on February 26, 1965. Even with these guidelines senior party officials
continued to waffle about displaying the Vostok and had to be apprised
of the most arcane details of exhibitions. When space industry officials
organized an exhibit entitled “Man in Space” for foreign audiences, the
discussion once again went up to the Politburo level in August 1965. As a
result of these discussions, the Central Committee and Council of Min-
isters issued a further decree three months later approving the Vostok
exhibit.43 In all, it took eighteen months to simply find agreement about
what to show abroad.
If the Politburo often had to give the final word, Mozzhorin and
Eremenko wielded enormous power because they provided the first and
most important filter for information that the architects of the space pro-
gram wanted to publish. As such, every single pronouncement on the
Soviet space program—whether in a book, a newspaper, a magazine,
a poster, a postage stamp, or a placard at a museum—passed through
the hands of these two men, who had a special office in the main TASS
building in Moscow. Mozzhorin later recalled that managing this affair
was a “nightmare” partly because he was frequently caught between the
demands of leading space designers who wanted recognition and glory
and party ideologues who decried such attempts because they might vio-
late secrecy edicts. Mozzhorin’s group also feared that they would “let”
something out and be penalized for it, and thus usually erred on the side
of caution, even if the information seemed benign. He was particularly
afraid that some or other party member would find something published
in a foreign news magazine about the Soviet space program that should
not have been there.
In one case Mozzhorin was nearly dismissed from his post. In 1967
he approved an essay for publication in the newspaper Trud in which Strategic Rocket Forces Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Tolubko noted that
62 Asif A. Siddiqi
military officers were the ones operating the infrastructure in support of
the Soviet space program. Minister of Defense Andrei Grechko insisted
that there be an investigation on why this article was published, because
he feared it might convey to Americans that the Soviet Union was mili-
tarizing space.44 Several people were reprimanded for the incident but
Mozzhorin kept his job, although Grechko proved right to some degree.
The article was immediately picked up by the American media, scruti-
nized widely, and confirmed what Western observers had long suspected:
that the Soviet space program was essentially a military enterprise.45
Where Mozzhorin and Eremenko were the final arbiters of the pub-
lic face of the Soviet space program, they rarely ever wrote material per-
sonally. For this task the party’s Central Committee approved a select
few journalists, usually one each from a major newspaper or journal to
be privy to secret information. These journalists were granted special
permission to travel to secret places, meet people whose identities were
still secret, and see classified equipment. Yet such writers as Aleksandr
Romanov (TASS), Vladimir Gubarev ( Pravda), Mikhail Rebrov ( Krasnaia zvezda), Iurii Letunov (radio), and Iurii Fokin (television) displayed a curious homogeneity in their work, all playing up certain tropes—heroism,
the socialist cause, Soviet ingenuity, the inevitability of success—that
produced a bland product; volume, vague allusions, and highly technical
detail trumped economy, actual facts, and eloquence.46 Mozzhorin him-
self conceded as such, remembering that most of the articles “smacked
of . . . techno-fetishism. They were too high-level and uninteresting for
the broad masses, and [they] poorly advertised domestic space [achieve-
ments].” Some of the correspondents, such as those from Pravda and Izvestiia, were hired on the recommendation of the Central Committee sec-
retary for defense industries and space programs, Dmitrii Ustinov, but
secrecy seriously impaired their ability to write meaningful pieces; they
were forced, in Mozzhorin’s words, to write “sugary streams of enthusi-
astic text.”47 Ironically, the space program “leadership,” who themselves
were partly responsible for imposing such draconian secrecy, expressed
erature, which largely resulted from said secrecy.
Although Mozzhorin’s group was to act as censors, they had a sym-
biotic relationship with journalists. The latter were allowed access in ex-
change for following the former’s mandates as closely as possible. This
relationship helped to create a powerful union of censor and journalists,
Cosmic Contradictions 63
a block of actors who controlled both the content and contours of publicly
available information on the Soviet space program. Lev Gilberg, the editor
of the Mashinostroenie publishing house, which issued dozens of space-
themed books, frequently invited officials from Mozzhorin’s censorship
group to write for him. Gilberg had a key connection into the inner work-
ings of the space program, being a good friend of Vladimir Shatalov, the
general in charge of cosmonaut training in the 1970s and 1980s.48 This
coalignment ensured that those writers who did not participate in self-
censorship or “play the game” were excluded from the privileged access
given to selected correspondents and writers. It also fed the striking ho-
mogeneity in the writing on the Soviet space program in the 1960s and
the 1970s, both in terms of content and style.
Secrecy in Practice
As Soviet space exploits began to accumulate, certain guiding princi-
ples of the secrecy regime became evident. These obviously reflected the
characteristics of the broader Soviet secrecy system, but inflected with
the peculiarities inherent in the space program, such as its connection
to the military, its association with national prestige, and its high-risk
nature.49 Three broad strategies guided those who produced the public
narratives of the Soviet space program: first, they eliminated contingency
from narratives of the space age so that all successes were assumed inevi-
table and the idea of failure rendered invisible; second, they constructed a
space (no pun intended) of “limited visibility” for both actors and artifacts
(that is, only a few selected persons—usually flown cosmonauts or public
spokespersons with little or no direct contact with those directing space
projects—and objects were displayed to the public); and third, they con-
structed a single master narrative or chronicle that included a set of fixed
stories in which the central characters were few (such as Tsiolkovskii,
Gagarin, and later Korolev) but heroic and infallible.
The first pattern of secrecy, the elimination of contingency, was de-
signed to remove failure from the Soviet space program. With almost no
exceptions, coverage of Soviet space exploits, especially in the case of hu-
man space missions, omitted reports of failure or trouble. This was the
case from the early 1960s to the late 1980
s. If a rocket failed to reach or-
bit, it was never announced; only successes were trumpeted. If a mission
was curtailed early, TASS would merely exclaim that the original mission
64 Asif A. Siddiqi
had been scheduled for that length. Because of the fear of conceding any
kind of failure, accounts of cosmonauts’ missions were so sanitized that
reports inevitably veered toward ambience than substance. In this sense
books and articles from the 1960s conveyed a kind of “thick descrip-
tion” (to use the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz) without the
actual object being described. In other words, they contain no details,
only settings. Canonical space books from the early years, such as Nashi
kosmicheskie puti (Our space way, 1962), Ukhodiat v kosmos korabli (They leave for space in a ship, 1967), Na beregu vselennoi (On the coast of the universe, 1970), and Letchiki i kosmonavty (Pilots and cosmonauts, 1971) provide literally hundreds of pages of text of reconstructed conversations
among cosmonauts, engineers, and laypeople that touch on a variety of
social and cultural phenomena, such as family life, workplace customs,
humor, and devotion to the Communist Party. These provide rich con-
text, but they do not convey substance because the central issue at hand—
the feats of the cosmonauts—are left to the imagination.
Demands for secrecy may have originated from military imperatives,
but they had repercussions on many other dimensions of the Soviet space
program. For example, the publicity-versus-secrecy dichotomy was paral-
leled in another polarity: the need to praise the seamless work of Soviet
machines versus the need to extol the heroics of Soviet cosmonauts. The
historian Slava Gerovitch has explored these built-in contradictions with-
in the space program, particularly how different constituencies within
the upper echelons struggled to find an appropriate balance between
man and machine.50 The public dimensions of this struggle showcase
an attendant tension, not so much with man and machine, but between
publicity and secrecy. For example, during the Voskhod-2 mission in 1965, when Aleksei Leonov became the first man to exit his spaceship and
“walk” in space, the spacecraft faced a number of serious problems that
were not revealed at the time.51
One of these problems involved the failure of the automatic orienta-
tion system that would position the spacecraft in the proper direction
before reentry. Through a very complicated and extremely risky series
of actions, the crew was able to manually orient the ship for landing,
although they landed nearly four hundred kilometers off course. The cos-
monauts were forced to spend two nights in near arctic conditions fend-
ing for themselves while rescue services searched for them. After the
mission, officials argued over how much to reveal publicly about this and
Cosmic Contradictions 65
the other lapses of safety during the flight.52 The two cosmonauts were
prepared in advance for a postflight meeting with journalists by rehears-
ing answers to sixty possible questions. The press conference itself had
a vaguely farcical quality about it as the cosmonauts resorted to gross
generalities and half-truths. At one point the cosmonaut Pavel Beliaev
was forced to say that the crew had been “delighted” that the automatic
system of orientation had failed, because this provided them with an op-
portunity to use the manual system.53 Here, the fallibility of machinery
was removed from the center of the narrative so that failure became pe-
ripheral, sidelined, and no longer important. We see how secrecy was not
simply a regime designed to safeguard military information but also was
invested with a certain flexibility, invoked in different circumstances to
arbitrate among a variety of seemingly intractable issues at the forefront
of the Soviet space program. In this particular case the invocation of se-
crecy (not revealing the true extent of the many failures on the flight)
allowed man to exercise agency over the machine.
Eliminating contingency also meant not divulging information
about future plans because plans inevitably changed, leading to delays.
One manifestation of this policy was to say nothing about impending
missions. In early 1967, Kamanin noted in his diary that the Novosti
press agency received hundreds of queries from foreign news agencies
about cosmonauts and future flights into space but that “we give them
very little information, and even when we do, it’s outrageously late. The
CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] categorically prohibits giv-
ing detailed information before a flight, allows very little to report dur-
ing a flight, and cuts all text on technology.”54 This practice was put to
test in the late 1960s, when the Soviets appeared to have fallen behind
in the so-called race to the moon. Because Soviet cosmonauts had not
displayed anything close to matching their American counterparts at the
time, Western analysts assumed that the Soviets had faltered behind the
Americans, a suspicion that decades later proved to be true. At the time,
however, Soviet cosmonauts were often put in awkward positions of con-
veying that the Soviet space program was indeed advancing along a delib-
erate plan despite clear evidence to the contrary.
When cosmonaut Vladimir Shatalov, for example, was visiting Japan
in May 1969, he was bombarded by questions about the Soviet Union’s
recent poor showing in space. Kamanin dourly noted in his diary that
“we cannot tell the truth openly about our failures and mistakes—we
66 Asif A. Siddiqi
must beat around the bush, trying to put a good face on a bad situation.”55
Sometimes cosmonauts on foreign goodwill missions, frustrated by such
questions, would make brave statements about impending Soviet moon
missions, which only raised the ire of party officials back home who de-
manded more control over cosmonaut statements.56 Amplifying Golova-
nov’s insightful comment (cited earlier in the chapter), secrecy worked
in favor of the Soviet space program when it was ahead because the au-
dience, both home and abroad, could let their imaginations run free as
to what was going to be possible in the future. When the Soviet Union
fell behind, secrecy became absolutely essential to obscure this situation,
which further strained the gap between what was happening in the So-
viet space program and what was being told about it.
The second trope of secrecy was to construct a space of limited vis-
ibility for actors. In practice, this meant that the real architects behind the Soviet space program were rarely named. Soviet Communist Party First
Secretary Nikita Khrushchev famously noted in 1958 that “when the time
comes photographs and the names of these glorious people will be pub-
lished and they will become broadly known among the people. We value
and respect these people highly and assure their security from enemy
agents who might be sent to destroy these outstanding people, our valu-
able cadres. But now, in order to guarantee the security of the country and
the lives of these schola
rs, engineers, technicians, and other specialists,
we cannot make their names public or print their pictures.”57 An official
decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Coun-
cil of Ministers expressly prohibited leading space designers, including
the many chief designers, from speaking on the radio, on television, and
in print under their own names. This is not to say that the space program
did not have public spokespersons. Besides cosmonauts, the Central
Committee had designated a number of eminent scientists who had little
or no connection to the actual operation of the space program, to travel
internationally and speak with authority on Soviet space achievements.
When they spoke, these academicians—such as Ivan Bardin, Anatolii
Blagonravov, Leonid Sedov, Evgenii Fedorov, and Boris Petrov—vacillated
between two poles. Either they spoke in the most absurd generalities or
they delved into the most egregious detail, usually about scientific experi-
ments. Both were strategies designed to evade questions about the pro-
gram itself. Some of these men had tenuous connections with the secret
world of Soviet space, but as Iaroslav Golovanov astutely noted: “Those
Cosmic Contradictions 67
who were only slightly in the know . . . were so ensnared by what they had
signed about not disclosing government secrets, that they uttered only
banalities, and thus differed only slightly from the uninitiated.”58
Naturally, those who were effectively in the driver’s seat of the So-
viet space program found this arrangement troubling if not insulting.
Some of them were, however, allowed to write in public but only under
pseudonyms. This culture of pseudonyms was a widespread practice that
blossomed in the 1970s, when more and more “insiders” sought to bring
their literary skills to public attention. Although most of the literature on
the Soviet space program in the 1960s was authored by sanctioned news-
paper and magazine journalists, by the following decade, a large group
of designers began doubling as writers but under assumed names so as
not to reveal their true identities. In recent years scholars have mapped
the pseudonyms with the real names, but in the glory days of the Soviet
space program, Westerners or indeed Soviet citizens had little or no way