Soviet Space Culture

Starting with the first man-made satellite 'Sputnik' in 1957 and culminating four years later with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, space became a new utopian horizon. This book explores the profound repercussions of the Soviet space exploration program on culture and everyday life in Eastern Europe, especially in the Soviet Union itself.

The launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957 changed the course of human history. In the span of a few years, Soviets sent the first animal into space, the first man, and the first woman. These events were a direct challenge to the United States and the capitalist model that claimed ownership of scientific aspiration and achievement. Into the Cosmos shows us the fascinating interplay of Soviet politics, science, and culture during the Khrushchev era, and how the space program became a binding force between these elements.

From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity. These practices shaped the evolving cultural image of the space age in popular Soviet imagination. Soviet Space Mythologies provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of space history, history of technology, and Soviet (and post-Soviet) history.

* Traces the impact of space travel on everyday life in the East* July 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing* Space exploration from the perspective of cultural history* A visual story told with photos and historical documents Since the dawn of time, people have been fascinated by the idea of traveling to the stars, which is vividly illustrated by utopian and dystopian works of architecture, the visual arts, and cinematography. In many ways, the designs and symbols associated with space travel also found their way into popular culture in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. Often spurned as propaganda by the West, they informed the design of mass-produced consumer goods and public art works in the USSR. While in our part of the world space travel largely turned into a political race as a result of the Cold War, its appeal found an aesthetic expression in everyday life in the East.This book presents the results of in-depth research and extensive travels through a total of seven countries. Its prime focus is the impact of space exploration on everyday life in its pioneering age between the late 1950s and the 1980s and the persistence of related concepts and utopian ideas in today's society. Told as a visual story, it combines artistic and documentary photography, portraits of contemporary witnesses, landscape snapshots, and historical documents. It is in part an historical investigation since many of the pioneers of the space age are no longer alive and many of the formerly ubiquitous items have disappeared.Text in English and German.

This thesis argues that there is a popular culture of space exploration characteristic of a wider Russia; its roots lie in pagan times and it grew through Orthodox Christianity and Soviet Communism to the twenty-first century, where it is actively promoted by Russia and neighbouring nations. The key influences stem from Nikolai Fedorov, Kontsantin Tsiolkovsky, Friedrich Tsander and Yuri Gagarin. The narrative of the twentieth-century Soviet space programme is considered from this perspective and the cultural importance of Tsiolkovsky to this programme is acknowledged. This is an alternative perspective to the commonly-held Western view of the "Space Race". The manipulation of imagery and ritual of space exploration by Russia and other neighbouring nations is examined, and the effect on the "collective remembering" in modern Russia of key events in Russian space exploration is tested.

This wide-ranging cultural history explores the expression of Bolshevik Party ideology through the lens of landscape, or, more broadly, space. Portrayed in visual images and words, the landscape played a vital role in expressing and promoting ideology in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin years, especially in the 1930s. At the time, the iconoclasm of the immediate postrevolutionary years had given way to nation building and a conscious attempt to create a new Soviet �culture.� In painting, architecture, literature, cinema, and song, images of landscape were enlisted to help mold the masses into joyful, hardworking citizens of a state with a radiant, utopian future -- all under the fatherly guidance of Joseph Stalin. From backgrounds in history, art history, literary studies, and philosophy, the contributors show how Soviet space was sanctified, coded, and �sold� as an ideological product. They explore the ways in which producers of various art forms used space to express what Katerina Clark calls �a cartography of power� -- an organization of the entire country into �a hierarchy of spheres of relative sacredness,� with Moscow at the center. The theme of center versus periphery figures prominently in many of the essays, and the periphery is shown often to be paradoxically central. Examining representations of space in objects as diverse as postage stamps, a hikers� magazine, advertisements, and the Soviet musical, the authors show how cultural producers attempted to naturalize ideological space, to make it an unquestioned part of the worldview. Whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination. Not all features of Soviet space were entirely novel, and several of the essayists assert continuities with the prerevolutionary past. One example is the importance of the mother image in mass songs of the Stalin period; another is the "boundless longing" inspired in the Russian character by the burden of living amid vast empty spaces. But whether focusing on the new or the centuries-old, whether exploring a built cityscape, a film documentary, or the painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, the authors offer a consistently fascinating journey through the landscape of the Soviet ideological imagination.

Among the many successes of the Soviet Union were inaugural space flight—ahead of the United States—and many other triumphs related to aviation. Aviators and cosmonauts enjoyed heroic status in the Soviet Union, and provided supports of the Soviet project with iconic figures which could be used to bolster the regime’s visions, self-confidence, and the image of itself as forward looking and futuristic. This book explores how the themes of aviation and space flight have been depicted in film, animation, art, architecture, and digital media. Incorporating many illustrations, the book covers a wide range of subjects, including the representations of heroes, the construction of myths, and the relationship between visual art forms and Soviet/Russian culture and society.

The inherent contradictions of the Space Age -- the mixture of technologies high and low, of nostalgia and progress, of pathos and promise -- are revealed in Kosmos, Adam Bartos's astonishing photographic survey of the Soviet space program. Bartos's fascination with this subject led him to seek out places like the bedroom where Yuri Gagarian slept the night before his history-making flight into space, located in the Baiknour Cosmodrome, the one-time top-secret space complex in the Kazakh desert. Kosmos presents 94 of Bartos's photographs, rich with the incongruities of the history, science, culture, and politics of the Space Age.