This is a little bit of history that deserves to be acknowledged
because it preconditioned the popular
imagination for Russian participation in space long before it was possible.
It is also a reminder that the post revolution era of Russia worked
initially for most people. This was
because the government was spending its way into the future by building plenty
of infrastructure as China has also been doing.
Economic contradictions had not yet choked the system. Stalin and Hitler had not yet begun their lethal
dance.
There was plenty wrong, but things were getting done including Armand
Hammer and his pencil factory. Thus
optimism was a natural outlet of human expression and space was a safe
land. The horrors of Stalin were mostly
off stage and generally out of sight.
So we had a blast of futurist speculation.
The Space Craze That Gripped Russia Nearly 100 Years Ago
By Adam Mann
April 12, 2012 |
3:24 pm |
Newspapers proclaimed that hundreds of starships would soon venture out
into the cosmos. People dreamed of moon colonies that were just a few years
away. Ordinary citizens organized competitions to build rockets to reach the
edge of space.
Welcome to Russia in the 1920s.
America’s fascination with space grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. But the
Russians had already beaten us to it a generation earlier, during the world’s
first space craze. The entire country seemed to become captivated by the idea
of interplanetary travel.
Between 1921 and 1932, Russian media published nearly 250 articles and
more than 30 nonfiction books about spaceflight. In contrast, only two
nonfiction works on the subject appeared in the U.S during same period. Despite
the huge technological hurdles, ordinary Soviet citizens were convinced that
routine spaceflight was just around the corner.
“In the 1920s, the line between lunar aspirations and lunacy was often
invisible,” wrote historian Asif A.
Siddiqi of Fordham University in
New York, in a 2008 paper in the science history journal OSIRISdescribing
this remarkable period in Russian history.
On the 51st anniversary of Yuri
Gagarin becoming the first human
to reach space, it’s logical to look back to the famous Space Race between the
U.S. and Russia. But the space fad that came before it is in some ways even
more interesting.
Russians have long had a spiritual fascination with space. For
centuries, the people told parables, folk tales, and myths about space travel.
A mystical early-20th century Russian philosophy known asCosmism wanted humans to travel into the
universe, recover the ashes of the deceased, resurrect the dead, and settle
throughout the cosmos.
Following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the end of World War I, the
1920s were a hopeful period for many Soviet citizens. People wanted to come
together and help build a utopian socialist society.
The obsession with space travel was born in this climate, beginning in
earnest in 1923 following the publication of an article titled “Is Utopia
Really Possible?” in the newspaper Izvestiia. The piece focused on two early
pioneers of rocketry — the Romanian-German Hermann
Oberth and the American Robert
Goddard — and their ideas of
spaceflight.
This led Russians to rediscover their own homegrown rocket
scientist, Konstantin
Tsiolkovsky, who in 1903 produced the
first mathematical calculations indicating that spaceflight was possible.
Tsiolkovsky’s work was republished in 1924, and sparked many newspaper stories
about the imminent rockets and spaceships that would be carrying people into
space.
Soviet citizens were convinced that Robert Goddard was planning to
launch a rocket to the moon (he had earlier speculated about such a mission,
though no real plans existed). Mars was in opposition — coming closer to Earth
than it had been in hundreds of years. And Moscow university students formed
the world’s first spaceflight advocacy group, the Obshchestva Izucheniia
Mezhplanetnykh Soobshchenii (Society for the Study of Interplanetary
Communication).
The Society brought together workers, scientists, and inventors to work
on ideas for living in space and traveling to other planets. One prominent
member, Fridrikh Arturovich Tsander, constructed a lightweight greenhouse
intended to supply fresh vegetables to space travelers and worked on a new kind
of aircraft engine that could breach the atmosphere.
Like many other Society members, Tsander was a utopian who believed
that mankind’s destiny was the stars. He traveled around Russia giving speeches
about how “[a]stronomy, more than the other sciences, calls upon man to unite
for a longer and happier life,” and that people living on the moon “could
probably construct a habitation in which living conditions would be much better
than on the Earth.”
The biggest impact the Society had was in bringing the idea of
spaceflight to the masses. In May of 1924, they organized a lecture by engineer
Mikhail Lapirov-Skoblo called “Interplanetary Communications — How Modern
Science and Technology Solves This Question.” (“Interplanetary communications”
was then a common phrase for “interplanetary travel.”)
Tickets to the event sold out two days prior and, on the day of the
talk, the police had to be called in to control the frenzied mass of people
jockeying to attend. The lecture sought to do away with the older, mystical
notions of spaceflight and embrace a modern, scientific version. Lapirov-Skoblo
ended his speech by calling on the Soviet people to build rocket engines to
“transform into reality the centuries-old dream of flight into space.”
Further lectures and debates were held in Leningrad, Kharkov, Ryazan,
Tula, Saratov, and elsewhere, disseminating the dream of space exploration all
over the country.
Popular media also helped feed the space craze. Aleksei Tolstoi’s
best-selling novel Aelita: Zakat Marsa(Aelita: Sunset of Mars), first
published in serialized form in 1922–23, told the story of a Russian engineer
who travels to Mars and incites a proletarian revolution among the bourgeois
Martians. The titular Aelita, queen of Mars, helps the protagonist and later
falls in love with him.
A silent movie based on the book came out in 1924. It was preceded by a
viral ad campaign in the Russian
newspapers Pravda and Kinogazeta: “What is the meaning of
mysterious signals received by radio stations around the world? Find out on
September 30!” The mob on the movie’s opening night was so large that even the
movie’s director, Iakov Protazanov, couldn’t attend.
The film was a success, and featured exotic sets, a glamorous princess,
interplanetary travel, and some pretty spectacular special effects for the
time. (These days, you
can watch it in nine parts on
Youtube.)
In 1927, Russian organizers put on the world’s earliest international
exhibition on space travel. The fair, named the “World’s First Exhibition of
Models of Interplanetary Apparatus, Mechanisms, Instruments, and Historical
Materials,” opened in Moscow, not far from one of the city’s biggest
thoroughfares. Between 10,000 and 12,000 attendees visited the fair in
over two months. At its entrance, visitors encountered an elaborate display of
an imagined planetary landscape behind a large pane of glass.
It featured a hypothetical planet with blue vegetation and orange soil
crisscrossed by straight canals. From the sky descended a giant silver rocket,
while a space-suited astronaut stood at the edge of a crater. The exhibition’s
organizer, Mikhail Popov, said that in entering the fair, he felt as if he had
“crossed over the threshold of one epoch to another, into the space [era].”
Visitors, which included schoolchildren, workers, artists, scientists,
and poets, wrote their impressions of the exposition in a book of comments. One
attendee, reporter S. G. Vortkin, was so caught up in what he saw that he wrote
in the fair’s guest book, “I am going to accompany you on the first flight. I
am quite serious about this. As soon as I heard what you had done, I tried in
every way to make certain that you would take me with you. Please do not refuse
my request.”
By the end of the 1920s, the Russian space fad was nearing its end. The
Soviet government refused to officially support the Society for the Study of
Interplanetary Communication, citing the lack of scientific knowledge among its
members.
When people discovered that their dreams of rockets and spaceships were
years, if not decades, away, their interest waned. Eventually, widespread
poverty and the growing Stalinist purges began to erase the idea from most
people’s minds.
But this craze helped plant the seeds of Russia’s eventual early
dominance in the space race. The first generation of Soviet space engineers,
such as Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, came of age during this time. The
rocket designer Vladimir Chelomei named his proposed mission to send people to
MarsAelita, after the movie he had watched as a 10 year old.
Though the U.S. frantically played catch-up after the launch of the
satellite Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin’s historic flight in 1961, and eventually
placed the first people on the moon, the Russian people had been there long
before, if only in their dreams.
Citations: Asif A. Siddiqi, “Imagining
the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in
Revolutionary Russia,” OSIRIS 2008,
23: 260 – 288 (.pdf)
Asif A. Siddiqi “The
Societal Impact of Spaceflight Chapter 27: Making Spaceflight Modern: A
Cultural History of the World’s First Space Advocacy Group,” NASA History, 2007. (.pdf)
Images: 1) Stills from the movie Aelita. 2) Robert Goddard at a chalkboard at Clark
University in 1924.NASA
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