Imagining the Cosmos : Utopians , Mystics , and the Popular Culture of Spacefl ight in Revolutionary Russia

This essay investigates the explosive Soviet interest in space travel during the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the 1920s, as expressed through amateur societies, the press, literature, painting, fi lm, and other popular culture. In recovering an obscured history of the roots of Russian cosmonautics, it shows how the cause of space exploration in early twentieth-century Russia originally stemmed from two ideological strands: technological utopianism and the mystical occult tradition of Cosmism. The former (seemingly modern, urban, international, materialist) alternately clashed and meshed with the latter (superfi cially archaic, pastoral, Russian, spiritual), creating an often contradictory but urgent language of space enthusiasm. Cosmic activists, who saw themselves as part of a new Soviet intelligentsia, actively used both ideals to communicate their views directly to the public. The essay argues that despite superfi cial differences, technological utopianism and Cosmism shared much of the same iconography, language, and goals, particularly the imperative to transform and control the natural world. In other words, the modern rocket with its new Communist cosmonaut was conceived as much in a leap of faith as in a reach for reason. By taking a pair of steps, I crossed over the threshold from one epoch to another, into the space [era].1 —Mikhail Popov, organizer of the world’s fi rst interplanetary exhibition, on what it felt like to step into the display hall, 1927 Space achievements represented an important marker of Soviet claims to global preeminence during the cold war. In books, movies, posters, and songs, Soviet authorities sang the glories of their space program; cosmonauts and artifacts toured the world using rhetoric that confl ated mastery of space with mastery of nature. During and after the cold war, both Russian and Western historians underlined the connection between the Soviet space program and Marxist fascinations with technol* Dept. of History, Fordham University, 441 E. Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458; siddiqi@fordham .edu. The author wishes to thank Michael Hagemeister as well as the participants of the weekly seminar at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University for their useful comments. 1 Sergei Samoilovich, Grazhdanin vselennoi (Cherty zhizni i deiatel’nosti Konstantina Eduardovicha Tsiolkovskogo) (Kaluga, 1969), 181. IMAGINING THE COSMOS 261 ogy.2 These accounts located the social and cultural origins of the Soviet space program as part of the project of modernization, secularism, and “progress.” When the fi rst young hero cosmonauts fl ew into space in the early 1960s, Soviet commentators repeatedly depicted them as emblematic of a modern and technologically sophisticated Russia, overtaking the West. Furthermore, unlike American astronauts who thanked God for their successes, Soviet cosmonauts were explicitly atheistic; one of the fi rst cosmonauts, the young Gherman Titov, famously declared on a visit to the United States that during his seventeen orbits of the Earth, he had seen “no God or angels,” adding that “no God helped build our rocket.”3 And in the 1970s, when the Soviets launched their fi rst cargo ship to a space station, they named it simply Progress. Through lenses of modernity, secularism, and progress, historians typically traced back the history of the Soviet space program to the “patriarch” of Soviet cosmonautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, who in 1903 produced the fi rst mathematical substantiations that spacefl ight was possible. According to this deeply engrained story, the Bolsheviks recognized the value of his work after the Russian Revolution, honored him with many awards, and made him a national treasure. To the Bolsheviks, Tsiolkovskii’s ideas were a perfect vehicle for catapulting Russia into the modern technological age of Ford and Taylor. Soon, inspired by Tsiolkovskii, young men and women joined together to build rockets. The Soviet government supported them and, in 1933, sponsored the creation of a national institute to build rockets. The intellectual and engineering groundwork that they created eventually bore fruit a quarter century later with the launch of Sputnik, the world’s fi rst artifi cial satellite.4 The received story, built on a series of willful distortions, masked a set of complex social and cultural processes, particularly the ways in which social and cultural factors outside state sponsorship—besides popular Marxist rhetoric about the role of technology—enabled the project of space exploration in the Soviet Union. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tsiolkovskii’s ideas on space exploration fed enormous popular interest in the cause of cosmic travel in the Soviet Union. With little or no support from the state, amateur and technically minded enthusiasts formed shortlived societies to discuss their interests and exchange information.5 Some put up impressive exhibitions displaying the visions of the major prognosticators of the day such as Tsiolkovskii, the American Robert Goddard, and the RomanianGerman Herman Oberth. In the popular media, advocates wrote about the power of technology to improve and remake Russian society. On the cultural front, the science fi ction of Aleksei Tolstoi, the paintings of the Suprematists and the Amaravella collective, and Iakov Protazanov’s famous interplanetary movie Aelita all engaged mystical and spiritual ideas of the place of humanity in the cosmos. These embryonic artistic, 2 William Shelton, Soviet Space Exploration: The First Decade (New York, 1968); James E. Oberg, Red Star in Orbit (New York, 1981); William P. Barry, “The Missile Design Bureaux and Soviet Piloted Space Policy, 1953–1974” (DPhil diss., Univ. of Oxford, 1995); David Easton Potts, “Soviet Man in Space: Politics and Technology from Stalin to Gorbachev (Volumes 1 and 2)” (PhD diss., Georgetown Univ., 1992). 3 “Titov, Denying God, Puts His Faith in People,” New York Times, 7 May 1962. 4 Nicholas Daniloff, The Kremlin and the Cosmos (New York, 1972); James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New York, 1997). 5 For an international perspective, see Asif A. Siddiqi, “Nauka za stenami akademii: K. E. Tsiolkovskii i ego al’ternativnaia set’ neformal’noi nauchnoi kommunikatsii,” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 2005, no. 4:137–54.