fort through several decades.
There were compelling institutional explanations for the regime of
secrecy that surrounded the Soviet space program, rationales that tran-
scended any need to maintain the fiction of a Soviet lead in the “space
race.” The fact that the entire institutional structure supporting the So-
viet space program was lodged firmly and deeply in a military setting
was undoubtedly the most critical factor. The earliest Soviet successes in
space—such as the launch of Sputnik, Laika, probes to the moon, Yuri
Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, and many more—were orchestrated by
the Experimental Design Bureau-1 (Opytno-konstruktorskoe biuro-1, or
OKB-1) headed by the so-called chief designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev.
OKB-1 was subordinated for many years under the Ministry of the De-
fense Industry and then eventually, like most other space enterprises
during the late Soviet era, under the Ministry of General Machine Build-
ing. Both of these ministries were part of the highly secretive military-
industrial complex, scrutinized by Western intelligence agencies
throughout the Cold War. OKB-1’s primary goal, at least until the mid-
1960s was not space but rather to develop more efficient intercontinental
ballistic missiles for the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. Because of its as-
sociation with such an overtly military project, Soviet space achievements
were shrouded in an extra layer of secrecy. In July 1955, when work on
the rocket that launched Sputnik was reaching peak levels, the Council of Ministers issued a decree “with the goal of ensuring more strict secrecy
on work carried out on rocket and reactive armaments” that enumerated
a whole host of new regulations at various enterprises, including the ap-
pointment of a deputy director at each workplace to oversee secrecy re-
gimes and bringing in KGB personnel to help.27
Military secrecy could be justified without much controversy be-
cause there was “the legitimate strategic purpose of denying sensitive
national security information to potential enemies.”28 Secrecy over mili-
tary affairs was particularly stringent in the defense industry, which de-
veloped weapons. Although the names of certain accomplished design-
ers—particularly aviation designers—were revealed during the interwar
years, this practice was abandoned at the height of the Cold War when
the identities of such designers as Korolev were unknown to the pub-
lic. Moreover, all information about the organizations that they headed
56 Asif A. Siddiqi
was kept strictly secret. Real names of weapons were never used in writ-
ing. Instead Soviet industrial managers developed an esoteric system of
naming weapons that relied on a number-letter-number system that was
based on no discernable logic; in all written documents, for example, the
Vostok spacecraft was referred to as “object 11F63” ( izdelie 11F63), while its launch rocket was “object 8K72K” ( izdelie 8K72K). Many workers employed at factories contracted to deliver parts for such spacecraft had little
or no idea what the part was for. Draconian rules dictated daily handling
of paperwork within defense enterprises, with documents divided into at
least five categories of access—none of which were permitted to be seen
by workers not employed by the enterprise. Workers in a particular de-
partment at an organization usually had no knowledge of what was going
on in other departments.29
Military secrecy first emerged as a temporary practice as part of the
draconian measures adopted during the civil war. These measures were
reinforced during the so-called war scare of the late 1920s. In 1927 all
defense factories were renamed so that their traditional names were re-
placed with numbers beginning from one to fifty-six. Eventually, this
custom was extended to research and design institutions attached to the
factories, which were also given numbers to disguise their work profile.
This tradition endured to the mid-1960s so that Korolev’s organization
was simply named OKB-1, while a competitor organization was named
OKB-52. To further obfuscate the mission of these institutions, in the
1960s ministries introduced a wholesale name change to generic “ma-
chine building” titles. For example, Korolev’s OKB-1 was renamed the
52 became Central Design Bureau of Machine Building. Afraid that
Western intelligence would pick up even these bland names, workers at
such institutions were not allowed to use them in public and instead or-
dered to use special “post office box numbers” to refer to each institute,
design bureau, or factory.
The military secrecy regime far exceeded what was necessary for stra-
tegic rationales, indicating that this regime was driven by more than sim-
ply a need to protect state secrets about mobilization plans and weapons
development. An important driver of military secrecy—and in fact, the
entire Soviet secrecy regime—was to maintain privilege of those who had
access to decision making. The historian John Barber and his coauthors
have noted that “secretiveness was . . . one of the defenses protecting the
Cosmic Contradictions 57
priority and privilege of the military sector generally, and of the defence
industry in particular.”30 Secrecy in the Soviet space program, embedded
deep within the structure of the Soviet defense industry, stemmed from
a similar rationale, given that the space program received enormous dis-
bursements at times—for example, during the era of “stagnation,” when
many Soviet citizens might have wished for a better standard of living. In
addition, there were many within the space program who insulated them-
selves from critique not only from the general public but also from their
peers within the program who might have threatened their status and
privilege. Designers would routinely conceal their own plans or exagger-
ate their own accomplishments to industrial managers or party leaders;
the system rewarded those who clung to secrecy or obfuscation.
One of the most enduring examples of military secrecy—the creation
of a fake launch site—suggests another rationale for military secrecy, one
that had less to do with protecting military secrets than to project the
peaceful intent of the space program to the domestic audience. After the
Sputnik launch Soviet officials said nary a word about exactly from where all these rockets were being launched, but because they wanted to record
Gagarin’s flight as a world record to the Fédération Aéronautique Interna-
tionale (FAI), they had to submit the name of the launch site, as per the
federation’s rules. It was out of question for the Soviets to reveal the name
and location of the launch range, located in a desolate area of Kazakhstan,
whose express purpose was to support the launch of intercontinental bal-
listic missiles (ICBMs). For years, any speculation in the West on where
Soviet rockets were launched from was immediately reported back to So-
viet officials, who were extremely sensitive about this information.31
Given this conundrum, two junior officers at a military institute were
asked to come up with a solution. One of them, Vladimir Iastrebov, later
recalled that “we needed to name the launch place for the launch vehicle
of the Vostok spaceship, but we were not allowed to mention Tiura-Tam,
where the cosmodrome (or more precisely, the rocket range) was located.
Because of this, [Aleksei] Maksimov and I selected on the map the ‘most
plausible’ [adjacent] point of launch that was not far from Tiura-Tam. It
turned out to be the town of Baikonur, and since then, with our casual
selection, the cosmodrome got its now well-known name.”32 For more
than two decades after the launch of Gagarin, official Soviet media as-
siduously maintained the fiction that Soviet rockets were launched from
a place called “Baikonur” in Kazakhstan, when in fact the town of Bai-
58 Asif A. Siddiqi
konur was three hundred kilometers away from the actual launch point.
The façade was maintained despite the fact that the actual location was
widely known by Western observers already in the 1960s, suggesting that
the obfuscation was meant more for a domestic audience rather than a
foreign one. Soviet citizens were to believe that their glorious space pro-
gram had purely civilian purposes while the American one had belliger-
ent intentions.
Space Censors
Glavlit, through its daughter organizations and the publishing-house
system, was the ultimate arbiter in directing the censorship apparatus
during the Soviet era, but it delegated censorship duties in a number of
thematic areas, such as military issues, nuclear weapons, and the space
program, to smaller specialized organs.33 During the early months af-
ter Sputnik, the process of issuing public communiqués and books on
the space program was rather haphazard; senior scientists and engineers
within the program typically drew up statements that passed through
censors within the Academy of Sciences and the relevant publishing
house, with Glavlit checking the results but usually deferring to their
authority.34 The academy posed as a convenient public face of the space
program although its institutes and staff had little direct involvement in
Soviet space achievements because it was run almost entirely out of the
Soviet defense industry.
Because of this public fiction, many of the thousands of young Soviet
enthusiasts who wrote to volunteer for the space program addressed their
letters to “the Academy of Sciences.” These letters were then passed on
to an institute within the Ministry of Defense with the descriptive name
NII-4 (pronounced nee-chetyr), which, not so much from intent but rather confusion, inherited much of the public relations functions of the space
program in the early 1960s. NII-4, whose main job was to evaluate and
conduct research on the battle-fighting capabilities of nuclear-tipped in-
tercontinental ballistic missiles, was located in the Bol’shevo suburb of
Moscow, not far from Korolev’s own design bureau. Here, the institute
deputy director Iurii Mozzhorin, a colonel in the Soviet artillery forces,
was handed the job of drawing up the TASS communiqués that were
hungrily pored over both at home and abroad for clues into the Soviet
space program. Mozzhorin remembers drawing up the press release for
Cosmic Contradictions 59
Gagarin’s launch in advance of the event. Three preprepared envelopes
were distributed to radio and TV stations and TASS, each containing the
text of a particular scenario (complete success, death of cosmonaut at
launch or in orbit, or emergency landing of cosmonaut on foreign terri-
tory); depending on the outcome, the press was ordered to open one and
destroy the others.35
Throughout the 1960s each State Commission—the ad hoc group
of high-level individuals from different branches of the government that
oversaw a particular space mission—had a special “press group” that au-
thored and disseminated information about space events. By mid-decade,
however, it had become clear that the Soviet space program needed a for-
malized system to prepare and control the information that was revealed
about the space effort, especially because the amount of information be-
ing disseminated increased dramatically every year. The obvious solution
was to assign Glavlit this job. In July 1967 the highest industrial officials
in the space program drew up a plan to create an “expert commission”
attached to Glavlit that would be responsible for coordinating and approv-
ing all media on the Soviet space program. Because leading space pro-
gram officials would head and manage the commission, Glavlit opposed
this plan, undoubtedly because it would diminish Glavlit’s control over
the flow of information. In the end, Glavlit lost this battle, and the job was
assigned to the space establishment, with Glavlit maintaining a coordi-
nating capacity instead of a leading one.36
Mozzhorin retained the task of managing the public relations ca-
pacity of the space program. As he moved from institution to institu-
tion, from his original employer (NII-4) to TsNIIMash (the Tsentral’nyi
nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut mashinostroeniia, or Central Scientific-
Research Institute of Machine Building), the leading research and devel-
opment institute of the Soviet space program, he took the media job with
him. As director of TsNIIMash for nearly thirty years, Mozzhorin played
a critical role in arbitrating conflicts within the Soviet space program but
also formulating future plans. As such, he was in an ideal position to
know the full spectrum of both prevailing and future capabilities of the
program. His “propaganda” task was formalized by a Council of Min-
isters decree on July 1, 1968, when the Soviet government for the first
time officially assigned his staff at TsNIIMash the mission of “organization and preparation of materials on rocket-space themes for publication
in print, transmission on radio and television and for showing in film and
60 Asif A. Siddiqi
in exhibitions.”37 Soon after, a team at TsNIIMash performed a two-year
research project (from 1968 to 1970) on the entire spectrum of Soviet
space-related propaganda and how to systematize the process. The team
prepared a draft decree, later approved by the USSR Council of Ministers,
which included a document titled “Regulations on the Preparation for
Open Publication of Materials on Rocket-Space Technology.”38
Secrecy was obviously a central concern here, as Mozzhorin himself
recalled. He was responsible “not only for the preparation of drafts of
TASS communiqués, [and] headers for scientific and technical articles
in the newspapers, but also [for ensuring] . . . that all open publications
on rocket-space technology in the Soviet Union and materials exported
abroad were technically correct, did not contradict government edicts,
and did not violate secrecy.”39 Mozzhorin performed this “thankless”
job together with Anatolii Eremenko, “a very smart, principled, techni-
cally literate, and lit
erary specialist” who headed TsNIIMash’s depart-
ment of “information, expertise and history.” Like Mozzhorin, Eremenko
authored many books and articles for the Soviet media on the history
of Soviet space exploration.40 This department coordinated their work
with representatives from the Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of De-
fense, the defense industrial ministries, various ministries responsible
for radio, television, print, film, central and local organs of the Soviet
press, TASS, the Novosti press agency, and the Znanie (Knowledge) All-
Union Society, a major popular science outlet during the Soviet era. Both
Mozzhorin and Eremenko remained at their posts until 1990, when the
former retired. Eremenko continues to work at TsNIIMash and remains
in charge of its museum; in 2004, despite his work in the censorship ap-
paratus or perhaps because of it, he was awarded the Utkin Silver Medal
“for many years [of] active journalistic work on rocket and space technol-
ogy and cosmonautics.”41
Mozzhorin’s group played a key role in articulating the public face
of the Soviet space program, but the evidence suggests that high-level
party and government officials were frequently drawn into issues that
were relatively trivial. The Military-Industrial Commission, the very pow-
erful governmental body that supervised the Soviet military-industrial
complex during much of the Cold War, for example, had to approve TASS
communiqués on every Soviet space event prepared by Mozzhorin’s
group. When questions of openness reached the Politburo level, as they
did often, they highlighted an acute ambivalence about secrecy that fre-
Cosmic Contradictions 61
quently delayed plans. For instance, in February 1964, U.S. and Soviet
officials signed an agreement to display space artifacts in each other’s
countries. The Politburo (then known as the Presidium) met a couple of
months later to discuss the issue but deferred to the expertise of rocket
designers and administrators who recommended that certain aspects of
the Vostok spacecraft be declassified for the exhibit.42
Despite the recommendations, doubts plagued the main actors for
months. The Central Committee and the Council of Ministers adopted a
set of guidelines for displaying space program artifacts in museums only