Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

The Legacy of Laika: Celebrity, Sacrifice, and the Soviet Space Dogs

20 4 I can’t help thinking about Laika. She had to do it for human progress. She didn’t ask to go. . . . She really must have seen things in perspective. It’s important to keep some distance . . . —Ingemar, in My Life as a Dog (Mit liv som hund), dir. Lasse Hallström, 1985 On 3 November 1957, less than a month after the successful launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, the Soviet Union achieved another milestone in the space race when a small, mixed-breed dog named Laika became the first living creature to orbit the earth. Sealed within the tiny cabin of Sputnik 2, Laika was provided with food, water, and a climate-control system designed to support her for several days. The space capsule was not engineered to be retrievable, so the dog’s death was a certainty from the outset. For forty years, the Soviets maintained that she had died painlessly after several days in orbit, although we now know that she succumbed to panic and overheating only a few hours into the mission. In any event, she was immediately famous. News of her flight made headlines around the world, fuelling Western anxieties about Soviet technological achievement and angering animal welfare groups, even as the Soviets hailed this latest victory in the Cold War. Other dogs soon joined Laika in the pantheon of canine pioneers paving the way for the first manned flight by Yury Gagarin in April 1961. The Soviet public especially adored Belka and Strelka, who spent twenty-four hours in orbit before returning safely to earth. Their puppies became media darlings in their own The Legacy of Laika Celebrity, Sacrifice, and the Soviet Space Dogs a m y n e l son The Legacy of Laika 205 right and, when Khrushchev gave one to the Kennedy family, participants in Cold War history. By proving that animals could survive conditions of weightlessness beyond the earth’s atmosphere, Laika and the space dogs played an important role in the space race and the Cold War. This study uses their celebrity and sacrifice to explore the interpretive possibilities and methodological challenges of incorporating animals into the history of the human past. While recent scholarship has examined the significance of animals in human history from the perspective of hunting, agriculture, domestication, and scientific research, the difficulties of conceptualizing a history focused on animal, rather than human subjects remain considerable.1 As Erica Fudge has noted, our access to the animals of the past is usually mediated by documents written by humans, leaving us only with representations and making it impossible to look at animals themselves.2 In the case of Laika and the space dogs, these problems of representation are offset at least partially by the fame the dogs garnered as individuals, and the opportunity to consider material relationships as well as human representations of those relationships. Although they did not leave written records or have a sense of their own “role” in history, the space dogs participated as historical actors precisely in ways that humans would or could not. They are amongaselectgroupofanimals,suchasJumboorSeabiscuit,whoarefamous in their own right. They are also extraordinary as the named counterparts to the no less famous but anonymous dogs used as experimental research subjects by the great physiologist, Ivan Pavlov. Like other human and animal experimental subjects, the space dogs may be considered as “boundary objects” that overlap “intersecting social worlds and realms of knowledge.”3 For many people, they were “experimental animals ” playing a critical role in the production of knowledge about the environmental conditions of outer space. Others saw the dogs as “brave scouts,” “faithful servants,” or “innocent victims.” But in a historical moment where the differences between human and animal were emphasized even as the affinities between the two were stressed, the space dogs’ status and agency as dogs was critical. Donna Haraway’s understanding of “companion species,” which emphasizes the material and semiotic interdependence between humans and domestic canines “bonded in significant otherness,”4 can help illuminate the role of dogs as historical actors in a drama that intertwined humans and animals in public and politically charged ways. This essay examines the linked fortunes of humans and dogs by reconstructing the history of the space dog program. It situates that story in terms of the unique tradi- a m y n e l s on 20 6 tions of Russian-Soviet science, the...