Asif Siddiqi has written the most important book on the history of Russian technology since Kendall Bailes’s 1978 Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin. Like Bailes, Siddiqi interweaves social and political history with the narrative of technology development, making this volume essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the interplay of science, technology, and Russian society in the twentieth century (The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiii+402. $85).

Since the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957, the Soviet space program has conjured images of scientific planning, enormous budgets, and a gargantuan, methodical, and conservative military-industrial complex. Walter McDougall cast it as a saga of technocratic ascendance. Siddiqi demolishes the myth that Sputnik resulted from careful long-term planning or guided R&D. He demonstrates that even in the secretive, stodgy, bureaucratic USSR, rocket enthusiasts could develop informal networks to realize their dreams. This is a story of human agency producing a space race. Without mass enthusiasm and public support, the Soviet Union would not have reached the cosmos.

Most accounts of the Soviet space program have focused on the consequences following the launch of the first Sputnik in 1957. While some have provided background for English-language readers on Konstantin Tsiolkovskii and the Russian fascination with spaceflight, Siddiqi’s book is the definitive work on the topic. He chronicles the science fiction writers, science popularizers, and rocket enthusiasts who in unexpected ways kept the passion for space alive in the USSR. But he goes further, exploring the ways independent initiative interacted with government programs to produce Soviet successes during 1957–61.

Some of the material about the 1940s and 1950s was covered in Siddiqi’s earlier, massive Challenge to Apollo (2000). This latest book adds new archival material and extends the story back to the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so, Siddiqi alters our understanding of how science was done in the Soviet Union. He demonstrates agency on the part of key individuals, informal groups, and the broader society. The Soviet leadership evinced minimal interest in space until the mid-1950s. Enthusiasts kept the dream of cosmic exploration alive until it could be joined with security needs and Soviet thirst for prestige to create a major program. Ironically, as Challenge to Apollo suggests, once it became a state program Soviet cosmonautics was less successful.

The early chapters of Red Rockets’ Glare tell the story of Tsiolkovskii and other enthusiasts, leading to the “space fad” of the 1920s. This is the most thorough, balanced, and empathetic treatment of Tsiolkovskii we are likely to get. Siddiqi explores Tsiolkovskii’s science fiction and popular science writings, showing that his treatises on rocketry, including his mathematical model demonstrating that rocket flight was possible, provided both evidence and aura, inspiring Russian engineers for decades. Siddiqi does not ignore the less-appealing elements of Tsiolkovskii’s views, including his embrace of eugenics. Tsiolkovskii, the self-educated cosmonautics pioneer, demonstrates the more positive side of Bolshevik egalitarianism and distrust of specialists, even if he was arrested and his pension was paid irregularly. With understated irony, Siddiqi describes how the father of space flight did not want to travel from Kaluga to Moscow for a celebration of his work in 1932 (though he did make the trip later).

The author resuscitates the “space fad” of the 1920s, when Sergei Korolev and other key figures in Soviet cosmonautics developed the networks that underlay subsequent success. He then turns to the Soviet rocket program in the 1930s, and its demise with the loss of Mikhail Tukhachevskii’s patronage and then of Tukhachevskii himself in the purges. Here the story takes an unexpected turn: although the Soviet state abandoned rocketry before World War II and, except for the famous Katiushas, did not explore possibilities during the war, individuals and small groups kept rocketry work alive. At the center of the story is Korolev, the glider pilot who became one of the most dedicated advocates of rocket development and space flight. Lacking garages, the Soviet amateurs used an old church and worked out of private apartments before converting an abandoned wine cellar as their research headquarters. Siddiqi makes it clear that the key to eventual success was symbiosis: the amateurs needed state resources; the state needed their “expertise and innovative ideas” (p. 154).

Siddiqi’s treatment of the purges is a masterful combination of social history, including the role of epistemic communities, with the history of technology. It overturns the Stalin-centric explanations that prevailed both in the Soviet era and during glasnost. Siddiqi recounts the absurdity of Valentin Glushko being sentenced to the camps for favoring “Trotskyite nitrogen” over “Bolshevik oxygen” as a rocket fuel, while demonstrating how individual decisions to politicize scientific and technical differences intensified the terror. Korolev’s fate shows how close the USSR came to losing the man most responsible for its success in the space race. Sentenced to the camps during the Yezhovshchina, Korolev’s case was selected for review when Lavrentii Beria took over. Bad luck caused him to be already en route to Kolyma when the decision to review his case was taken. He finally was summoned to Moscow. Walking and hitching to Magadan, he arrived too late to embark for Moscow. The ship he would have taken ran aground, killing hundreds. The seriously ill Korolev was tended by a physician and finally reached Moscow on a later boat, only to have his eight-year sentence reaffirmed. Before he could be sent back to Kolyma, he was saved by assignment to Tupolev’s sharashka (research institute for imprisoned specialists) in Kazan. Reunited with the cream of the country’s surviving aviation designers, Korolev was in a position to join the teams sent to Germany after the war.

Following victory over Germany, the USSR sought reparations in the form of both hardware and know-how. The story of how groups of Soviet engineers and officers in Germany developed an informal network that became the core of the Soviet space program again demonstrates the absence of an official project and the key role of social actors. Stalin’s mania for control frequently produced administrative gridlock, making informal networks crucial to achievements in science and technology.

The final three chapters describe the ways the military’s interest in developing ICBMs was married to the enthusiasts’ dreams of space flight. Siddiqi shows how missile designers were able to translate the nativism of the Andrei Zhdanov era into glorification of Tsiolkovskii and Russia’s role in space science. Accident was as important as design. In 1953, Andrei Sakharov badly miscalculated what a thermonuclear charge would weigh. As a consequence, Soviet rocket design focused on a much heaver payload than proved necessary for a nuclear device. But it meant that Soviet ICBMs were well suited to launching satellites and eventually human payloads (pp. 273– 74). Only after Korolev’s team convinced the USSR’s leaders to launch a satellite did the Soviet propaganda apparatus create the now-familiar narrative of long-term development under the party’s astute tutelage. Siddiqi shows that Stalin cared about nuclear weapons and delivery systems, not satellites or space flight. Khrushchev did not pay attention to the cosmos before 1955, and was shocked at the Western response to Sputnik. He was, however, clever enough to take advantage once he comprehended its impact.

Reviewers are “paid” to quibble. Siddiqi’s excellent prose is sometimes marred by editing that is poor for a major university press book. His account of Korolev’s surprise when Sputnik provoked a global media frenzy is difficult to square with Korolev’s emphasis on the importance of being first; his criticism of a worker for not polishing the satellite, given that it would eventually be on exhibit in a museum (recounted in Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo, p. 163); or the chief designer’s insistence that the satellite be visible as well as audible while in orbit. The final chapter buries an important change from the Stalin years in a quotation (p. 344): that the repeated R-7 missile launch failures in the summer of 1957 did not result in purges and punishments represented a significant alteration of the climate for priority projects. In this case, tolerating setbacks preserved the team that went on to launch Sputnik. In the longer term, it may have contained the seeds of stagnation: abandoning sticks, the Soviet system proved incapable of providing sufficient carrots. Siddiqi’s previous work shows that once the state “owned” the space program, cosmonautics suffered from the flaws familiar to students of the Soviet system. But that story goes well beyond Siddiqi’s outstanding contribution in this volume. Red Rockets’ Glare is mandatory reading for historians of technology and of Russia.

Given that “We launched Sputnik” is the stock reply by Russian officials when the decline of their science and education systems is discussed, Russian readers are not going to welcome a concluding chapter that begins, “Sputnik was not a triumph of Soviet science.” This is precisely why they need to read Siddiqi’s superb monograph. That the Soviet Union’s most famous technological accomplishment was not a product of a top-down state program is the most important lesson in a book full of valuable insights and challenges to conventional wisdoms.

Harley Balzer is an associate professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University. In 1992–93 he served as executive director of the International Science Foundation for the former Soviet Union and Baltic States.

©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Current Issue • Vol 52 No. 3 (July 2011)