Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture

3. Cosmic Contradictions

47 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sputnik and its successors have been the subject of a vast literature that has generally split into two distinct categories. One body of work, focused on recovering “truth” about the effort, has sought to fill gaps in our knowledge. In the deluge of “new” information available with the coming of glasnost and then continuing into the postsocialist period, historians and journalists have rushed to reveal the “real” story behind the Soviet space program. Another smaller but growing stream of recent literature, favored by social and cultural historians, has explored the meanings behind the undeniably massive cosmic enthusiasm that characterized the height of the Soviet space program in the 1960s. Here, scholars have delved into the social and cultural resonance of space, situating their claims in the broader matrix of postwar Soviet history. In broad terms the first canon has been concerned with production, and the latter with consumption. One obvious bridge between these two literatures has been the figure of the Soviet cosmonaut, who was simultaneously part of the machinery of science, technology, and industry that allowed the Soviet Union to achieve many impressive feats in the early years of the space race and a constituent of 3 Cosmic Contradictions Popular Enthusiasm and Secrecy in the Soviet Space Program Asif A. Siddiqi 48  Asif A. Siddiqi the machinery of public relations, critical to creating a global wave of popular enthusiasm for Soviet exploits. Despite a widespread fascination with cosmonauts and what they represented, we know very little about the codes that governed their passage from one world to the other, from production to consumption, from the private to the public. Mediating this connection between production and consumption, between “truth” and “image,” was the regime of Soviet secrecy, which not only circumscribed the ways in which cosmonauts crossed over these divides, but also (re)constructed text, images, and symbols on cosmic topics in fundamental ways that remain misunderstood. Secrecy pervaded every single aspect of the Soviet space program.1 In the early 1960s so much of it was shrouded in secrecy that it seemed that the program could be capable of anything, and its future appeared boundless. The less we knew, the more seemed possible. This heightened level of secrecy, the strictest it was ever to be in the history of Soviet space exploits, was already in place by the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. Two years before Sputnik’s launch, on August 8, 1955, the Soviet Presidium (as the Politburo was known at the time) approved a project to launch a satellite into Earth’s orbit; one of the first problems on the agenda was what to say to the world about the event. The final version of the official Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) communiqu é, which was approved ten days later with the help of party ideologue and Politburo member Mikhail Suslov, established several precedents for all subsequent official pronouncements on the Soviet space program.2 The press release contained no information on who built the satellite , who launched it, what kind of rocket was used, from where it was launched, why it was launched, and who decided to launch it. The final version of the communiqué, issued on the early morning of October 5, 1957, is illuminating in what it does say: there is an abundance of arcane scientific and technical data about the satellite and its trajectory, as if to overwhelm the reader with mathematics in the absence of even a picture of the object. What remains of the text is taken up by expressions of pride of the late “father” of Soviet cosmonautics, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovskii and some final words about possibilities opened up by this accomplishment. These allusions to the past and the future left a discernible hole about information in the present.3 Secrecy was not simply a regime for preventing the transmission of information from one community to another; it also encapsulated an Cosmic Contradictions  49 ongoing discursive metacommentary about the relationship between the space program and the Soviet populace in the 1960s. In every proclamation about a new achievement in space, in every declaration about the heroic work of a cosmonaut, and in all ephemera of the culture of Soviet cosmic travel was embedded a conversation about the acceptable limits of secrecy. Yet because of secrecy, the Soviet space program was victim to a fundamental contradiction...