The Soviets and space

The Soviets were the first in space, with the Sputnik satellite in 1957,and there's celebration of that and other space-firsts all over Moscow. Statues, street names, even hotels glorify the space program.

One of my favourite places in the city is VDNKh - an acronym standing for "Exhibition of Economic Achievements." Its rows of pavillions were opened in the 50s to showcase all Soviet things great and good, with one given over to each of the 15 Soviet republics for them to display national produce, to the different brances of science (electrophysics, nuclear technology, etc.), and of course, later, to spaceflight.

At the end of of a long avenue of fountains you come across this, a Tupolev jet once flown by Aeroflot (and the precise same type that took me to Azerbaijan, even though it's now more than 30 years old), and a rocket suspended in its launcher:




When I was there on one of the last days of nice weather in October, sunny and breezy, kids were death-defyingly climbing up the slippery support struts to the gangway cosmonauts might have used to embark. I also went inside the Tupolev, dusty and smelling of must, where there was a grainy video about Mr. Tupolev showing on a tiny TV screen, and one wall of the cabin lined with a glass display case holding airfix models of Tupolev jets.

Behind the rocket is the biggest of all the pavillions, the one dedicated to space technology. Like all the other pavillions at VDNKh, since the fall of communism it contents have become rather more capitalist in nature. It's now a garden center. Still, the past lingers on. Fading photographs of the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan still adorn some of the walls, and at the very end, covered only by a white sheet as if it was to be unveiled tomorrow, is a massive circular portrait of the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin. You can just about see the outline of the portrait through the sheet, and imagine the atmosphere, although tantalisingly and as if through a gauze, in the original space pavillion 30 or 40 years ago, when crowds flocked and the pride and amazement at the USSR's feat was still fresh and felt.




Next to VDNKh metro station is the Space Obelisk, unveiled in 1964, three years after Gagarin orbited the earth. A rocket roars into the sky on a magnificant, swooping silver plume. On its base are a host of reliefs: Lenin gesturing to the stars, a sun god with hair streaming holding up a hammer and sickle, Gagarin, Laika the dog, the first ever being in space, and a couple lifting up their baby to celestial rays of light.




The atmosphere of and around these monuments always strikes me as a little strange. Religion was outlawed under communism, and the Soviets seem to have turned to the conquest of space, as one example, to let a little bit of heavenly inspiration into their lives. And yet space exploration in this Soviet form always leaves me with a feeling of emptiness - it's a thoroughly human conquest, made by mortals in a cold and impassive universe.




(Outside a suburban metro station near my flat, this man is holding up a Sputnik satellite.)

I've succumbed to the soviet-space-fascination myself. This is in my room. It reads:

GLORY! TO THE SOVIET PEOPLE, THE PIONEERS OF SPACE.