The Social Construction of Sputnik

Asif Siddiqi has written the most important book on the history of Russian technology since Kendall Bailes’s 1978 Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin. Like Bailes, Siddiqi interweaves social and political history with the narrative of technology development, making this volume essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the interplay of science, technology, and Russian society in the twentieth century (The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiii+402. $85).

Since the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957, the Soviet space program has conjured images of scientific planning, enormous budgets, and a gargantuan, methodical, and conservative military-industrial complex. Walter McDougall cast it as a saga of technocratic ascendance. Siddiqi demolishes the myth that Sputnik resulted from careful long-term planning or guided R&D. He demonstrates that even in the secretive, stodgy, bureaucratic USSR, rocket enthusiasts could develop informal networks to realize their dreams. This is a story of human agency producing a space race. Without mass enthusiasm and public support, the Soviet Union would not have reached the cosmos.

Most accounts of the Soviet space program have focused on the consequences following the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957. While some have provided background for English-language readers on Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the Russian fascination with spaceflight, Siddiqi’s book is the definitive work on the topic. He chronicles the science fiction writers, science popularizers, and rocket enthusiasts who in unexpected ways kept the passion for space alive in the USSR. But he goes further, exploring the ways independent initiative interacted with government programs to produce Soviet successes during 1957–61.

Some of the material about the 1940s and 1950s was covered in Siddiqi’s earlier, massive Challenge to Apollo (2000). This latest book adds new archival material and extends the story back to the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, Siddiqi alters our understanding of how science was done in the Soviet Union. He demonstrates agency on the part of key individuals, informal groups, and the broader society. The Soviet leadership evinced minimal interest in space until the mid-1950s. Enthusiasts kept the dream of cosmic exploration alive until it could be joined with security needs and Soviet thirst for prestige to create a major program. Ironically, as Challenge to Apollo suggests, once it became a state program Soviet cosmonautics was less successful.

The early chapters of Red Rockets’ Glare tell the story of Tsiolkovskii and other enthusiasts, leading to the “space fad” of the 1920s. This is the most thorough, balanced, and empathetic treatment of Tsiolkovskii we are likely to get. Siddiqi explores Tsiolkovskii’s science fiction and popular science writings, showing that his treatises on rocketry, including his mathematical model demonstrating that rocket flight was possible, provided both evidence and aura, inspiring Russian engineers for decades. Siddiqi does not ignore the less-appealing elements of Tsiolkovskii’s views, including his embrace of eugenics. Tsiolkovskii, the self-educated cosmonautics pioneer, demonstrates the more positive side of Bolshevik egalitarianism and distrust of specialists, even if he was arrested and his pension was paid irregularly. With understated irony, Siddiqi describes how the father of space flight did not want to travel from Kaluga to Moscow for a celebration of his work in 1932 (though he did make the trip later).

The author resuscitates the “space fad” of the 1920s, when Sergei Korolev and other key figures in Soviet cosmonautics developed the networks that underlay subsequent success. He then turns to the Soviet rocket program in the 1930s, and its demise with the loss of Mikhail Tukhachevskii’s patronage and then of Tukhachevskii himself in the purges. Here the story takes an unexpected turn: although the Soviet state abandoned rocketry before World War II and, except for the famous Katiushas, did not explore possibilities during the war, individuals and small groups kept rocketry work alive. At the center of the story is Korolev, the glider pilot who became one of the most dedicated advocates of rocket development and space flight. Lacking garages, the Soviet amateurs used...