How the Soviets Explored the Cosmic Void and Found … Nothing

In the fullness of time, the Soviet success in space exploration during the 1950s and 1960s may well overshadow the defeat of the Nazis as the greatest Soviet achievement. (Alexei Kojevnikov, in his introductory essay in Into the Cosmos, goes so far as to say that Sputnik and Gagarin are on their way to attaining the status of historical icons, like “the pyramids, the Great Wall, the Santa Maria, evolution, and the atomic bomb.”) Many countries have evicted an invading army, but only one launched the first satellite and the first man into space, with the added dramatic element of doing so just years after losing millions of citizens and a tremendous amount of economic infrastructure in a war. Despite the historical significance and emotional appeal attached to the inauguration of the Space Age, the body of scholarly literature related to the Soviet space program remains somewhat undeveloped, with most existing works focused on lifting the cloak of secrecy surrounding the launches and personnel. The opening of the Soviet archives has by now allowed historians to establish reliable answers to fundamental questions such as “what were the true Soviet aims in space?” and “how close were the Soviets to landing a man on the moon?” Especially thanks to the publication of Asif Siddiqi’s encyclopedic Challenge to Apollo historians can turn their attention away from what the cosmonauts and engineers did and toward what the rockets meant.¹ The three books considered here represent a part of this shift, as each aims to highlight the impact of space exploration on Soviet society, using space travel as a lens to examine the Soviet project more broadly. In addition to this common emphasis, the books share a remarkably critical attitude to their object of study, consistently pointing out the failure and duplicity that surrounded the program. An unstated conclusion impresses itself on the mind of anyone who reads them in tandem: while the Soviets attempted to use space exploration to support their contention that a socialist country could best chart a path to the stars and inaugurate a new era for humanity, they ultimately found in the cosmic void nothing usable—only empty space.

The unusual thematic unity of these books, two of which are collected volumes and therefore not necessarily expected to promote an argument, derives in part from the significant level of common authorship. Andrew Jenks, the author of the Gagarin biography, contributes an essay to Into the Cosmos; Slava Gerovitch, Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, and Roshanna Sylvester each offer articles in both Into the Cosmos and Soviet Space Culture; and Siddiqi writes the introduction and an article for Into the Cosmos and the epilogue for Soviet Space Culture. The limited degree to which the volumes diverge from their shared outlook appears related to the nationality of the authors whose works appear in all three books. The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling is by an American, and American historians dominate Into the Cosmos. Both are far more critical in tone than Soviet Space Culture, which features authors from Europe as well as the United States, and the essays of European provenance are more descriptive than interpretive. Aside from these few exceptions, the overwhelming impression made by the three books is that Soviet spaceflight, rather than a world historical accomplishment or romantic struggle to break the bonds of the earth, in truth lays bare the fundamental emptiness of the Soviet project as a whole.

Andrew Jenks’s The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling advances this interpretation by examining Soviet space exploration and Soviet culture at two levels: the personal, by appraising Yuri Gagarin’s biography; and the social, by...