Still you hadn’t had enough. You needed wilder blood.
South. You wandered this way and that. You were laughing in a blizzard. Laughing a dog’s hilarious laugh. Winter came, then spring. You caught a whiff of smoke—a mosquito repellent. You skirted human lands, keeping just outside the boundary, and then, every so often, casually, you would intrude. Some lands had been inhabited by humans once but were empty now. You passed the remains of one of Stalin’s gulag. You trotted past gold and silver mines, now ghost towns, glancing curiously at the buildings. You discovered a hot spring bubbling up deep in the forest. You sniffed the water and barked. Woof! You noticed a silver coin from the Russian Empire imprinted with an image of a sable, lying in the garden of an abandoned hunting cabin. In the summer, after a long absence, you arrived once again on the banks of the Lena, whose waters were now five miles wide.
At night, the short summer unfurled a sky full of stars.
It was August.
August 1960.
Suddenly you were seized with an impulse. You had felt this before—this pressing urge to do something, something. This unnameable feeling had seized you, impelled you to lift your head to the heavens. You didn’t know the date—you were a dog, you had no use for dates—but it was November 3, 1957. Yes, that was it. A day inscribed forever in the history of the canine tribe. It was year zero Anno Canis, so to speak: that sacred, epoch-making day when a bitch in an airtight chamber, on board a man-made satellite named Sputnik 2, gazed down from orbit at the earth. She had gazed down, that third day in November, on you, Anubis, and you had felt what others felt. Yes, you felt it, sensed a gaze sweeping over you from the vastness of the sky. SHE’S LOOKING AT ME. That dog was Laika. Laika, a space dog, a Russian laika named Laika, a bitch from the USSR, looking at you, gazing down upon you.
And now it was August 19, 1960.
Year 3 Anno Canis.
Another epoch-making day.
Two dogs were in space. One a male, one a bitch, both Soviet space dogs. They had been sent up earlier that day on Sputnik 5. They had been entrusted with a task. The space race was entering the next stage. The Eastern and Western camps (which was just another way of saying the Soviet Union and the United States) were each rushing ahead, desperate to be the first to send a manned spaceship into space. Each side was determined to beat the other in the race. The Americans had been devastated when Sputnik 1 went up, and the launch of Sputnik 2 had turned their devastation to shame. But then, c’mon, they just put dogs in space, right? Animals, that’s the best they can do. The Yankees nodded to each other in satisfaction. There you had it, the limits of communism laid bare. And now it’s our turn! Just watch, here in this free land of ours, we’ll send a person into space! The Yankees were sure they could do it. The preparations were progressing surprisingly smoothly. They were selecting an astronaut. Working to create a manned spaceship, not some silly dogged spaceship. The space race had come to stand as a vehicle for a competition between ideologies, to demonstrate once and for all which of the two was superior. And how were things going in the USSR? How smoothly was its program progressing? The USSR didn’t care about smoothness. It was pouring five percent of its national budget into the space program. As an actual figure, that was six times more than the US was investing. That’s how committed the USSR was to beating the US. This time too, they would win. They would send what the Yankees called a “cosmonaut” (a term coined to describe the Soviet equivalent of the American astronaut) into space. In short, the Soviet Union was pressing ahead with its preparations, not exactly smoothly, no—insanely.
And before there could be cosmonauts, there had to be more space dogs.
When Sputnik 2 went up in year zero Anno Canis, Laika, the space dog, the Russian laika, had perished. Sputnik 2 had been an incredibly primitive artificial satellite: in fact, it had been designed so that it was impossible to bring it back to Earth. It was all but certain from the start that it would be destroyed upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere; essentially Laika was fated to die. There was no hope that she would make it back alive. The situation was different for the two dogs who starred in the program in August 1960—year 3 Anno Canis. They were outfitted with pressurized suits. They had clear helmets that stuck out to accommodate their snouts, odd snaky tubes, brown protective skin. These suits had to be tested before the cosmonauts could fly. If dogs could be sent into outer space in these suits and make it back alive, then the same thing could be done with humans. This would prove that people could be launched into space and brought safely back to Earth.
That was the point of this mission.
Sputnik 5 blasted off on August 19. It circled the earth seventeen times in its planned orbit. And the following day, the two dogs returned to Earth alive.
These dogs had finally succeeded in a mission that did not result in inevitable death. One male dog and one bitch, each in a pressurized suit, had seen the earth from outer space and then returned. To the earth that had given birth to the canine tribe. Two dogs—two Soviet dogs. Their names—Belka and Strelka.
Belka and Strelka. They received a joyous welcome. They were Soviet heroes, these dogs, following in the footsteps of that other great hero, that dog among dogs, Laika.
Nikita Khrushchev was premier of the Soviet Union at the time. Having brushed aside various political enemies in the wake of Stalin’s death, he had become both First Secretary of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Council of Ministers. He was the first to crack a smile upon being informed that the two dogs had accomplished their glorious mission. “Two more heroes are born! Ura!” he said, grinning. Once again Communism had overwhelmed the West in the areas of science and technology, demonstrating to the world that Communism would lead mankind forward! And we accomplished it with dogs! Haha! Those bastards must be quaking in their shoes, terrified to think that they’re about to be overtaken yet again in the space race. And yes, yes, all their fear was occasioned by two little dogs.
Ura!
Khrushchev had particular cause for his somewhat childish glee. As it happened, that first Soviet hero, Laika, had become a hero largely as a result of his efforts. Which is to say, the whole thing had started out as a whim on his part. This isn’t speculation, it’s truth: Khrushchev created the space dog. At first, he had given the go-ahead to the rocket program because he recognized the potential military significance of the research, not because he was captivated by the romance of space exploration. So it came about that on August 21, 1957, the USSR succeeded in launching an R-7 rocket whose astonishing propulsive force derived from a pack of booster rockets. The rocket, the Soviet Union’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, had a range of 4,350 miles. People called it by the affectionate nickname Semyorka. Sputnik 1, which was launched less than a month and a half later and became the first man-made satellite in the history of mankind, was essentially the same rocket, except that the Semyorka’s cone had been fitted with a man-made satellite rather than the nuclear warhead it had originally been designed to carry. All of which is to say that Khrushchev hadn’t had a whit of interest in or sympathy for his scientists’ dreams. People in space! The greatest adventure of the century! The spine-tingling thrill of science, of technology! He didn’t care. At first. But then, once they had actually launched the satellite, beating the US to the chase, he saw how stunned the entire world was. Those bastards in the West were quaking in their boots! Communism had opened the door to a new age for mankind, and they were flabbergasted! They were stunned!