How space travel became the unofficial religion of the USSR

http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/4645

by codeas • 11 years ago

102 62 11 years ago

I just want to add that the same fascination with science and space created cinema masterpieces at least for that time. The special effects used in these 50's and 60's movies influenced Hollywood and helped to create such classics as Stars Wars and Terminator 2.

juliangamble• 11 years ago

Could you provide examples of the Soviet films that were so influential?

ommunist7• 11 years ago

Hollywood directly ripped that one off - Планета бурь by Pavel Klushantsev. It strongly influenced both Spielberg and Lucas, and Cameron too.

ClintEhrlich8• 11 years ago

1972's Солярис is a classic. It is far superior to the later American version directed by Steven Soderbergh.

rational-future• 11 years ago

Lucas did see a number of German and Soviet SciFi movies before making Star Wars. Some of the influence in costumes and space ships is quite obvious.

arethuza• 11 years ago

Another very obvious influence on Star Wars, and specifically the attack on the Death Star, was the UK 1955 movie "The Dam Busters" about the real life WW2 Operation Chastise.

There are amusing clips on YouTube of Star Wars visuals and the The Dam Busters audio and vice-versa - the similarity is pretty close.

Edit: Correction 1995 -> 1955

dimitar• 11 years ago

Practically all of the economy of the Soviet Union was the military-industrial complex and that complex had to pretend it wasn't only that.

All industry was dedicated to manufacturing weapons - what was produced for civilians was a side-production and small part of the output.

For example - practically all of the aluminium in the Soviet Union was used for the military. And most of the aluminium was used for rocketry and aviation - again military. And you have a big cities like Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine called Rocket city for having a huge concentration of such plants.

Now space exploration sounded good because it is one of the few areas the Soviet Union could compete with US AND it was convenient to explain why Socialism needs so many rockets.

The scientific progress might even eventually improve living standards might one wishfully think. Of course it didn't, at least it wasn't allowed to.

Eventually, most of the military-industrial complex was disbanded and it is only logical that the space cult was thrown in the dustbin on recent history.

Nowadays Russia has only a fraction of it is former military output and there isn't any point in pretending it is smaller, quite the opposite, the government think it is important to display it is military might.

abcd_f• 11 years ago

Bold claims require proper sourcing. Otherwise it's perilously close to trolling.

Perhaps start by explaining why that complex had to pretend "it wasn't only that"?

ommunist7• 11 years ago

Man, he is mostly right. Almost everything industrial in the USSR was either military, or dual purpose. E.g. in my home town huge chemical plant was supposed to produce chemical fiber, however if needed in 24 hrs it could be switched to produce explosives.

gress3• 11 years ago

That isn't a bold claim at all - there was a cultural battle on the world stage between the USSR and the US as to which had the better society. Being perceived as nothing but a war machine would have lost that battle for the USSR.

wisty• 11 years ago

Military spending by the USSR was about 16% of GDP. US (and Russia today) is more like 3-4%, and that's very high by global standards. It's not quite "war machine" (the UK hit about 50% in WWII, North Korea sits on about 30%), but it was a huge amount.

kushti• 11 years ago

The article is an exaggeration at least. "Space travel" wasnt' comparable with dialectical materialism(lead Soviet philosophical doctrine) in any way.

Interestingly, could be "american exceptionalism" called an "unofficial religion" as well? lol

crdoconnor• 11 years ago

Interestingly, could be "american exceptionalism" called an "unofficial religion" as well?

Hell Yea

ClintEhrlich8• 11 years ago

"Exceptionalism" is not an American phenomenon. It just seems that way because America currently enjoys unipolar primacy, so it can put its ideology into action.

Most powerful nations have intentionally promulgated some form of exceptionalist ideology. Russians believe their country is exceptional because it alone can bridge the gap between Eastern mysticism and Western materialism. The Chinese believe their country is exceptional because of their civilization's unrivaled history. Brazilians believe their country is exceptional because it has blended more cultures and races than any other.

The examples go on and on... Japan, Korea, Germany, France, Italy, India... all have well publicized beliefs that some factor elevates their country above its peers. Given the ubiquity of this belief, I suspect that it has adaptive benefits for society, such as increasing social cohesion. (Or maybe it's just an innate human failing!)

zorked• 11 years ago

There's a difference between a claim that a country is unique for some reason (everyone has one of these) versus thinking that this makes them superior or entitled.

American Exceptionalism even has a creation myth and a pantheon of gods. It's something else entirely.

ClintEhrlich8• 11 years ago

This article fails to explore the depth of the connection between Russia and space travel. Long before the October revolution, Russian scientists like Kibalchich and Tsiolkovsky were obsessed with using rocketry to explore the cosmos.

They were just two members of a robust philosophical tradition, Russian cosmism, whose influence can still be seen today in the transhumanist movement. To many cosmist thinkers, space travel was not a "religion" in the cliched symbolic sense suggested by the article; it was the literal underpinning of their metaphysical beliefs.

Exploring space was considered, not just the fate of the Russian people, but the ultimate destiny for humanity itself.

vanderZwan3• 11 years ago

Got any sources? Sounds like a very interesting topic.

ClintEhrlich8• 11 years ago

I have been stumbling through some of the original Russian-language texts. A lot of the passages go over my head, but it's a good way to pick up fun new words and phrases.

So far, my favorite cosmist thinker has been Tsiolkovsky. It is amazing to recognize so many of one's recent intellectual realizations in prose that was written almost a century ago.

My pet scientific theory quantifies the capacity of a complex adaptive system to alter the universe, so I named it voltropy for 'volitional transformation.' That choice felt eerie when I discovered that the original Russian title of Tsiolkovsky's famous book, The Will of the Universe, is Воля Вселенной — which literally means The Volition of the Universe.

IndianAstronaut• 11 years ago

Exploring space was considered, not just the fate of the Russian people, but the ultimate destiny for humanity itself.

Fascinating. I really do still think this is the case. We know so little and there are infinite possibilities out there for us in space.

gwern3• 11 years ago

They were just two members of a robust philosophical tradition, Russian cosmism, whose influence can still be seen today in the transhumanist movement.

Source? I don't see any influence at all. When I read older transhumanist works like _Great Mambo Chicken_, Ettinger's _Man into Superman_, or even older than that like _The World, The Flesh, and the Devil_, or I read histories of the movement like Stambler's recent _History of Life Extensionism in the 20th Century_, I see absolutely no influence on Western transhumanism from Russians except indirectly through Cold War realities. Further, when I read the occasional summary or publication that filters through the language barrier about current Russian stuff like the 2045 Initiative, it feels like it's coming from a totally separate and disconnected world (for better or worse).

That there are similarities is not much of a proof: the possibilities of technology and science are the same everywhere, and so responses will likewise be similar. You don't have to have studied deeply in the Kosmism canon to think that it would be good if we didn't age, sicken, and die suffering horribly and that science might be able to do something about that...

The only attempt I've seen to actually show real links is Stross's lame blog post on it, which amounts to 'this is a little like that, this came before, therefore, this caused that' and is nothing more than a thinly-disguised 'post hoc ergo propter hoc'.

ClintEhrlich8• 11 years ago

There is a certain special irony in debating the genealogy of an idea within a thread about Russian cosmism, given Vernadsky's belief in the noosphere.

Regardless, I didn't mean to imply that the modern transhumanist movement is merely an outgrowth of Russian cosmism. But the cosmist writings may be the earliest articulation of transhumanist values.

If someone finds a direct, linear connection between cosmism and transhumanism, I would love to hear about it. But I suspect that the same set of ideas has been developed independently multiple times.

Indeed, it would be problematic if they had only evolved within one nation, because that would imply that they were culturally contingent. If they are intrinsically sound, they should be available for discovery by diverse thinkers.

nkoren• 11 years ago

This does not seem like it should be controversial. Transhumanism is a direct outgrowth of Timothy Leary's 1970s "SMI^2LE" programme (Space Migration Increased Intelligence Life Extension), which in turn was directly influenced by L5 Society folks like Keith Henson and Gerald K. O'Neil. They, in turn, were directly influenced by Tsiolkovsky and other Cosmists. These influences were acknowledged by all parties involved.

PerfectDlite4• 11 years ago

Exploring space was considered, not just the fate of the Russian people, but the ultimate destiny for humanity itself.

This idea was created much later, when Soviet officials tried to ingrain Soviet space achievements in past history and build some kind of philosophical foundation.

Besides, originally (during Kibalchich and Tsiolkovsky) cosmism wasn't about space travel.

huhtenberg• 11 years ago

My grandmother knew names and personal details of first 60 or so cosmonauts, had a notepad with all launch dates and was generally a walking encyclopedia on all things space. She was a housewife most of her life and a steam engine machinist in the 1930s. Not any sort of technical elite, nor even remotely interested in anything technical. Except for the space travel.

So, yeah, to say that space travel was a big thing back in Soviet times would be a major understatement.

primroot2• 11 years ago

The article seems to imply that any work of art created within the context of an organization must be regarded as propaganda by default. "The Mystery of the Third Planet" was produced by a studio, which according to wikipedia enjoyed an "unprecedented degree of artistic freedom" [1]. Yet this film is mentioned right after the remark that "children were a key target of propaganda with space-themed films and cartoons cranked out for a younger audience." I don't really disagree with this way of categorizing certain art as propaganda but I'd like to see the same line of thought applied more often to Hollywood.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuzmultfilm#History_during_t...

bpodgursky• 11 years ago

"Propaganda" is usually used to refer to attempts by a government organization to rally support behind itself and convince people that it is doing the right thing. It's pretty much implicit that a private company will try to gather public support by producing art/commercials/etc.

But most people feel a government should hold itself to different standards, and act on the will of the public rather than try to CREATE public opinion.

primroot2• 11 years ago

Yes, and the article doesn't tell us how Soyuzmultfilm cartoons were dictated by government policy rather than influenced by a well established "unofficial religion."

rm_-rf_slash• 11 years ago

In the 1930's, the Roosevelt Administration was concerned with widespread corporate propaganda aimed at convincing the public that the New Deal would destroy the economy, and so it commissioned a series of rival videos meant to help steer Americans from being unduly influenced away from policies that would actually help them.

If (a democratic) government merely holds itself to the will of he public as opposed to seeking to create it, then someone will take advantage of the power vacuum, and I see no way that state or society would benefit.

ommunist7• 11 years ago

I was a zealot of it in my early school years. Much of my later disappointment with modern days Russia was allowing the Soviet space research programmes to collapse. Its a pity humanity will never again have Energia rocket. That one could reach Mars with 5tons of useful weight in 1991. In 2012 there was attempt to animate Energia, but 90% of it was constructed in Ukraine, and it is not an option today.

wtbob• 11 years ago

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vvpan• 11 years ago

Very interesting article, it brought together a lot of things which I haven't thought about in years. Yet the word "propaganda" is a bit strong I feel. I was into many things as a end-of-Sovier-era kid, but have very fond memories of taking in Soviet sci-fi and generally futurist ideology. As a kid it has provided me with plenty of food for imagination and was all-around enriching. There are much worst things to surround your mind with, and plenty of things from modern capitalist pop culture are clearly inferior, I'm sure everybody can think of countless examples.

pandaman• 11 years ago

A same article could have been written about the USA. Actually it would have made a bit more sense, since it could include pop culture references to actual space travel (e.g Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica etc. etc) instead of things like "The Guest from the Future", a TV series about time travel that mentions that there is a space port in Moscow of the future and some obscure cartoons (other than "The Secret of the Third Planet" I have not seen ones the author mentioned and, unlike her, I grew up in the USSR).

Not that I believe the cult of space exists in the USA, but the same stupid argumentation is more applicable here.

How space travel became the unofficial religion of the USSR

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