Space History

From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies.

Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. This book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity.

Советская космическая мифология возникла под давлением противоречивых сил — требований секретности, с одной стороны, и запросов пропаганды, с другой. Из культурной памяти стирались любые ошибки и неудачи, связанные с космосом, и история свелась к набору клише: безупречные космонавты выполняли безошибочные полеты с помощью безотказной техники. Но имидж героя-пилота плохо сочетался с образом пассажира полностью автоматизированного корабля. И инженеры, создававшие космическую технику в полной безвестности, и космонавты, вынужденные заниматься пропагандистской работой вместо подготовки к новым полетам, пытались противостоять мифам официальной истории с помощью передававшихся из уст в уста рассказов, выросших в своеобразные контрмифы. Основанная на обширных архивных исследованиях и интервью с космонавтами и инженерами, эта книга прослеживает механизмы формирования советских космических мифов и контрмифов и их связь с меняющимся образом космоса в советской и постсоветской культуре.

Despite the wealth of information and archival material that has become available in the years following the fall of the USSR, the history of the Soviet space program has been dominated by the accounts of a select few, such as the recent four-volume English translation of Russian rocket designer Boris Chertok.

In this remarkable oral history, author and interviewer Slava Gerovitch helps to enrich and complicate space historiography by presenting interviews with the men and women who witnessed Soviet space efforts firsthand, from the cosmonauts themselves to the military officials who directed the program to the engineers who made real the grand ambitions of the USSR.

Rather than comprising a monolithic “master narrative,” these fascinating and varied accounts bring to light the often divergent perspectives, experiences, and institutional cultures that defined the Soviet space program.

Беседа Дениса Сивкова со Славой Геровичем

Space propaganda was directed by a generation of ideologues brought up under Stalin, and its leading architect, Nikolai Kamanin, modeled it after his own role in the Stalinist aviation myth. The cosmonauts took their place in the generational hierarchy of Soviet spiritual heritage as “sons” of the famous aviators of the 1930s, thus becoming Stalin’s spiritual “grandsons.” The cosmonaut myth was conceived as novel, futuristic, and high-tech, yet it was constructed out of many of the same elements as the old propaganda discourse. The medium subtly undermined the message. And the messenger—the cosmonaut—felt ambivalent about the message. The crucial questions that interested the cosmonauts—the technological aspects of spaceflight, emergencies in orbit, and plans for future flights—were left out of their public speeches. The cosmonauts had to follow the preset agenda of the space propaganda machine, just as they had to fit into the controlling machinery of their spacecraft. Neither machine left them much room for initiative. Just as they tried to increase their control over spacecraft, the cosmonauts tried to wrestle greater control over their social role. Just as they were not perfect automatons on board, they were not ideal models in the social arena.

In this chapter, I will examine a wide range of cultural practices of remembering – from published reminiscences of public rituals to official histories. I argue that in the Soviet context, despite the stereotypical picture of a top- down control of historical discourse, the boundaries between different forms of cultural memory were highly permeable, and multiple actors with diverse methods and goals participated in myth- making. In the semi- private spaces of the highly secretive space industry, the communicative memory of veterans’ stories mixed with the symbolism of public rituals formed the cultural memory of the space engineers and the cosmonauts. In these intermediate memory spaces – between the private and the public, between the informal and the official, and between technology and politics – memories hidden from the outside world were widely shared. In these spaces rose the images of Korolev – the wise leader of the engineering effort and the spiritual father of the cosmonauts – that shaped the group identities of engineers and cosmonauts.

This article explores the interplay of cultural and communicative memory of the Soviet space age from the 1960s through perestroika to the post-Soviet era, focusing on memoirs and commemorative events as cultural vehicles for mythologization of history.  Instead of seeing Soviet space myths as pure propaganda tools, it examines them as a function of Soviet remembrance practices, both public and private.  Drawing on private diaries of space program participants, the article argues that both myths and counter-myths played a constructive cultural role by shaping the identities of cosmonauts and space engineers, by embodying certain moral and political ideals, and by providing a shared symbolic language for public discourse.  Furthermore, space myths were not entirely constructed from above. Various historical actors—from the cosmonauts to space engineers to military officials to artists to the general public—introduced their own elements into space mythology, not necessarily consonant with the official version.

The Space age both reinforced cultural boundaries—through the Cold War imagery and rhetoric—and blurred them through the emerging sense of the global. It produced vivid memories and engaging stories; individual retelling of these stories and collective propaganda projects of remembrance gradually turned historical events into mythological epics, shaping the identity of generations. The “Sputnik generation” of Russian citizens, who grew up in the 1950s, in recent interviews acknowledged the formative role of the key events of the Space age, but had little personal recollection of their reaction to Sputnik or Gagarin’s flight. In order to remember, we have to create our memories. and we create them out of the myths and symbols of our culture. 

This article explores the impact of the professional culture of rocket engineering in Stalin’s Soviet Union on the engineering and organizational practices of the space program during the Khrushchev era. The Stalinist legacy and the dual military / civilian character of rocket engineers’ work profoundly affected the identity of this elite part of Soviet technical intelligentsia. Focusing on such notions as control, authority, and responsibility, this article examines the role of engineering culture in shaping the Soviet approach to the automation of piloted spacecraft control. Through patronage and networking, rocket engineers were able to overcome the ineffi ciency of Soviet industrial management and to advance their agenda of space exploration.

Soviet propaganda often used the Soviet space program as a symbol of a much larger and more ambitious political/engineering project—the construction of communism. Both projects involved the construction of a new self, and the cosmonaut was often regarded as a model for the “new Soviet man.” The Soviet cosmonauts publicly represented a communist ideal, an active human agency of sociopolitical and economic change. At the same time, space engineers and psychologists viewed human operators as integral parts of a complex technological system and assigned the cosmonauts a very limited role in spacecraft control. This article examines how the cosmonaut self became the subject of “human engineering,” explores the tension between the public image of the cosmonauts and their professional identity, and draws parallels between the iconic roles of the cosmonaut and the astronaut in the cold war context.

In this essay, I shall review a number of human-machine issues raised at different phases in the Soviet space program from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. From my perspective, the problem of on-board automation was not a purely technical issue, but also a political issue—not in terms of big politics, but in terms of “small” politics, local politics. my approach is to examine how technological choices were shaped by power relations, institutional cultures, and informal decision-making mechanisms, and how these choices, in turn, had significant ramifications for the direction of the Soviet space program and ultimately defined not only the functions of machines, but also the roles of human beings.