It is hard to find a more salient example of a developmental success story in post-World War II Soviet history than the space program with its exceptional achievements such as the first Sputnik orbital launch (1957) and the first human mission in space, conducted by Yuri Gagarin (1961).14 This success story was greatly appreciated at the time and is still perceived positively by many Russians: according to a 2008 nationwide mass survey, it was rated as the second most important event in Russian history after victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.15 Indeed, the advancements of the space program served as a profound demonstration of the technological progress of the Soviet Union and contributed to an attractive domestic and international image of the country and its political leadership within the context of the Cold War. However, the success of the Soviet space program was short-lived: the major breakthrough of the 1950s–1960s turned into a plateau in the 1970s–1980s, its material and symbolic returns diminished over time, and subsequent events after the Soviet collapse contributed to Russia’s recent shift toward the second echelon of the global space superpowers. What were the causes of this trajectory, and why is the experience of the Soviet space program important for understanding the strong and weak sides of success stories in Russia, both in the Soviet and in the post-Soviet period?16
The success of the Soviet space program would have been impossible without the efforts of two key individuals. The chief designer Sergei Korolev (1907–1966) was not only an outstanding organizer of science and technology who effectively coordinated a huge number of individuals and organizations and brilliantly implemented quite a few technologically complex and innovative devices and solutions; he was also (if not above all) a successful policy entrepreneur who was able to persuade Nikita Khrushchev to make the space program as a whole and especially a human mission in space his personal top policy priority.17 Khrushchev, in turn, desperately needed success stories, especially in the early stages of his leadership when he was pursuing domestic and international legitimation and took major risks that proved to be justified in the case of the space program.18 Khrushchev was emotional, ill-tempered, and not a very competent leader: he often advanced certain policy innovations that brought only limited success (as in case of the Virgin Lands agricultural program), and even trusted charlatans such as the (in)famous academician Trofim Lysenko.19 The implementation of the Soviet space program, and especially of human space missions, was an expensive extension of the rocket segment of the arms race, and a possible defeat on this front vis-à-vis the United States (driven by differences in the resource endowment and relative economic weights of the two countries) could have proved sensitive for the Soviets in many ways. However, Khrushchev accepted these risks and provided his personal patronage to the space program and top priority funding for human space missions, despite fierce resistance from the Soviet military.20
The outcome of these efforts greatly exceeded the wildest dreams of both Korolev and his political patron Khrushchev. The Soviet Union won twice on the space front because of the successful launch of Sputnik and especially Gagarin’s orbital flight against the background of a belated start by their American rivals who had lagged at the beginning of the space program and had been faced with numerous technical problems. The outstanding success of the early stages of the Soviet space program opened new horizons for Korolev and his team: they received carte blanche to implement its new stages, of which the first and foremost was the human mission to the Moon, where the Soviet Union entered competition with the United States known as the “Moon race.” As for Khrushchev, the symbolic benefits that he (and the Soviet Union as a whole) received because of the successes of the space program and its demonstrative effects, multiplied by domestic and international propaganda,21 were highly visible, especially given the increasing scope of the numerous problems the Soviet leadership faced in the early 1960s. However, the symbolic benefits brought to the Soviets by Sputnik and Gagarin only partially compensated for the high political and economic costs of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the shootings at workers’ protest rallies in Novocherkassk, and the need to buy grain from abroad.22 Even then, these benefits were short-term, and their positive effects were only temporary.
There are no “if” paths of alternative history, and we will never know how the Soviet-American Moon race might have gone had the Khrushchev-Korolev tandem’s drive behind the Soviet space program continued. However, the ousting of Khrushchev from the Soviet leadership in October 1964 became a turning point for his top priorities, including the Soviet space program. Soon after that, under pressure from military-industrial lobbyists, the plans for the space program were reviewed in favor of their military component, while costly human space missions lost their priority.23 In fact, the Soviet Union left the Moon race well before the Apollo program in the United States was implemented in a full-fledged way and before it reached its peak in July 1969 with man’s first step on the Moon. The events that followed this departure, such as Korolev’s premature death in January 1966, the chain of casualties during human space missions in April 1967 and in June 1971,24 and Gagarin’s death in a plane crash in March 1968, contributed to the space program gradually losing the status of success story for the Soviet Union. On a symbolic level, the struggle for space leadership with the United States was framed as a kind of draw, with the symbolic gesture of the joint Apollo-Soyuz space mission in July 1975. Yet in military terms, the space rivalry with the United States continued, and it became more and more of a heavy burden for the Soviets. In technological terms the Soviet Union was not able to demonstrate new major breakthroughs and put them into mass production; while the United States successfully launched its new Space Shuttle program in 1981, the Soviet response, Buran, did not even reach the stage of human missions.25
In essence, up until the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet space program followed a pathway of improving those technological solutions that had been proposed and/or implemented in Korolev’s times. More important, the multiplicative effects of the Soviet space program remained limited: the major success story of the Soviet Union on the space front did not contribute to new major success stories in other fields that would have a genuine strong impact on the country’s development. The Soviet space program remained a somewhat isolated “pocket of efficiency,”26 and beyond this narrow field, its influence was relatively weak: no major multiplicative effects27 were observed—quite the opposite, bureaucratic ineffectiveness became greater and greater over time against the background of the increasing crisis of the Soviet economy.28 The one-off high returns of the Soviet success story in space declined over time, and its previous achievements increasingly performed symbolic compensatory functions, something visible as early as 1964, the heyday of the Soviet space boom. At that time, the Soviet bard Yuri Vizbor in his song “The Story of Technologist Petukhov” (Rasskaz tekhnologa Petukhova) identified himself with Soviet technological and cultural achievements on behalf of the protagonist, who proudly stated: “But we are making rockets . . . and also at the top of the world in the field of ballet” (zato my delaem rakety . . . a takzhe v oblasti baleta my vperedi planety vsei). Yet the keyword in this claim is not “rockets”: it is “but” (zato). It is also worth noting that half a century after Vizbor, in 2014 the keyword “but” performed the same compensatory function after the Russian annexation of Crimea, in the form of the popular slogan “But Crimea Is Ours!” (Zato Krym nash!).