frog several incremental stages and proceed directly to developing the
powerful two-stage missile R7 with a seven-thousand-kilometer reach.
The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos 21
This machine was capable of flying to the American continent, thus of-
fering for the first time some possibility of retaliation and deterrence
against nuclear bombers targeting Soviet cities.14
At least some of the engineers at this juncture had not entirely forgot-
ten their youthful dream of space travel that decades earlier had brought
them into the then amateur field of rocketry design. They understood
their chief mission to be about strategic defense of the Soviet homeland,
not cosmonautics. But a missile with the R7 characteristics was also
perfectly capable of delivering its payload into a space orbit. While the
missile was still under development, Tikhonravov’s small group started
working on parallel designs for sputniks and manned-space missions.
In 1956, at an opportune moment when Nikita Khrushchev inspected
and happened to be particularly pleased with the work on the R7, Korolev
requested permission to use one of the future missile tests for a sputnik
launch. The Soviet leader needed reassurances that such a distraction
would not delay in any way the fulfillment of the main job, but he agreed
to reward scientists and engineers in their desire, even if it might appear
somewhat childish.15
The space race did not exist yet in the minds of most politicians and
the public, but Korolev and his top engineers worried about possible
American competitors. They decided to forgo the wait for more sophisti-
cated equipment and to go ahead with what their internal documentation
referred to as the “simplest sputnik”—a rump satellite able to confirm,
besides the fact of the space launch itself, the possibility of radio com-
munication from orbit back to Earth through the ionosphere.16 The R7
was still at a stage when approximately every second launch encountered
some problems, but the one with the first sputnik happened smoothly on
October 4, 1957, just six weeks after the first successful military test of
the R7 as an ICBM. Even the engineers who knew that they were about
to accomplish something important could not anticipate the enormity of
the political tsunami that followed. Overnight, Sputnik became the chief world media sensation and a public fixation. The dream about the cosmos entered a different cultural realm—no longer a monopoly of science-
fiction fans and a few engineers, but a matter of primary attention for
the political establishment, mass culture and media, countless children
and their teachers, and much of the general population across the globe.
Rocketry and space travel became relevant for various areas of cultural
life, endowed with many new and changing meanings and uses.
22 Alexei Kojevnikov
After Sputnik
In his contribution to this volume, Asif Siddiqi has reminded us
that the umbilical cord linking the ostensibly peaceful exploration of the
cosmos with military programs remained its essential contradiction and
continued to produce tensions between sometimes conflicting priorities.
One can argue that precisely this link, often as unmentionable in public
as it was self-obvious, made the space race a useful political trope and a
powerful symbol for the rivalry between the Cold War superpowers. By
talking about space, one could also symbolically invoke military might
and threats without explicitly naming them. Political authorities in the
USSR and the United States understood the major importance of Sputnik
for the strategic balance in the world as well as for the world of public
relations immediately, if only post factum. Typically the Soviets looked
dismissively on the Western media’s propensity for sensationalism, but
in this case they found it working in their favor and started supporting
it with their own propaganda tools. Soviet spokesmen promoted the
achievement nationally and internationally as a demonstration of social-
ism’s advantage over capitalism.
rolev for further spectacular achievements in space scheduled around the
days of two major Soviet holidays, November 7 and May 1. The American
leadership initially tried to downplay the event but was also worried about
the changed dynamics in Cold War technological competition. In 1945
the Soviets were regarded as inherently backward, but they had caught
up in the development of the atomic bomb by 1949, pulled even with
thermonuclear weapons by 1953, and actually surpassed “the West” in
missile design by 1957.17 The public interest aroused by Sputnik and the Cold War mentality thus transformed the idea of space travel from an id-iosyncratic obsession of some into a chief political priority for the existing
and eventually other aspiring superpowers. The space race began in ear-
nest, primarily aiming at the first human flight, but as Amy Nelson has
reminded us in her chapter in this volume, also involving animal heroes.
From a military perspective, as the most visible side effect of the
ICBM development, the Soviet space launches signified a gradual shift
toward the ever more symmetrical stage in the Cold War’s strategic bal-
ance, with the USSR achieving a modicum of nuclear counterthreat (al-
The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos 23
though the latter would take several more years to develop from a largely
symbolic to a sufficiently serious one). The loss of unchallenged nuclear
supremacy was hard for the U.S. leaders to swallow, which produced the
dangerous outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis.18 Eventually it had to be
accepted as a fait accompli and resulted in a relatively stable state of grow-
ing mutual awareness that an all-out thermonuclear war would bring
about suicide for all of humanity and could not be won in principle. The
Soviet leadership’s acceptance of this conclusion earlier, already by 1956,
allowed Khrushchev to announce publicly that world wars had become
avoidable and to proclaim the policy of “peaceful coexistence” with capi-
talism as the official Soviet strategy on the world arena.19
Another aspect of the war mentality proved unchangeable, however.
The generation of Soviet officials who had seen their country half de-
stroyed, hanging by a thread, and just barely surviving in the war against
Nazi Germany, could not settle for mere capacity for serious counter-
strike as an adequate form of military deterrence. Their experience de-
rived from World War II demanded nothing less than relative parity with
the United States—that is, roughly the same actual numbers of warheads
and delivery means. At this point the military and space priorities began
to part ways, because after the R7 their respective demands required dif-
ferent technological systems and increased competition for resources.20
The Soviet political and military leaders chose as the country’s first prior-
ity to catch up with the United States in nuclear capabilities—rather than
to compete seriously in the militarily and economically u
seless moon
race. Their culturally defined notion of strategic security required mass
production of newly developed missiles that were different from those
used in the space launches. A major commitment of efforts and resources
toward this task dominated the entire decade of the 1960s. They finally
saw such relative strategic parity achieved by the beginning of the 1970s,
albeit at a quite burdensome price for the national economy. Such parity
in turn created the grounds for détente and for the first serious negotia-
tions with the United States on limiting the arms race.
The space race continued to play a major role in the public percep-
tion and the superpowers’ propagandistic bickering, where both states
celebrated different “firsts” as their respective ultimate victories. The So-
viets claimed the main prize on April 12, 1961, when a modified three-
stage version of the R7 carried the capsule Vostok 1 with the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the Earth once and landed safely after
24 Alexei Kojevnikov
the 108-minute flight. In the USSR, as well as in post–Soviet Russia, the
success of the first manned flight has been valued as the ultimate victory
in the space race, higher than any other possible achievement in space,
including Sputnik, and commemorated annually as Cosmonautics Day.21
In the United States the frustration over the defeat made President Ken-
nedy announce the next national priority for country: send a man to the
moon. Having committed tremendous resources toward this task, the
United States accomplished it with the moonwalk by Neil Armstrong on
July 21, 1969. After this triumph or consolation prize, political emotions
cooled down somewhat.
Today, fifty years later, the public fixation on manned flights can
probably be understood as a misperception, because their actual pur-
pose, economic usefulness, and longtime prospects—apart from the ever
declining propagandistic value—have remained as yet rather uncertain.
Sputniks, however, proved their practical utility almost immediately with
spy, meteorological, and communication satellites. They have become, in
the meantime, irreplaceable and invaluable by having changed the es-
sential ways of human life, from allowing for global communications and
the Internet to fostering environmental awareness of our common fate
on the Earth. In hindsight, it would probably be more appropriate to rec-
ognize and celebrate the first little sputnik as humanity’s revolutionary
breakthrough into space, humble as most true moments of great explora-
tion.
The recent resurgence of popular interest in the Soviet space story
in contemporary Russia has brought about new cultural meanings. For
example, feature movies by two leading contemporary directors— Cosmos
as Anticipation by Alexei Uchitel and A Paper Soldier by Alexei German Jr.—set their respective plots against the historical/mythological background of the early space launches, which serve as a metaphor for So-
viet civilization as a whole.22 In the latter film the main protagonist, a
young physician helping to train the first group of cosmonauts, is torn
apart by inner insecurity. He sees in the realization of the space dream
the desperate last chance to redeem the Soviet project and return to its
original idealistic values after the excesses and distortions of Stalinism,
yet unconscious doubts torture him and eventually lead him to death.
Artistically interesting, both movies also reveal how hard it has become
in the post-Soviet, anticommunist cultural climate, to understand and
represent the beliefs and attitudes of the Soviet generation whose for-
The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos 25
mative years of youth coincided with and were greatly influenced by the
dawn of the space era and Khrushchev’s liberalization. That generational
group went by the self-appointed name shestidesiatniki, or the 1960s generation (roughly applicable to those who in 1960 were in their twenties),
to whom the historian Donald J. Raleigh has also referred as the “Soviet
Baby Boomers” and “Russia’s Sputnik generation.”23
Coming of age almost a decade earlier than the American baby
boomers, the Soviet shestidesiatniki developed a similarly strong generational mentality to distinguish themselves from older folks. Born mostly
before the war, a great many of them were raised by single mothers and
without fathers, who were serving or had been killed at the front. Many
experienced great deprivation and hunger as young children during the
war and the immediate postwar reconstruction, but they also witnessed
fifteen years of tremendous improvement in living standards from utter
poverty to normalcy and even relative prosperity by the 1960s. This ex-
plains the popularity of belief in Soviet values and exuberantly optimistic
views of the future. Science-fiction books and futuristic literature were
once again the rage, and even Khrushchev may be said to have been car-
ried away by the visionary mood of the time when he foolheartedly prom-
ised the Soviet citizen Communism in twenty years.24
They saw excesses of Stalinism as violations of the idealistic values
of socialism, which Khrushchev had promised to restore. The shesti-
desiatniki grew up with those values naturally, learning them in school as an already established and settled social norm, without too much of an
alternative. Unlike the older generation, the shestidesiatniki were mostly too young during the Stalin years to have been personally forced into
difficult moral compromises when those values contradicted with the vio-
lent practices of dictatorship. They could thus see themselves as relatively
uncorrupted by Stalinism and, living in peaceful time, could optimisti-
cally and sincerely believe in a harmonious combination of Communism,
morality, and nonviolence.25
If this description reminds the readers of Mikhail Gorbachev, it is no
accident, for he belongs to the same generation and his views were quite
typical of the shestidesiatniki. What is somewhat less usual about him,
however, is not the value system itself, but that Gorbachev was able to re-
tain it throughout all the subsequent years deep into the 1980s. Many of
the first Soviet cosmonauts came from that very same age group, and as
exemplary heroes during the 1960s, they were subject to the cultural ex-
26 Alexei Kojevnikov
pectations of the time. Cosmonauts acted as public promoters of the So-
viet values of atheism, feminism, and scientism. Truth and truth-telling
received particular praise as the most desirable and required virtues dur-
ing de-Stalinization—especially by those who had not had to burden
their consciences with unavoidable lies during the earlier era by virtue of
their youth.26 Mass consumerism (in its modest Soviet version) emerged
in the 1960s as a relatively new phenomenon. Goods were still scarce, but
the absolute amounts mattered less than the rapid upward trend, which
the generation of the 1960s had enjoyed for the great part of their still
very young lives. As Cathleen S. Lewis aptly tells us in her chapter in
this book, the little collection items that b
ecame consumer goods, such
as stamps and znachki (enamel pins) with space symbolism, served as
markers for an important social shift.
The cultural nexus of the 1960s would not last very long—it was
already disintegrating by the middle of the decade. Economic growth
slowed down considerably, while de-Stalinization and other reforms did
not go as far as many had hoped and finally stalled, leading to widespread
disillusionment and loss of optimism. In subsequent decades some of
the typical shestidesiatniki would lose their naïvete and turn cynical
or alcoholic; others would become open or closet dissidents; yet oth-
ers maintained their beliefs quietly, waiting for more opportune times,
like Gorbachev and some of his perestroika team. But by the time they
marked their presence in the upper echelons of Soviet power and tried
to reform it, popular disillusionment with the regime had already gone
too far. Believers in its rehabilitation soon found themselves in an abso-
lute minority. With the removal of censorship and deepening economic
crisis in the late 1980s, the public mood quickly surpassed the reformist
stage and proceeded toward the wholesale rejection of the system. Soviet
cultural heritage, however, proved of much more lasting value than the
political regime per se. Some of its parts have also been lost or rejected,
while others, including space culture and its mythology, have survived
and continue to develop in Russia and other post-Soviet countries, even if
not necessarily labeled as “Soviet” anymore.
Interestingly, some of the more profound cultural legacies of the So-
viet opening into the cosmos can be found internationally. Whereas in the
domestic Soviet context the propagandistic potential of Sputnik and oth-
er successes in space mostly supported and reaffirmed the already well-
established values, on the global arena it served as a vehicle for spread-
The Cultural Spaces of the Soviet Cosmos 27
ing these ideas into new territories. The highly publicized achievements
in space exploration changed the Soviet Union’s international image
during the 1960s from an “underdog superpower,” however promising,
to a technologically advanced one, roughly equal in imagination to the
United States. The overall attractiveness of the Soviet model increased