Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture

6. Cold War Celebrity and theCourageous Canine Scout

133 6 Cold War Celebrity and the Courageous Canine Scout The Life and Times of Soviet Space Dogs In the gripping Cold War contest that was the space race, the feats of astronauts and cosmonauts marked some of the most iconic moments of the twentieth century. The race to send humans beyond the Earth’s atmosphere shifted the battlefield of the Cold War, focusing the energies of the two superpowers on a struggle for scientific and technological supremacy at once more compelling, and thanks to the mass media, more accessible than conventional warfare. Contoured by personal and geopolitical rivalries and fueled by the superpowers’ shared aspirations and values—including a faith in progress, the veneration of science and technology, and a commitment to harnessing nature to human ends— the space race might be considered a quintessentially human drama.1 Yet in the years before Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight ushered in the era of human space travel, many of the milestones in the quest to make that era a reality were claimed by dogs. Indeed, from the initial clandestine launches of “rocket dogs” in 1951, to the highly publicized, doomed voyage of Laika in 1957 and the celebrated journey of Belka and Strelka in 1960, the prospects for human spaceflight were measured against the Amy Nelson 134  Amy Nelson fates of the stray dogs Soviet researchers used to test life-support systems and investigate the effects of spaceflight on living organisms. This chapter considers the life and times of ordinary dogs enlisted in the extraordinary quest to send humans into space. Building on an emerging literature in animal studies, it addresses the possibilities of integrating animals into the history of the human past by reconstructing the history of the space dog program.2 It examines the global fame of the canine cosmonauts, especially Laika, to show how competing images and public discourses situated the canine cosmonauts at the nexus of several related but sometimes dichotomous categories. Many of these representational categories circled around the concept of the “canine hero” or celebrity . For example, Western criticism over the use of dogs as experimental subjects in space research played against the Soviets’ promotion of the brave canine “scout” and their adept manipulation of the dogs in the Cold War propaganda war. At the same time, the dogs served as a catalyst and provided a template for the paradigm of the heroic space traveler commonly associated with Yuri Gagarin and the cosmonauts. The dogs were also scientific research subjects. The decision to use them to learn about the possibilities of human survival in space rested on pragmatic grounds (stray dogs were hardy and in abundant supply) as well as on the traditions of Russian-Soviet physiological research, particularly the work of Ivan Pavlov. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the space dogs became subjects of “chronic experiments” designed to yield reliable information about the effects of particular stimuli and conditions on specific physiological processes. The dogs were surgically modified to provide researchers access to information that would help them evaluate the potential for humans to survive in space. As living organisms modified by humans to serve human ends, they might even be regarded as creations of the laboratory—a kind of “biotechnology” in an updated Pavlovian physiology factory.3 Like other objects of scientific inquiry, the space dogs functioned as “boundary objects” a concept that has been used to show how the same specimen, exhibit, or research subject means different things to different people.4 Various human constituencies on both sides of the superpower divide saw the dogs in often contradictory ways—as experimental animals , brave scouts, hapless victims, faithful servants, or stellar exemplars of the family pet. This chapter suggests that these sometimes divergent meanings converged in ways that made the space dogs effective bound- Cold War Celebrity and the Courageous Canine Scout  135 ary objects in the complex and politically charged enterprise of Cold War public science. Although they meant different things to different audiences , the concept of “dog” underpinned all of these meanings, allowing the space dogs to serve as an interface or “translation” between otherwise divergent social worlds.5 The canine cosmonauts’ status as dogs established a measure of mutual intelligibility across the diverse but intersecting perspectives of engineers, politicians, medical personnel, scientists, and the general public. The multivalent and historically conditioned relationships between humans and the dog (Canis lupus familiaris) informed the space dogs’ media-mediated celebrity...