Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry

Introduction Envisioning the Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Russian Public Culture, and the Mythology of Soviet Cosmonautics, 1857–1964

INTRODUCTION envisioning the cosmos k. e. tsiolkovskii, russian public culture, and the mythology of soviet cosmonautics, 1857–1964 “Today, Comrades, I firmly believe that what were my past dreams— interplanetary travel—based solely on theoretical foundations will soon become a practical reality.”—K. E. Tsiolkovskii, taped speech from Kaluga in Red Square, Moscow, May Day, 1935 I n the final year of his long life, Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii was sanctioned by Josef Stalin and the Communist Party’s Central Committee to give a popular speech from his provincial home in Kaluga, where he researched and taught for the majority of his life. It was no ordinary speech, because this canonized local hero would be speaking on May Day, 1935, to those in attendance in Red Square (Communist dignitaries and luminaries, including Stalin); but his taped speech was also broadcast throughout the former Soviet Union (see figure 1). Stalin would use the figure of Tsiolkovskii to focus on the superiority of Soviet technology over technology produced under Western capitalism and its scientific system. However, Tsiolkovskii, though he praised the Communist Party for its vision and support, also used the occasion to promote his own ideas about the possibility of space flight. This speech was given while impressive Soviet airplanes flew above, and Tsiolkovskii described them as steel dragonflies that were only a tip of a more profound iceberg. The airplanes and dirigibles that flew over Red Square that day in 1935 were an outgrowth of Tsiolkovskii’s dreams since he himself sketched and analyzed the potential of blimps, at an earlier period, more than anyone in Russia. He also told Soviet citizens about the future of interplanetary travel, his true passion, and elaborated on how he spent over forty years studying rocket flight and the earth’s gravitational forces. He believed the time would come soon when humans would travel in space in new rocket ships and change our conceptualization of the universe.1 10 introduction Little has been written in the West on Konstantin Tsiolkovskii.2 On the other hand, Russian scholars have mostly focused on Tsiolkovskii as a visionary technical genius and elaborated on the narrow technical contributions he added to our understanding of the possibility of rocket flight and space exploration.3 Recently, some Russian specialists, in short newspaper editorials, have proposed a radical alternative, that he was not a technical master of his field and was solely constructed as a genius by the Bolsheviks to mythologize Tsiolkovskii as a Soviet hero. To some extent, these editorials have been constructed to cause controversy and demythologize histories of Tsiolkovskii that were written during the Communist era—therefore, they have an agenda that supersedes their analysis of his contribution to the history of space flight. Though they indeed offer some truth, they also obscure—in a superficial, editorialized fashion—the visionary foresight of Tsiolkovskii and do not contextualize his futurist conceptual and fictional writings in any utopian context of his times.4 Furthermore , these so-called “revisionist” interpretations keep historians locked in a hermetically sealed debate on Tsiolkovskii and his contributions: namely, Bolshevik myth versus real technical genius. They thus make it difficult to offer more eclectic perspectives on his life and how it fits into broader Russian historical and cultural trends. Furthermore, unlike this study, they tend to view mythmaking in the Soviet period as solely a top-down constructive process. Many earlier Soviet accounts of Tsiolkovskii’s life also fail to construct eclectic enough arguments to place Tsiolkovskii’s legacy in a cultural and political context.5 Though Tsiolkovskii was indeed a technical visionary, he was also a potential “poster boy” for Stalin ’s (and, later, Khrushchev’s) vision of Soviet technical superiority over the West. Even though the Bolsheviks and Stalin used Tsiolkovskii for their propaganda, he was also an agent of his own destiny. Much like other scientists, he worked the system for his own benefit as a conscious actor constructing his own identity locally, nationally, and internationally. He also used the Soviet bureaucracy, popular publishers, and the Soviet press to popularize his ideas on space flight and rocketry. He therefore deftly understood , as his own publicist, so to speak, how to manipulate a Figure 1. Photograph taken at the central park in Kaluga, Russia, Autumn 1939, commemorating the death of K. E. Tsiolkovskii in September 1935. The painting held by participants depicts the 1935 May Day festivities in Red Square the day Tsiolkovskii...