Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974 (review)

Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974. By Asif A. Siddiqi. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2000. Pp. xvi+1005. $79.

One of the fascinating aspects of historical research is the infusion of new information into a previously well-considered subject. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the resultant access to the archives of the Soviet space program, new information has challenged our understanding of the space race and the forces behind it. American scholarship has traditionally leaned toward characterizing the Soviet program in terms of its impact on the U.S. space effort. Asif Siddiqi's Challenge to Apollo looks specifically at the U.S.S.R.'s approach to space activities and profiles the individuals who drove the Soviet commitment to space exploration. He breaks new ground in doing so.

Siddiqi pursues three lines of inquiry. The first focuses on penetrating the interior of the Soviet program, looking at who drove it, what interests they served, and how decisions were made. The second explores Soviet technological capabilities, and the third considers why the Soviets lost the race to the Moon.

Beginning with a look at the formation of rocketry clubs after World War I, Siddiqi describes the buildup of the Soviet ballistic-missile complex and the subsequent drive for space. Along the way, he confronts the reader with a new conception of the Soviet effort. Although the engineering community made a good recovery from Stalin's purges and the destruction wrought by World War II, work in rocketry became mired in bureaucracy. A profusion of design bureaus competed with one another, all lacking a clear idea of what they were trying to accomplish. By the mid-1950s, the chief designer of long-range ballistic missiles, Sergey Korolev, had taken advantage of this disorder to redirect a segment of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) effort toward spaceflight. This runs contrary to the common perception of the role played by Nikita Khrushchev. Actually, it was Korolev who served as the main catalyst in the space effort, persuading Khrushchev of the feasibility of launching a satellite. Siddiqi makes it clear that the early successes were isolated endeavors, "that all the Sputnik launches were either one-off efforts or hastily put together projects resulting from the suggestions of a few anonymous men" (p. 175). Although the Soviets promoted their success as a triumph of the Communist state, space was not a primary instrument of state policy.

This revelation counters the argument made by Walter McDougall in his 1985 book, . . . The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. McDougall asserts that the Soviets were first in space because the Communist state was the dominant promoter and manager of the space program. Siddiqi shows that the Soviet government focused no massive investment on space exploration. It was space-minded individuals, not bureaucracies, who drove the program. The government cared about ICBM development, not projects with scant military application. The standard conception of the monolithic Soviet space program may need substantial revision in the light of this new insight.

The Soviet failure to land a cosmonaut on the Moon can be attributed to a lack of coordination. Driven by the need to respond to Apollo, the Soviets pursued as many as six major lunar projects at once, but without a unified sense of purpose or clear leadership: "programs emerged and disappeared within the same year, inexplicably changing the direction of the Soviet space effort for a few months" (p. 633). They failed not because the Soviet Union was a technocracy per se, but rather because it was such an ineffective and fractious one.

Siddiqi draws from a wide range of new sources. Numerous photographs and illustrations complement the text and appendices. The size of the volume relates to the sheer complexity of Soviet political, bureaucratic, and technical systems. As a reference and...