I. The Changing Nature of Russian Scientific Discourse in Public: From Imperial Era Enlightenment (and Early Soviet Technological Mass Education) to Nationalist Science Patriotism, an Introduction
Scientific discourse in the popular realm developed slowly in Russia because in both the Imperial and Soviet era there was significant state control of publishing and communicative media. In the Tsarist era, a state censor existed from the time of Nicholas I (1825–1855), and in the Soviet era this censor became even more notorious, if not pervasive. However, with this said, in Imperial Russia private publishing, scientific societies, and popular lectures became a few of the diverse means by which scientists and educators propagated notions of science to the public outside the state's purview. In European countries in general, many obstacles also existed to popularizing science since the Renaissance, and sometimes these were religious or state-sponsored roadblocks to the publicity of controversial ideas. However, all the same, Russians, like their European counterparts, found creative, bottom-up pathways to generate genuine interest in science from the public. Furthermore the popularization of science between educated scientists (or lay-professionals) and the public was not always a top-down diffusion of ideas, but also a negotiated process where the recipient had clear expectations in mind that sometimes (but not always) affected the popularization process itself.Footnote 1
The Soviet state in the twentieth century, however, saw science popularization as a fundamental, inherent part of their cultural revolutionary plans – namely, to create a new secular Soviet man and woman in the twentieth-century scientific world. In this framework, the Soviet state saw science and religion at odds with each other, and the popularizers, much like anti-religious bezbozhniki (godless activists), could be used in this revolutionary process. Thus the state's interests here converged with popular educators on some, but not all, subsets in terms of science popularization.Footnote 2 The Soviets were able to use the old intelligentsia to accomplish this task, as well as to craft new ways to propagate science using Marxist activists, such as anti-religious propagandists in the 1920s and 1930s. These developments were facilitated by mass publishing campaigns, public events, and centralized support (albeit with auditing and monitoring) of former Imperial scientific societies. Over time, however, as science became more embedded in the popular mindset, and therefore less a part of early enlightenment campaigns, Stalin and his successors found science popularization to be a convenient mechanism to also propagate notions of Soviet exceptionalism, cover great technical feats with nationalistic fanfare, and create an atmosphere of scientific competition with the West that would then also become embedded in the fabric of cold war life. Thus science popularization became transformed, as the society matured and evolved over time, from an endeavor tied to enlightenment to one tied to nation building (Low Reference Low2005), technical modernization, and national prowess.Footnote 3 In this light, understanding Soviet science popularization during Stalin's and Khrushchev's times lends itself to methodological parameters that do not focus simply on the diffusion and reception of scientific content, but as much on an understanding of technical modernization paradigms and state-society interaction in the post-WWII era.
This article will begin with an overview of first the Imperial popularization process as a window through which to understand how the early Soviet regime borrowed from the past in order to engender a mass scientific consciousness. In the pre-1917 past, science popularizers mounted huge campaigns in factories, itinerant libraries, adult-education classrooms, and other venues to spread science amongst the underprivileged. This article will argue, therefore, that science propagandists of different ideological and educational backgrounds converged temporarily with the Soviet state regarding the great mission not only to raise both the rudimentary scientific level of its citizens, but also to imbibe that citizenry with a scientific consciousness. Yet by Stalin's times, science popularization as a movement additionally became a tool for state sponsored campaigns to promote large-scale technological progress and also propagate notions of Soviet technical feats in the process of engendering national pride. With Stalin's “Great Turn” in the mid-to-late 1930s away from the more cosmopolitan and utopian roots of the early Soviet Cultural Revolution, science also became a purveyor of state sponsored campaigns. This would also be true in Khrushchev's times in the 1950s and early 1960s with grandiose technologies such as the space program. Nonetheless, state and society would converge on some of these scientific interests – especially the pride Soviet citizens took in large-scale technological achievements such as Yuri Gagarin's circumnavigation of the globe in April of 1961. However, state and public also came to an engagement with mass-scientific themes from different angles and through a variety of cultural prisms that did not always intersect.
II. From Pan-European Enlightenment to Stalinist Mass-Technical Educational Propaganda: Science Popularization from Imperial Times through Stalin's Cultural Revolution (1928–1932)
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Imperial Russia experienced a reading and publishing revolution outside the state's purview. Enlightened publicists, such as the freemason Nikolay Novikov, built entire enterprises around publishing popular scientific tracts and textbooks for commoners in the hope of expanding the scientific horizons of broader classes. To some extent, these private publishers competed with the earlier monopoly held by the state and its institutions (especially the Russian Academy of Sciences) in order to bring high scientific ideas (in more diluted form) to a broader readership. It was indeed in 1783, under Catherine the Great, that the watershed state decree that authorized the opening of independent, private publishing houses in Imperial Russia was promulgated – pushed through from above ironically without even the sanctioning of the Russian Senate. Between 1776 and 1783, presses owned or rented by private individuals did exist in Russia, but on January 15, 1783, Catherine II's edict granted private individuals the right to own and operate printing presses without having to receive a special privilege from the government. The press law had significant resonance for those publications in the natural sciences. Editors, such as the enlightened thinker Nikolay Novikov, published a veritable myriad of popular science journals, books, and pamphlets. His most popular journal on the sciences was entitled Magazine of Natural History, Physics, and Chemistry, which appeared in the 1780s in Russia, printed at a press that was situated at the University of Moscow.Footnote 4 The sciences in general received a real boost by this law. In the decade between 1783 and 1792, approximately ten percent of all privately published books were on the topic of technology, science, and mathematics (see Mel'nikova Reference Mel'nikova1966, 177–180).Footnote 5
In Western and Central Europe, much like Russia, the publishing house (both state, at first, and then later private) was an early catalytic means or conduit for science popularization, especially in countries with relatively low literacy – cheaper books and magazines, especially with simple diagrams or pictures, were aids in spreading science amongst the masses so to speak. In Britain, cheap popular science newspapers such as the Penny Magazine, and in France, the Magazine Pittoresque, were published by European philanthropic societies in the 1820s and 1830s such as Britain's Society for the Diffusion of Useful Scientific Knowledge. These societies had a mission to popularize science amongst lower class audiences in formats that were filled with pictures, diagrams, and diluted scientific descriptions.
As the nineteenth century dawned in countries such as Russia (but this is true for Germany as well),Footnote 6 penny or kopek newspapers (and cheap popular journals) became essential self-education sources (or texts) especially for workers to gain valuable scientific knowledge.Footnote 7 This is especially true since many laborers may not have had access to traditional institutional-based education courses, and wanted more technical knowledge to better their job prospects and for social mobility. Those from lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds, throughout Europe at this time, also sought out these publications (and itinerant lectures for that matter) as a means for self-improvement and for utilitarian purposes at their job site.
In the nineteenth century, both Russian editors, and academics themselves, published works for the new Russian market, sparking a trend in mid-century to publish popular-science journals and newspapers with a particular didactic or educational focus.Footnote 8 In Germany and Central Europe, during this time period, editors of journals also helped cultivate an interest in science (and natural history) amongst both middle-class and working-class audiences, as topics such as Darwinism soon became embedded in the fabric of everyday popular discourse.Footnote 9
By the late nineteenth century, scientific societies, the Academy of Sciences, popular editors, and pedagogues became involved in a vast movement to popularize scientific knowledge throughout the Russian empire. Educational specialists were particularly interested in how to craft popular scientific texts, and how to envisage their audience and targeted readers. The movement was as much about the content of popular science tracts as it was the method of popularizing this material for a broad audience.Footnote 10 A number of educators, such as the Petersburg bibliographer Nicholas Rubakin, also developed natural scientific curricula for non-traditional students to follow on their own time, after work let out in Russian factories in the capital. Rubakin and his followers, for instance, gave itinerant popular science lectures at factories in and around the Russian Imperial Capital, and also founded the Committee to Fight Against Illiteracy in 1891 and a mobile library of educational aids and pamphlets in all fields of the natural sciences especially.Footnote 11
Additionally, the scientific society, at the local and provincial site, became an important venue to popularize scientific ideas outside the central capital cities of Imperial Tsarist Russia. This had happened earlier, to some extent, in Western European countries with more established middle-class voluntary societies. As Margaret Jacob points out in her work, this was predominate in even eighteenth-century provincial English life where societies run by genteel and mercantile individuals propagated an understanding of science that was both mechanical/experimental and utilitarian (Jacob Reference Jacob1998, 156–158).Footnote 12 The Russian science societies in the locale mimicked, to some extent, these Western European societies, yet they had a mission to also enlighten wider segments of the populace. This mission was an inherent element of the popular and philanthropic educational pursuits of the middle-class Russian intelligent (morally, enlightened intellectual). In Russia, they also had an intent to make visible the industrial, ecological, and technical importance of their regions. Lastly, their societies therefore combined elements of the roots of scientific professionalization, support of local ecology, science education, and enlightened voluntarism. After the construction of the zemstva (local councils) in the 1860s in Russia, during the era of Alexander II, municipal bureaucracies helped fund scientific educational lectures, museums, and voluntary projects in areas such as the Northern Volga River Basin (Yaroslavl’ especially), Southern Russia (Krasnodar), and in Eastern Russia (such as Yekaterinburg). The work of these societies continued up to WWI when Russia subsequently experienced enormous social disarray during the War, two Revolutions, and Civil War.
With the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, something had dramatically changed the landscape for science popularizers. Many now found the new Marxist state a willing supporter of their goals of spreading science to an under-educated public. The state, at least until 1928, sponsored pre-revolutionary editorial boards, museums, scientific societies, and even individual publicists that helped in this cultural revolution that replicated the broad goals of the early European enlightenment and the more imminent cultural revolution of Lenin's Communist Party in the 1920s.Footnote 13 This was true not only in the central provinces and capitals of Soviet Russia, but in provincial settings at well. The Bolsheviks therefore wanted to especially use the pre-revolutionary scientific elite in their mass educational campaigns, particularly in areas like the provinces where their political foothold was still tenuous.Footnote 14 This is not to assume the pre-revolutionary state, in contrast, was unwilling to work toward similar mass-educational goals; however, in the post-1917 revolutionary landscape, Russian mass science educators found the Soviet state (at least temporarily) an active, symbiotic patron of their goals of science popularization. Private publishers, pre-revolutionary science societies, and itinerant science lecturers were therefore able to continue their earlier activities across the revolutionary divide until the so-called “great break” (velikiy perelom) of Stalin's 1928 Revolution.
After the Russian Civil War concluded in 1920, the period of the mixed economy, or New Economic Policy (Novaya ekonomicheskaya politika, NEP), 1921–28, that ensued poses the historian of science popularization and political discourse an interesting methodological dilemma. While the Bolshevik state was “Marxist” in theory, during this period, this did not necessitate that the means and methods of science enlightenment were inextricably linked in a web of dialectical materialist propagandistic ideology. While radical communist popularizers existed and tried to push their agenda in the 1920s, the state, especially under the direction of People's Commissariat of Enlightenment director Anatoliy Lunarcharskiy, and science section head Feodor Petrov, did not want to antagonize the older bourgeois pedagogues – eagerly hoping to use them in the broader movement to educate the formerly dispossessed laboring classes on whom the Bolsheviks theoretically rose to power and who had given their tacit support.
Theoretically, therefore, one could argue that in the period 1861–1928 (from Alexander II's reform era to Stalin's Revolution from above), a type of contiguous communicative “public sphere” in relation to science existed across the 1917 revolutionary divide, even with different state structures. How would we therefore theoretically and practically analyze or describe this socio-political, scientific discursive medium prior to the hyper-centralized, Stalinist monopoly of power and information that began in the aftermath of 1928? Jürgen Habermas has explained, in pre-twentieth century European times, that as periodicals replaced private correspondences as the key medium of discourse (and museums and societies institutionalized lay opinion on issues of public art, and, for example, science), a so-called “public sphere” arose that replaced the old aristocratic and monarchal spheres of information flow. He isolated the bourgeoisie, or middle sociological elements, as the force that was driving this new public sphere in Europe; and he stressed that a continued private European market, well into the twentieth century, was essential for this type of sphere to have a lasting vibrancy (Habermas Reference Habermas and Burger1992, 51).Footnote 15
Yet in countries on the fringe of Europe (i.e. Russia/Eurasia –caught between two continents), where both the educated working and middle classes were a relatively small part of the population (Russia prior to the Stalinist 1930s was very rural in socio-political terms – in 1914, only 18 per cent of the population lived in urban settings), Habermas’ analysis does not always apply as well. This is especially true since a small cohort of middle-class voluntary philanthropists, educators, and editors had to spread science to either condensed urban classes in crowded capital cities or a largely illiterate, rural population outside the major cities. The public scientific sphere was also contested, so to speak – that is, part state dominated under NEP, part private entrepreneurial holdover from late Imperial days, and part driven by an intelligentsia that still held philanthropic, non-profit educational goals in the sciences to be part of their missionary zeal. As urbanization exploded during Stalin's cultural revolution, and the needs of workers in industry demanded more technical education from below, the state under the Soviets in the 1930s (and beyond) had to respond with an enormous effort to popularize technological knowledge for the many who never had the benefit of even secondary scientific curricula. This created a tenuous symbiosis between the Communist state and the newly minted workers (streaming in from the countryside) in factories, and it posed dilemmas for science popularizers as they entered an even more state-dominated informational sphere in the sciences when the 1920s vestiges of private publishing would be completely abolished in the Stalinist 1930s. Equally as important, science popularization, especially for the state, became synonymous with remedial technical education – particularly responding to social pressures from below to provide technical manuals, films, pamphlets, and technical night courses to undereducated workers in factories and industrial sites.
Yet the 1920s NEP era witnessed an explosion of popular scientific magazines, popular lectures at museums, and pre-revolutionary publishing houses re-asserting their profitable business and marketing acumen in these arenas as well. In the 1920s, the Leningrad publicist Yakov Perel'man published voluminous works on air- and space-flight and a profitable series, “Science as Entertainment,” while the pre-revolutionary publishing house of Pavel P. Soykin capitalized on the public's interest in exploration and anthropological surveys of exotic cultures and global geography.Footnote 16 Space flight, rocketry, and the cosmos were also important topics to readers, and the public engaged in these issues enthusiastically.Footnote 17
Popular science educators, however, were not always in agreement over how to popularize science and technology and whether to imbue the material with political or ideological overtones in Soviet Russia of the 1920s. Furthermore, Soviet era science popularizers saw some, but not all, of the pre-revolutionary publicists as lacking scientific training. For instance, the biologist Boris M. Zavadovskiy attacked some of the pre-revolutionary bibliographers whose work was still popular amongst readers with remedial skills in the 1920s, arguing that those such as Nikolay Rubakin were not well versed in scientific questions they wrote about, focused on anecdotal information, and diluted the scientific information they propagated. These debates, though pedagogical and idiosyncratic, raged in Soviet era journals such as Kniga i revolyutsiya (The Book and Revolution) during the 1920s.Footnote 18
With Stalin's Industrial and Cultural Revolution enacted from above in 1928, something dramatic would change for the science popularization movement in Russia. In the Stalin era, Soviet state officials believed that the spread of science and technology had to coalesce with the Communist Party's utilitarian goals and needs to revive the industrial sector of the economy. This resulted in a new Stalinist technologically oriented popularization campaign that reflected the emphasis on Soviet technology and its glorification vis-à-vis the West. In essence, the enlightened, imaginative vision of public science that crossed the 1917 divide became transformed after 1928 into applied science and technology for the masses, especially at the laboring worksites.
Eventually activists interested in science education on a mass level organized groups such as the voluntary association TekhMass (abbreviation for Tekhnika Mass, or sometimes seen in a type of plural dative case “Massam” for Technology for the Masses) with the tacit support and economic backing of the Stalinist state. These communist oriented popularizers promoted the technical education of workers in the late 1920s in order to help integrate them into the factory environment of the Stalinist First Five-Year Plan (FFYP, 1928–1932) – therefore their mission was also a response to demand from below. While these organizations fostered mass propaganda efforts of the regime, they also provided basic technical guidance to rural laborers who were entering a more mechanized urban labor arena and shop floor. This so-called Stalinist campaign to support “mass-technology” was of primary importance to the regime and was a pervasive focus of many editorials in popular science journals and the popular press during the Stalin era.Footnote 19
III. A Nationalist Technological Discourse: Where Science Propaganda Meets Public Pride and Engaged Enthusiasm, 1932–1964
In the 1930s and 40s in Soviet Russia, however, a cultural shift had occurred under Stalin, coined by the historian Nicholas Timasheff as the “Great Retreat,” different from the 1928 “great break” from NEP. After 1932, up through Stalin's death in 1953 at least, high Stalinism would embody a retreat away from revolutionary cultural norms toward greater Russian, and even more nationalistic themes (see Timasheff Reference Timasheff1946). Embedded in this would be a continued emphasis on practical education for laborers that would additionally, however, glorify publicly Soviet technology and science vis-à-vis the West.Footnote 20 On the other hand, as the historian David Hoffman has reminded us, Stalinist technological propaganda also had a modernizing tendency that supported mass education and revolutionary norms that were not necessarily at odds with earlier Soviet cultural paradigms (see Hoffman Reference Hoffman2003).
However, it is within this context, for instance, that Soviet aeronautical feats during the 1930s were glorified and popularized through propagandistic means by the Soviet press. During the Soviet 1930s and 1940s, prior to the era of Sputnik, Russians began to witness in the popular press and journals a departure away from the international coverage of technology during the 1920s, moving toward an increasingly nationalistic, and even triumphal manner and tone. The 1930s were characterized as years of “Socialist Aviation,” where historic non-stop aeronautical feats were covered in the press with laudatory messages of Russian heroics in the air.Footnote 21 Pilots were urged to conquer the air and go beyond all previous boundaries and achievements.
Even stage and film productions with scientific and technical themes exhibited these Stalinist Greater Russian nationalistic and propagandistic overtones. For instance, the Moscow playwright Anatoly Glebov wrote an interesting cultural treatise entitled “Storming the Stratosphere” which was published in March 1932 in the Soviet journal Tekhnika (Technology) where he alluded to the fact that cultural figures, like himself, should propagandize about the feats of Soviet technology and heroics of the Russian people. Theatre and film particularly evoked this promethean metaphor of conquering the galaxy with Russian technological ingenuity, and these productions at that point in time (unlike the NEP era) had the requisite, myopic ideological component embedded in the plots.
Probably the best example of this kind of scientific cultural propaganda was the popular 1936 Stalin era film Cosmic Race that was directed by Vasiliy Nikolayevich Zuravlyëv. It was a silent film, attempting to appeal to young space enthusiasts, as its central characters speeded to the moon aboard rockets named after Soviet heroes, such as General Voroshilov or Comrade Stalin himself. While the film dealt with popularizing some serious scientific issues such as multi-stage boosters, gravity, and propellant devices, it mostly focused on the technical achievements of socialism vis-à-vis the capitalist West.Footnote 22
With the Second World War, and its concomitant devastation of the Soviet landscape and populace, popular educational campaigns, especially in the sciences, took a backseat initially to the industrial, economic, and mass-psychological rehabilitation of the USSR. However, with the launching of Sputnik I in 1957 (and the earlier acquisition of a nuclear bomb and its successful detonation in the Central Asian Steppe in 1949), Soviet political and administrative leaders became increasingly more aware of the competitive power of Soviet technology, even more than in the 1930s and early 1940s. The Soviets thus developed extensive campaigns to publicize (mostly through press releases) Soviet feats for a broad domestic and foreign audience. Publicizing technical and scientific feats therefore became an important component in the early cold war between the superpowers – this was both a rhetorical campaign on the part of governments, combined with a more practical, expansive popular-educational element in the press.
The critical problem in this process was that some material, such as rocket technologies for example, were highly secretive and were generated primarily for military use. Much of these clandestine Soviet successes therefore in rocket and missile technologies, especially pertaining to outer space, could not be publicized. Yet once Sputnik I was launched in 1957, the country witnessed an array of publicity on Soviet aeronautical (and cosmonautic) developments. Clearly, in this regime-driven process, big science and technology therefore became the overriding tropes that the scientific publicist campaigns emphasized, and Soviet feats in outer space were particularly popular during the Khrushchev era.Footnote 23 The popular ramifications of big science and technology, in the context of the ensuing cold war, give the superficial impression that these themes were simply regime-driven from above. Yet on further analysis (even in the 1950s and 1960s), one can argue that there was a genuine interest from below by ordinary Russians in scientific and technical issues – especially related to rocketry, air-flight, and the cosmos.
Besides the regime's infatuation with rocketry, air-flight, and space exploration, the propagation of the virtues of nuclear power for peaceful (as opposed to military) uses was also emphasized by the Soviet regime in the post-Stalinist era (Schmid Reference Schmid2006). This was certainly not unique to Soviet society, and the historian Daniel Ford has noted that a similar development occurred in post-WWII America – namely, the American government attempted to discuss the virtues of nuclear technologies without any explanation of its potential risks (Ford Reference Ford1982). All the same, Soviet era writers emphasized in a variety of contemporary governmental newspapers and journals, such as the popular Noviy Mir (New World) and Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Gazette), between 1958 and 1961, that United States oil companies, and the military-industrial complex, opposed the use in America of nuclear energy for electrical purposes, while the Soviets would surpass other nations in this direction.
This emphasis on the part of the Soviet regime on big science and technological propaganda did not preclude a simultaneous campaign to propagate broader scientific-technical education material to the public in the post-WWII era (albeit with a Marxist-Leninist ideological underpinning). The Soviet regime popularized science in the post-WWII era using multi-variegated venues, yet its primary conduit through officially sanctioned circles was the creation in 1947 of the “All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge” (or Znaniye Society as it was known). The famous physicist Sergey I. Vavilov played an important role in its initial organization, and he had previously taken great interest in the popularization of scientific knowledge. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, the regime insisted that the society become infused with a dictum to simultaneously spread Marxist-Leninist ideological frameworks, which thus both “guided” yet constrained its initial organizers. It did, however, much like pre-revolutionary antecedent science societies, manage to orchestrate a huge Soviet-wide campaign to create public science lectures, popular readings and exhibitions, young adult science fairs, and competitions. In fact, between the time of Stalin's death in 1953 and the rise of Mikhail S. Gorbachev in 1985, the Znanie Society published half of all the popular science literature in the USSR. Even after that moment, governmental publishing statistics show that between 1986 and 1987, Znaniye published 663 popular scientific texts, pamphlets, and journals combined with a circulation (or print-run) of nearly 60 million copies. Like its antecedent TekhMass in the early Stalin era, the society also organized a network of “people's technical universities” which were oriented toward working class audiences who did not have adequate secondary education in the sciences. Furthermore, the Communist Party sanctioned the society to control and administer public science and technical museums that came under its purview after 1948 – these included the famous Moscow Polytechnical Museum and the Central Polytechnical Library in Moscow. Lastly, the society ran 32 planetaria in various Soviet cities, the oldest, and most famous, being the Moscow Planetarium. The Znaniye Society also ran science reading-rooms in remote areas of the USSR, and was also actively involved in atheist propaganda during the Khrushchev era when the anti-religious campaign became virulently reactivated.Footnote 24
The Znaniye Society was a clear indication of the hyper-centralized and institutionalized nature of post-WWII science popularization. To some extent, even more than in the early Stalinist 1930s, the Soviet Regime was better equipped to coordinate science propaganda and myopically constrain the spread of scientific information in public. This is a dramatic change from the 1920s when state and private venues competed more or less in this arena, and carried out a more sophisticated institutionalization of these efforts in comparison to the early Stalin era. It also is indicative of how the state sanctioned Znaniye to literally take over, and consolidate, all large scale institutions (such as science museums and planetariums) that were the main pre-WWII sites for science popularization. Even though the Znaniye Society was one of the main conduits for the state to popularize scientific knowledge, the Soviet regime was still very interested, particularly in the late 1950s, in publicizing its feats in the technical realm through its major newspapers as well. Especially after 1957, as part of a myriad of celebratory events in honor of Sputnik's launching, a host of journals and newspapers, including the military's Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star), published laudatory articles on Soviet technology, rocketry, the history of spaceflight, and the new cosmonaut.Footnote 25 Mass public spectacles and events commemorated new technologies launched by the space and nuclear age, and fit into the paradigm of the ideological and technological race with the West during the cold war era. These events, celebrations, and rallies, therefore became state-constructed sites for the Soviet masses to become involved in the public spectacle of display for “Soviet big science and technology.”Footnote 26
The Soviet state was also concerned with the technical education of young citizens and their involvement and engagement with science. The Komsomol (Communist Youth League) press actively, in the late 1950s and 60s, promoted the virtues of science, and of course large-scale technologies such as space exploration were particularly lauded.Footnote 27 Public institutions, such as Moscow's Planetarium, hosted state-sponsored science youth festivals and competitions involving airplane and rocket model-makers, while visits from Yuri Gagarin and other cosmonauts were held at places such as the Pioneer Palace near Moscow University in the Lenin Hills of the capital. Much of these efforts were constructed to actively cultivate interest amongst Soviet youth in science, technology, and engineering.Footnote 28 What is most noteworthy is that this involvement of youth in a growing scientific culture under Khrushchev is being replicated once again under President Vladimir Putin, and Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev, in a similar form. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight in the fall of 2011, the Russian regime sponsored a series of on-going young inventor competitions and “star nights” to reinvigorate young Russians’ interest in outer-space culture and science studies.
As the Russian state does today, so in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet state took great pride in its achievements in rocketry, space exploration, and even nuclear technologies. Eclectic popular journals such as Ogonëk (Little Flame), literary journals such as Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Journal), and more politicized official journals of the Communist Party such as Kommunist (The Communist) spread information about the feats of Soviet technology such as rocketry and space flight (see Siddiqi Reference Siddiqi2000). Mass parades, such as the April 1961 events in honor of Yuri Gagarin in Moscow, lauded a Soviet technological future that was blazing a new trail into the cosmos. Yet, as some analysts have suggested, this was not only propaganda from above, but also many Soviet citizens took great pride in their nation's technological achievements, just as Americans took pride in their moon landing. The eminent historian of Soviet science, Loren R. Graham, in his recent memoir recalled that moment as he too marched through Red Square in honor of Gagarin's circumnavigation of the globe in a satellite. Graham believed the celebration, though part of Soviet technical propaganda, was actually heartfelt on the part of the Soviet citizenry who participated, believing their system had fostered great technical achievements in human spaceflight (Graham Reference Graham2006, 18–19).Footnote 29
Cosmonauts, such as Gagarin, also took part in countless public festivals and ceremonies – from the opening of new science museums and planetariums, to public celebrations in Red Square in Moscow on their return from outer space. Yuri Gagarin, in June of 1961 (two months after his historic manned space flight), gave a well-publicized speech and laid the first brick at the Soviet National Museum of Cosmonautics named after Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy (the grandfather of Russian rocketry) in Tsiolkovskiy's hometown of Kaluga, Russian Federation.Footnote 30 These cosmonauts also appeared at the openings of countless science-fiction films on rocketry, space travel, and new technologies in Soviet capital cities and provincial centers as well.Footnote 31 Their faces also were printed on numerous pins, stamps, posters, and pamphlets that young Soviets traded and collected in the 1960s much like their western counterparts. One could effectively argue that this obsession with collectables was part of a modern transnational consumer and material culture.
The elite Russian cultural intelligentsia, unlike the Soviet state, youth groups, and broader Russian society, however, may have had the most ambivalence to science and technological progress during the post-Stalin era. This may have also been the one sociological stratum with the ability and intent to filter the Soviet technical propaganda and sift through the meanings of the popular science artifacts. A debate between the so-called “lyricists” and “physicists” exemplified the multivalent reactions to Soviet technological propaganda and scientific feats in the age of Sputnik. This debate appeared in the Young Communist League (Komsomol) press in the late 1950s and early 1960s pitting nineteenth-century realists against creative physical scientists who had abandoned the constraints of positivism. Furthermore, as the historian and cultural theorist Susan Reid has observed, the relation between science and creative imagination was a very critical concern to Russian intellectuals.Footnote 32 Yet some artists, cultural critics, and writers saw the imaginative impulse as a venue to inject creative enthusiasm into science and technology in post-Stalinist Russia. This vision therefore did not necessarily pit scientific disciplines (and technological progress) against the visual or literary arts, but instead to some extent fused them together. The famous sculptor, Ernst Neizvestniy (designer of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's modernist gravestone) was a leading artistic reformer, and advocated in his writings a scientific revolution with a creative bent, filled with imaginative impulse – thus fusing science, technology, and the artistic impulse (Neizvestniy Reference Neizvestniy1962). While the artist Vladimir Turbin, a contemporary of Neizvestniy's (and a leading art critic in the Soviet 1960s) also called for artists to engage science and technology in creative ways, yet Turbin seemed to argue that art could be the driving imaginative catalyst, while science should then adapt and elaborate on that creative foundation (Turbin Reference Turbin1961). All in all, these artists and critics were engaging both technology and science as a venue, and also competing for the mantle of creative production, which the cultural intelligentsia saw being taken from them or eclipsed by engineers and technical specialists.These artists and critics were therefore concerned that the technical elite would be the sole beneficiary of the Soviet state's patronage.Footnote 33
In the end, the Soviet public under Khrushchev, in the era of Sputnik's times, can thus be seen as engaging the state's rhetoric, participating in events on their own terms, and actively taking part in modern material and consumer culture. Stamp collecting, viewing popular films on rocketry, going to events, normalized the Soviet public's infatuation with spaceflight and other post-WWII technologies. Even Soviet hero worship of iconic figures, such as Gagarin, in the technical arena, can also be reflected in a capitalist economy, such as the glorification of Apollo astronauts in the West, where state and society also interacted in complex ways in the scientific public sphere. Furthermore, the Soviet intelligentsia found ways to inject artistic fervor into the propagation of new technological inventions and scientific discoveries, thus constructing and deconstructing science propaganda on their own terms.
IV. Epilogue and Conclusion – From Stalinism to Khrushchev's Times and Beyond
Indeed, in conclusion, it is a strange dichotomy that exemplified the political and social elements of science and technological popularization in the USSR particularly after Stalin's ascent to power in 1928. On the one hand, even back in the 1930s while the regime propagandized about Soviet technical utilitarianism, this was indirectly supported by the legions of rural workers from below who desperately needed technical educational qualifications to compete in the new industrial environment of the 1930s. They may not have bought into the propaganda of Soviet heralded feats, yet they believed in the state's efforts at mass-technical enlightenment. Furthermore, even in the post-Stalinist 1950s and 1960s, as the regime propagandized about its technical achievements in outer-space and with large-scale technologies such as nuclear power, like their American counterparts, average Soviets had a natural interest and pride in their country's achievements (granted, filtering the state's perspective on their own terms). In essence, these two varied publics (American and Soviet), that seemed so disconnected on the surface, shared a common process: both publics collected scientific/technical memorabilia of the space age,Footnote 34 they watched films and stage productions and marched in parades for their heroes, whether Neil Armstrong or Yuri Gagarin. This dichotomous, yet also unified process, though it was indeed very orchestrated from above in a politicized manner in different countries, was also engaged from below by their respective “masses.”
However, a segment of the Soviet populace, especially the cultural elite, had ambiguous reactions to the state's technological panacea for progress and modernization. Furthermore, the topics and “burning scientific issues,” so to speak, changed after Khrushchev's ouster in 1964. As the youth of the USSR became less enamored with space-flight feats, such as Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova's historic achievements, they became more interested in contested arenas. This included preserving the environment and exposing the repercussions of hyper-industrialization of the Soviet command economy. Young druzhniki (friends of nature) supported a wide-array of ecological issues, and wrote about this adamantly in Brezhnev era journals such as Priroda (Nature). All of this however, accordingly, was done within the confines of state constructs, as Douglas Weiner has aptly delineated in his analysis of this rising issue in post-Khrushchev Russia (Weiner Reference Weiner1999).
In the end, the process between state and society therefore leaves us with both a dynamic and contested conceptual notion of science popularization in the Soviet period that can fit into the paradigmatic rubrics of mass-education, mass-enlightenment, and propaganda from above as well as public interest, engagement, and deconstruction from below at various historical times in different ways in the twentieth century. However, the long history of science popularization in Russia, during both the Imperial and the Soviet eras, stretching back indeed to the eighteenth century, maintained a consistent tension between the regime and the people that was sometimes symbiotic and at other times contested.
