lions of copies.23
Perel’man was particularly interested in spreading the ideas of the
space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, and he popularized Tsiolkovskii’s
theories on spaceflight in his widely read book Mezhplanetnye puteshes-
tviia (Interplanetary travel). Perel’man adamantly defended the notion of
34 James T. Andrews
spaceflight against skeptics, showing readers how rockets could poten-
tially overcome gravitational forces as projectiles traveling at high speeds
with the use of liquid fuels.24 Perel’man was also editor of the popular
science journal Priroda i liudi (Nature and people), which carried articles on science and the cosmos. During the 1920s Perel’man had served in
the Soviet Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros, the Ministry
of Education), where he worked on school curricular reform in areas of
physics, mathematics, and astronomy.25
Leningrad was not the only crucible of space popularization. Many
Moscow astronomical, amateur, and space societies actively popularized
rocketry and space travel for an eager Russian public. The Moscow Soci-
ety of Amateur Astronomers had a technical section that was interested
in flights to other planets. In 1924 another distinct group of cosmic en-
thusiasts organized the Moscow Society for the Study of Interplanetary
Communication that sponsored public lectures on rocketry and space-
flight by those such as Fridrikh Tsander and M. I. Lapirov-Skoblo. Anoth-
er Moscow society, called the Society of Inventors, also had an Interplan-
etary Section under its purview, which was more interested in organizing
public exhibitions in the 1920s that had been a Russian tradition well
back into the 1880s.26
The Interplanetary Section of the Moscow Society of Inventors, how-
ever, became famous for its exhibition on models and mechanisms of
interplanetary travel that it held between February and June in 1927. The
exhibition had “corners” devoted to those great inventors who now are
part of the pantheon of the early rocket specialists. The exhibition thus
included a corner to the American physics professor Robert Goddard and
the Romanian-born mathematician Hermann Oberth. The exhibition
had a display entitled the “scientific-fantastic” period with material from
Jules Verne’s novels. It also included a display on early “inventors,” in-
cluding such Russians as N. Kibalchich, who designed rockets while in a
tsarist okhrana (literally “The Defense”—the secret police) prison in 1881.
Implicated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Kibalchich compiled
drawings in his cell of a rocket-powered aircraft while he awaited execu-
tion. He also provided mathematical computations for velocity and thrust
of a rocket through air.27
The exhibit was particularly known for publicizing the work of Rus-
sia’s own K. E. Tsiolkovskii, with an entire corner of the hall dedicated to
Getting Ready for Krushchev’s Sputnik 35
the local mathematics and physics teacher from Kaluga. Tsiolkovskii was
thrilled to be included and sent the organizers personal letters thanking
them and mentioned this was a wonderful way to spread and popular-
ize his ideas among Muscovites.28 What is fascinating is that a number
of famous Moscow poets and literary elites visited the exhibit—and it
was particularly mentioned in the curator’s notes that futurist poets such
as Vladimir Maiakovskii frequented the halls several times taking notes.
This alludes to the fact that the modernist literary elite was at least indi-
rectly interested in rocketry and visions of outer space and interplanetary
travel.29 Deeply affected by this exhibit, as indicated by his questions
posed to curators, Maiakovskii the very next year in some of his love po-
etry made allusions to the heavens beyond the Earth in a dreamlike fash-
ion. In his 1928 poem “Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov,” he wrote,
“the sky has a lot of stars. . . . And if I were not a poet, I would surely be
a stargazer.”30
The Tsiolkovskii exhibit had a variety of his rocket diagrams dis-
played as well as an overview of his writings claiming he had made some
of these discoveries as early as 1895. The exhibit also prominently dis-
played some of his science-fiction novellas that, according to the curator’s
notes, were of particular interest to futurist poets, playwrights, and novel-
ists, such as Anatolii Glebov, who also visited the exhibition frequently.31
In the 1920s writers like Aleksei Tolstoi and film directors such as Iakov
Protazanov had more complex visions of Soviet theories of outer space. In
Protazanov’s 1920s film Aelita, based on the Tolstoi short story, a Soviet engineer dreams of a space trip to Mars to escape his earthly problems in
Russia. Protazanov, one of the most commercially successful Soviet-era
filmmakers, was highly criticized by the Soviet press for this “supposed”
critique of Soviet society. Protazanov, himself intrigued by Russian no-
tions of spaceflight, had elaborate set constructions for actions on the
alien planet that won the film director much technical praise.32 Maia-
kovsky, Protazanov, Tolstoi, and Glebov are but a few Soviet-era cultural
figures interested in these imaginative dreams. They reflected the count-
less science-fiction pieces on outer space during this early Soviet era that
became popular with the reading public. Even prerevolutionary works
were republished for popular consumption, particularly famous ones
such as A. Bogdanov’s Red Star, also about a future utopia on the planet Mars.33 Spaceflight occupied not only the Soviet public’s interest, but it
36 James T. Andrews
also became embedded in the cultural intelligentsia’s utopian dreams
and visions as narrative fodder for their poems, films, and theatrical pro-
ductions.
National Markers, Spaceflight, and the Soviet Public
By the early and mid-1930s a cultural shift had occurred in Russia
under Stalin, coined by the historian Nicholas Timasheff as the Great
Retreat. Timasheff, and some current cultural historians (such as David
Brandenberger), have argued that Russia during high Stalinism embod-
ied a retreat away from socialist cultural norms back toward greater Rus-
sian, more nationalistic themes.34 Yet as the historian David Hoffman so
aptly has reminded us, the 1930s and 1940s also witnessed a continued
effort on the part of the regime to modernize their society, not necessarily
therefore at odds with previous Communist visions.35 This is particularly
true in the way the Stalinist regime embraced technological feats with
such fervor. It is within this context that the Soviet aeronautical feats
during the 1930s, for example, were glorified and popularized through
propagandistic means by the Soviet press.36 During the earlier 1920s in-
ternational aeronautical feats (especially those in the West) were covered
with the same frequency as equivalent Russian achievements. During the
Stalinist 1930s and 1940s, prior to the era of Sputnik, however, Russians began to witness a departure toward an increasingly nationalistic, trium-phalist tone—albeit the rhetoric ma
intained a revolutionary ethos—such
as “storming the cosmos,” “conquering the stratosphere,” and “reaching
new heights of the cosmos.”
Through theater and other media, Stalin-era cultural figures prop-
agated ideas on spaceflight that reflected this triumphant poised para-
digm. Most emblematic of this new departure were the Moscow staged
plays of those such as Anatolii Glebov, although poets and film directors
showed continued interest in the topic as well. The Soviet writer Glebov,
who wrote and produced the play Gold and Brain at the Zamoskvoretskii
Theatre touched on rocketry in many of his works. In a 1932 article in
the journal Tekhnika (Technology), Glebov noted how “in my latest play
Morning (shown at the Revolution Theatre in Moscow), I likewise again
touch on the issue of rocketry and space exploration. Furthermore, I am
always ready to propagandize about Russian achievement in this use-
Getting Ready for Krushchev’s Sputnik 37
ful arena.”37 By the 1930s these cultural figures would help the Soviets
to figuratively “storm the stratosphere,” as Glebov’s article was entitled.
They reflected a nationalistic tone as well as a radical transformative im-
pulse so indicative of the Stalinist cultural arena of the 1930s. Much like
the radical transformation of nature campaigns that invaded the space of
ecological nature preserves, so well documented by the historian Douglas
Weiner, the Stalinist cultural elite was ready to conquer and transform
the cosmos.38 Furthermore, these cultural signifiers and tropes may have
also been part of a general trend, as the scholar Malte Rolf has pointed
out, to reduce the number of acceptable cultural features of the Stalin era
into a more manageable set of ideological and nationalistic canons.39
It is during this era of resurgent Russian nationalism that the vi-
sionary rocket and space theorist K. E. Tsiolkovskii was asked by Stalin
to give his famous speech on the future of human space travel on May
Day in 1935 from Red Square. This was no ordinary speech, nor was its
repercussion among the public and physicists alike. Tsiolkovskii’s taped
speech was also broadcast by primitive wireless (radio waves) throughout
the former Soviet Union, across eleven time zones, with an enormous
social impact. Both Stalin, and later Khrushchev, would use the figure of
Tsiolkovskii to focus on the superiority of Soviet technology over Western
capitalism and its scientific system. However, both during this speech
and at times before this event, Tsiolkovskii used these Soviet public ven-
ues to promote his own ideas about the future possibility of spaceflight.
This speech was given while impressive Soviet airplanes flew above Red
Square, and Tsiolkovskii described them as “steel dragonflies” that were
only a tip of a more profound iceberg.40 This dualistic tension between
the regime’s nationalistic and propagandistic canons in the 1930s on the
one hand, and the scientist as cultural purveyor of knowledge on the oth-
er, created a tension between patron (state) and supplicant (specialist). In
subterranean ways figures like Tsiolkovskii thus tried to alter the Stalinist
canon, or at least provide it with nuanced sentiments. This process led to
a fragmentation of the Stalinist cultural ideal; this is evident even if the
canon, as orchestrated from above, reflected a regime-centered techno-
logical myopia.
All the same, the common state-constructed trope of the 1930s and
1940s evoked this Promethean metaphor of conquering the cosmos with
Soviet technological ingenuity. Unlike earlier Soviet science fiction, ar-
38 James T. Andrews
tistic productions of the Stalinist era 1930s and 1940s had the requisite
myopic ideological components embedded in these narrative plots about
outer space.41 Probably the best example of this genre was the 1935 Soviet
film Kosmicheskii reis (Cosmic race), which was directed by V. Zhuravlev.
Tsiolkovskii actually consulted on the film, which is mythically set in
1946 at the fictitious All-Union Institute for Inter-Planetary Commu-
nication. In the movie young pioneers help an inventor overcome his
detractors at all odds, even against the wishes of the old conservative
intellectual-director of the institute—thus representing the young Com-
munists achieving miraculous feats in space through the use of new So-
viet technology. When a successful journey into space concludes back on
Earth, there is the requisite Communist festival in their honor, where the
elder Tsiolkovskii-like designer of rockets gives a speech saluting Soviet
youth.42 The film thus merged the Stalinist socialist-realist ideological
paradigm with the inspirational, less politicized, hopes and dreams of
the real-life elder K. E. Tsiolkovskii.
The popular film and state-sponsored propaganda in the 1930s and
1940s operated simultaneously with a major governmental investment
in the potential military use of rockets as weapons under Stalin. In the
1930s the popular katyusha system, a battery of trucks equipped with
dozens of small rockets, was a technically low-grade method of scattering
even more primitive, invention in the pre-1917 era). Yet the regime in 1931
had already brought together a number of specialists to work collectively
in both Leningrad and Moscow on far more sophisticated technology un-
der what became known as GIRD (Group for the Study of Reactive Mo-
tion). In 1933 the GIRD groups amalgamated into the Moscow Scientific
Research Institute of Reactive Motion (the RNII). Critically, the founders
of this organization, including the dean of Soviet rocketry (S. P. Korolev),
claimed that Tsiolkovskii was their inspirational leader, and they made
him an honorary member of their engineering board in 1934. By the late
1930s the purges would decimate the ranks of this group as rocket spe-
cialists, especially the likes of Korolev, would be incarcerated in sharashki (the prison design bureau) to work for the regime’s militaristic ends in
mostly other pursuits, such as aircraft design. All the same, in the 1930s
these technical engineers sought more approval for their work, and more
funds from the regime itself, by skillfully invoking popular heroes or
Getting Ready for Krushchev’s Sputnik 39
“father figures” like Tsiolkovskii. In fact, one of the top-ranking Soviet
military engineers, I. T. Kleimenov, was the chief of RNII in Moscow;
and both he and Korolev actively corresponded with Tsiolkovskii in an
attempt to get his pronounced public support for their research initiatives
at a time before this research became completely top secret.43
During World War II, however, and throughout Soviet reconstruc-
tion in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Soviet aeronautical feats were to
some extent relegated to the periphery of the public landscape, while the
country was rehabilitated physically, politically, and psychologically. This
lack of publicity in the public sphere was also primarily a result of the
pronounced issue of secrecy emp
loyed by all governments on rocket and
bomb development internationally, both during and after World War II.
Although much of the international press would eventually discover the
successful detonation of an atomic bomb by Igor Kurchatov and his team
in the Central Asian Steppe in 1949, the rocket specialists were moved to
a secret headquarters outside of Moscow near Kaliningrad.44 The Soviet
military would become obsessed with achieving parity with the United
States with regard to rockets, although Korolev would use one of his R7
military missiles to catapult Sputnik 1 into orbit in October 1957.45 Nikita Khrushchev and the regime monitored closely their clandestine military
investments with much anxiety (and expectations) throughout the 1950s.
Sergei Khrushchev noted that his father demanded that Leonid Smirnov,
the deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers in charge of mis-
sile technology, phone him after every new project development (and lat-
er after every successful launch). Khrushchev demanded these updates
from Sergei Korolev and Defense Minister Malinovsky as well. According
to Sergei Khrushchev, Premier Khrushchev took much personal pride in
these developments, even if conducted under such secrecy (and without
public disclosure of successes).46
Although much of the secretive technology was generated for mili-
tary purposes in the early Cold War, and could not be publically an-
nounced, once Sputnik 1 was launched in 1957, the country witnessed
an array of publicity on Soviet aeronautical (and now cosmonautic) de-
velopments. Interestingly, this was the only element—namely, the overt
residual success of Sputnik—that could be publicized in laudatory terms without revealing top-secret research. However, after Sputnik, as part of the myriad of public celebratory events, a host of journals had pages filled
40 James T. Andrews
with laudatory articles on Soviet rocketry, the history of spaceflight, and
the life of the new cosmonaut. They included eclectic journals such as
Ogonek (Little flame) as well as more politicized official ones, such as Kommunist (The communist). All of these journals publicly expounded
on Soviet feats in spaceflight, enabling the regime an outlet to boast about
its technological achievements in rocketry.