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  • Soviet Space Mythologies: Public Images, Private Memories and the Making of a Cultural Identityby Slava Gerovitch
  • Joshua First (bio)
Soviet Space Mythologies: Public Images, Private Memories and the Making of a Cultural Identity. by Slava Gerovitch. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. Pp. xviii+ 232. $27.95.

With Soviet Space Mythologies, Slava Gerovitch has given us a vitally important and beautifully written contribution to the growing historiography on the Space Race. As with his first monograph, From Newspeak to Cyber-speak(2002), Gerovitch masterfully mixes methods from the history of science and technology with cultural history. Here, he argues that the Soviet Union's unique path within a global technological development emerged from and further reproduced two distinct cultural identities: Soviet rocket engineers like Sergei Korolev, Valentin Glushko, and Boris Chertok carved out a space of privileged autonomy while working in public obscurity, while cosmonauts such as Yuri Gagarin, Alexei Leonov, and Aleksandra Tereshkova enjoyed (and suffered through) global celebrity even as their technical roles in manned spaceflight were rather limited. Out of the contradictions [End Page 600]within these two professional identities and the tensions between them developed a powerful mythology of the Soviet "conquest" of space.

Gerovitch draws and expands on recent scholarship on the history of the USSR's space program, in particular Asif Siddiqi's The Red Rockets' Glare(2010) and Andrew Jenks's biography of Gagarin, The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling(2012). Whereas Siddiqi focuses on the preSputnik history of Russian and Soviet rocket science visionaries and Jenks uses Gagarin to talk about Soviet celebrity culture, Gerovitch demonstrates the interplay between engineers and mass culture during the post-Sputnik era (1958–present). Soviet Space Mythologieshinges on a long-running debate between rocket designer Korolev and the 1930s aviator-turned-cosmonaut trainer General Nikolai Kamanin over the degree of automation on manned rockets. While the engineers working in Korolev's Special Design Bureau No. 1 argued that the inevitability of human error made automation a necessity, Kamanin and the cosmonauts that he trained urged Soviet authorities to allow space pilotsto assume more manual control over the Vostok and Soyuz rockets during the 1960s–70s.

Despite a subtle evolution of emphasis, the engineers' prerogative remained hegemonic in the Soviet space program even as automation and a general lack of clarity surrounding the cosmonaut's role led to mounting mission failures along with growing American dominance in space exploration. Gerovitch points out that, while both the American and Soviet programs favored automation, the U.S. program was simultaneously more organized from the top-down and more flexible with astronauts' manual operations that allowed for leaner, more easily maneuverable rockets. The key to Gerovitch's argument lies in the agency he gives to the engineers' professional identities. Contrary to popular conceptions of Soviet science and technology, he claims that automation did not emerge (only) from a totalitarian conception of human-machine relations, but (primarily) because individual engineers asserted their superior expertise. Soviet Space Mythologiescompels us to question our assumptions about the Soviet preference for automation in space flight and demonstrates how this outcome was never predetermined by a "totalitarian" mind-set in the Soviet Union. Instead, automation emerged from heated debates among political and Communist Party leaders and the military, along with scientists, psychologists, and engineers.

Gerovitch asserts that the professional identities of cosmonauts and engineers were (and continue to be) shaped through the articulation and then circulation of private memories, even as both groups were profoundly influenced by the public mythologies that they helped construct. This consistent observation emerges from the author's extensive use of memoirs, diaries, and personal interviews, alongside some limited archival materials from the Russian State Archive of the Economy. He notes that space institutions [End Page 601]continue to control access to related archival documents, but out of this dearth of traditional historical evidence emerges a convincing argument about the interrelationship but also "struggle between master narratives and an array of counter-stories" (p. 7) about the Soviet space program.

Case in point: Gerovitch dedicates an entire chapter to the narrative of Gagarin's Vostok flight in 1961. Here he compares different accounts of...

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