Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe by Paul Betts & Stephen A. Smith

Author:Paul Betts & Stephen A. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

This seemingly oxymoronic connection between ‘Russian spiritual identity’ and humanity’s place in the cosmos continues to vivify a new post-socialist generation of Russian intellectuals.70

Conclusion

When the first young hero cosmonauts flew into space in the early 1960s, Soviet commentators repeatedly depicted them as emblematic of a modern and technologically sophisticated Russia, overtaking the West. And unlike American astronauts who thanked God for their successes, Soviet cosmonauts were avowedly atheistic; one of the first cosmonauts, the young German Titov, famously declared on a visit to the USA that during his 17 orbits of the Earth, he had seen ‘no God or angels’, adding that ‘no God helped build our rocket’.71 As Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock has shown, such exclamations reinforced an alignment between space exploration and campaigns to inculcate atheism among the Soviet population.72 They also whitewashed ‘inconvenient’ phenomena dating back to the 1920s when the founding theorist of Soviet space exploration, Tsiolkovskii, was actively writing about space travel in ways that could not conform to orthodoxies about the role of science and technology in post-World War II Soviet society. An article entitled ‘Cosmonautics versus Religion’ in 1959, for example, could confidently argue that atheism provided the spark for cosmic conquest and that Tsiolkovskii was at the vanguard of this movement.73 Yet, despite these efforts, through the height of Soviet space exploits during the Cold War, Tsiolkovskii’s mystical ideas loomed as an echo of an earlier time.

It is undoubtedly true that when the first space theorists, enthusiasts, and practitioners were articulating a vision for the future of cosmic travel, they were drawing from the modernist and quasi-utopian ideas emerging from particular scientific and technical disciplines rooted in post-Enlightenment rationalism. Expressions of this cult of modern science and technology took the form of fiction (Jules Verne) or popular science (Iakov Perelman) or engineering marvels (e.g. the airplane). All of the principal actors who translated Soviet populist cosmic enthusiasm into the machines that put the first Soviet satellites and cosmonauts into orbit, have paid explicit debt to this tradition. Lest we suspect that they were ‘hiding’ their true motivations, among the literally hundreds of memoirs about the Soviet space program churned out in the 1990s—many of them highly critical of the Soviet state, Stalin, and Marxism in general—remarkably, not a single one hints that the inspiration to aspire for the cosmos was anything but an outcome of a national and cultural commitment to be the best in science and technology.

Yet, while the cult of modern science in the twentieth century inspired these actors, it is also undeniable that the central figure at the very root of grand narrative of the Soviet space program, Tsiolkovskii, was deeply influenced by mystical and occult epistemologies. In fact, at the very moment, the 1920s, when the first mass cosmic enthusiasm emerged in Soviet culture, there was a concomitant if less widespread interest in various mystical and metaphysical notions about the cosmic setting of humanity. The existence of this particular historical strand in the early twentieth century is further complicated by

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