From cosmic enthusiasm to nostalgia for the future: A tale of soviet space culture

Abstract

The Khrushchev period was the ‘most future-oriented in Soviet history’, notes Svetlana Boym in her meditation on The Future of Nostalgia. The post-Stalinist Thaw created a space for renewed expectations on the future of socialism, anticipations that were unencumbered by the heavy pallor of disappointment that suffused Soviet culture of the late-Stalin years. Boym amplifies her claim by noting that, ‘Khrushchev promised that the generation of the 1960s (my generation) would live in the era of communism and conquer the cosmos. As we were growing up it seemed that we would travel to the moon much sooner than we would go abroad. There was no time for nostalgia.’2 The rhetoric that surrounded and promoted Soviet space exploits in the 1960s undeniably communicated a fascination for the future as underscored in language that explicitly linked socialism with the space programme; the former made the latter possible, while the latter made the former stronger. Both would take the Soviet Union into a glorious future.