the operation of a ministry had to be kept closely guarded and
“de-secretized” if previously out in the open. Given that the Soviet ballis-
tic m
issile program, which eventually became the Soviet space program,
was undergoing its birth pangs at the time, it is not surprising that even
“normal” aspects of its functioning, such as recruiting secretarial or cus-
todial staff or housing issues, were shrouded in a blanket of secrecy. The
March 1948 decree was strictly enforced at the lowest levels of missile
design organizations throughout the 1950s.11
The “thaw” under Khrushchev, the zenith of Soviet successes in
space, continued the paradoxical and contradictory tendencies of Soviet
secrecy. As others have shown, print culture was crucial during this pe-
riod as a vehicle for assisting in social change, not so much to challenge
the norms of prevailing Soviet life but “to reinvest them with the signifi-
cance they had lost over the previous thirty years.”12 A combination of new
publications, a fresh philosophy about the role of the written word for
the future of socialism, and fluctuating notions of what was permissible,
resulted ironically in a “flood of new instructions from above,” mean-
ing that “Party controls over print culture proliferated in the post-Stalin
period, even if they did not intensify.”13 A Glavlit report issued in 1965,
52 Asif A. Siddiqi
reviewing its previous two years of operation to “protect military and state
secrets in print, radio, television, and cinema, and … entertainment”
and to “prevent the spread of foreign publications in the country con-
taining anti-Soviet anti-socialist materials,” underscored just how busy
Soviet censors had been. In 1964, Glavlit employees “monitored” nearly
192,000 pages of literature, compared to 186,000 the year before. Their
work included preparing a new “List of information forbidden to publish
in the open press, transmitted on radio and television” as well as a similar
list meant for regional media outlets. Relevant instructions for the space
program were enumerated in Glavlit’s “Instructions on how to prepare
for the publication of information on scientific and technological achieve-
ments of the USSR, which can be recognized as patentable inventions
and discoveries.”14
Glavlit had their hands full as the Soviet space program reached its
zenith in the early 1960s. The early cosmic successes coincided with a
massive growth in Soviet print publications; almost a quarter of the non-
specialized popular journals in existence in the late 1980s were estab-
lished in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Many of these new journals,
such as Iunost’ (Youth, established 1955), Iunyi tekhnik (Junior technician, 1956), and Iskatel’ (Adventurer, 1961) were key avenues for bringing the Soviet space program to the masses. Older journals, such as Ogonek
(Light), Tekhnika-molodezhi (Technology for youth), and Znanie-sila (Knowledge is power), continued into the 1960s with the same vein of
technologically utopian literature that was characteristic of their articles
in the decade before. The popular literature on space that emerged in
the wake of Sputnik in 1957 did not emerge out of a vacuum but out of a strong and vibrant tradition of space-themed writing that was ubiquitous
in the early and mid-1950s.15
What changed was the scale and content of it—that is, there was
much more of it and there were now “real” events as points of reference,
not just idle fantasy. Spaceships replaced airplanes as harbingers of the
future, a change reflected in the transformation of the Air Force’s banner
journal, Vestnik vozdushnogo flota (Journal of the air fleet), originally established in 1918, to Aviatsiia i kosmonavtika (Aviation and cosmonautics) in 1962. The latter journal served as one of the mouthpieces of the Soviet
space establishment. Major General Nikolai Kamanin, the air force offi-
cial in charge of cosmonaut training who served on the journal’s editorial
board helped its editor, Colonel Ivan Shipilov, establish “close ties” with
Cosmic Contradictions 53
highly placed but secret designers and scientists so that Shipilov could
“use this connection for the cause [of popularizing space exploration].”16
The post-thaw period saw strengthened and more streamlined con-
trols over what was permitted in print. In 1965, although it was techni-
cally forbidden to mention the name of the mysterious “chief designer”
of the space program, it was still acceptable to note that “owing to ab-
normalities associated with the situation of the cult of personality, [his]
rocket aircraft was flight-tested only in 1940.”17 This oblique allusion to
the Stalinist purges was whitewashed out by the time the first biogra-
phies of Sergei Korolev appeared in the late 1960s.18 To eliminate such
“deviations” from the correct ideological stance and also to encourage
publishing houses and other media organs to take more responsibility for
censorship in the post-thaw era, the secretariat of the Central Committee
issued a new comprehensive decree on secrecy in January 1969. The new
law required Glavlit to “strengthen control over the maintenance of state
and military secrets in the press. To establish that all questions arising
in the process of preliminary monitoring of works of an ideological and
political nature, are to be examined at the level of heads of Glavlit and
the heads of publishing agencies and cultural organizations. Comments
from [Glavlit] workers are to be brought to the attention of the authors of
the works without reference to the censor. Violation of this order shall be
considered a violation of state and party discipline.”19
The decree effectively strengthened Glavlit’s control over both infor-
mation and ideological content. At the same time, the immovable curtain
between the author and the censor was rendered further opaque. Eight
years later, at the height of Brezhnev’s stagnation, the Central Commit-
tee department in charge of censorship was able to proudly report that
the clauses of the decree had been properly executed and that “Glavlit
systematically informs the leaders of the organs of press, information,
and culture, and in necessary cases party and Soviet organs on errors of
ideological and political nature, contained in materials meant for publica-
tion or public use.”20
The censorship apparatus based around Glavlit remained largely
the same throughout the 1960s and 1970s. From 1953 on Glavlit, now
with the official expansion Main Directorate for the Protection of Mili-
tary and State Secrets in Print, was subordinated directly to the Council
of Ministers—that is, the highest governmental authority in the Soviet
Union.21 In principle, Glavlit was an execution authority, receiving gen-
54 Asif A. Siddiqi
eral ideological guidelines from the Department of Propaganda of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party, one of numerous depart-
ments responsible for any and every aspect of Soviet society, culture, and
the economy.22 This department was itself overseen by a secretary of the
Central Committee, one responsible for “ideological issues” who had the
last word on censorship.23 On paper, these party functionaries were re-
sponsible for determining th
e appropriate ideological content of open ex-
pression so that Glavlit could do its mission of censorship, but in practice,
Glavlit’s functions were a mix of policy and implementation, an overlap
that mirrored the connection between two separate but also overlapping
functions: ideological policing and protecting secrets.24
Why Secrecy?
Iaroslav Golovanov, the famed and now late Russian space journal-
ist, rationalizing why there was so much secrecy surrounding the space
program, once astutely noted that: “Secrecy was necessary so that no one
would overtake us. But later when they did overtake us, we maintained
secrecy so that no one knew that we had been overtaken.”25 Golovanov’s
half joke was not so far from the truth in that it encapsulated two dif-
ferent rationales: to protect the strengths of the Soviet state, usually of a
military nature; and to protect the weaknesses of the Soviet state, some-
times military but more often than not economical or social. Disaggregat-
ing these rationales reveals an array of subordinate factors, some of them
repeated explicitly in many Glavlit documents in the postwar period and
evident in the workings of censorship within the space industry. These
rationales include: to protect information necessary for national security;
to present the Soviet Union to the outside world in the most favorable
light by controlling information seen as damaging to the national reputa-
tion; to present a monolithic view of the Soviet Union where there is no
dissent over state policies; to convey that the party and government are
in control, whether over ideas, technology, or nature, and that there are
no accidental outcomes in Soviet society; and to protect Soviet claims to
inventions and technologies by not revealing too much information about
them—a point mentioned in many Glavlit documents.26 Ultimately, as
the long history of Glavlit shows, secrecy was also endemic because of
the enduring tradition of censorship in the Soviet (and before it, the Rus-
sian context)—that is, there was a self-sustaining quality to the sheen of
Cosmic Contradictions 55
secrecy, ensuring that it had an indelible and perpetual presence in the
Soviet space program despite the many successes and failures of the ef-