Picturing the cosmos: Rare photos of Soviet space ambitions

In 1957, a small shiny sphere started the Space Age and ushered the world into the most heated decade of the Cold War.

The beautifully designed Sputnik-1 was the world’s first artificial satellite, setting the Soviet Union up for a streak of early victories in the conquest of the cosmos: the first man in space, the first lunar probe, the first woman in space, the first spacewalk.

As a symbol of modern life and the future, space was an ideal backdrop for the Communist propaganda machine, and every achievement carried a political message.

This revolution was not televised, but printed on the pages of magazines and newspapers: “The photographs tend to be overloaded with meaning and ideas, and that’s why they are so interesting,” said Iina Kohonen, author of “Picturing the Cosmos: A visual history of early Soviet space endeavor,” in a phone interview.

In her book "Picturing the Cosmos," author Iina Kohonen traces the rich visual history of the Soviet space program. This is one of the most published photos of Yuri Gagarin, the first man to fly into space, in 1961. "His portrayal in the propaganda was almost like a saint, and in some ways it still is. This was the photograph that Gagarin himself had on display at home. In most of his photos he's smiling, but not in this one, which somehow therefore captures his essence a bit more."

An example of the censorship at work. The original photo (left) shows, in the background, Grigori Nelyubov, who had been in the running to be the first man in space instead of Gagarin. He was expelled from the program for bad behavior and was eventually killed by a train, apparently drunk, in 1963 (conspiracy theories abound). For these reasons, he was never known to the public and got edited out of this photograph. "In the States, the astronauts were all public figures even before a flight, but in the Soviet Union they became so only afterwards, nobody knew them before, they didn't exist," said Kohonen.

Gherman Stepanovich Titov, the second man to orbit the Earth after Gagarin, reads about himself in the paper, a common theme in propaganda photos. "This emphasized the fact that all Soviet people were the same, as the cosmonaut heroes were reading about themselves in the paper just like common folk would do," said Kohonen. The particular photo used here was then reused countless times in magazines, books, postcards, posters and badges, with some retouching.

People in the streets are shown looking at the same newspaper.

Cosmonauts were often photographed talking on the phone with the Secretary of the Communist party, Nikita Khrushchev.

The first ever published photo of the Sputnik-1, which did not appear until five days after the launch itself. This could have been due to a general sense of secrecy and the fact that the Soviet media might have underestimated the impact of the news. "The designer of the spacecraft insisted to make it really beautiful, because he knew that it would wind up in museums," said Kohonen.

This humorous page from a 1961 issue of Ogonyok weekly magazine depicts Capitalism's reaction to the transition to Communism in the Soviet Union ("Illusion! Utopia! Slander!"). The accompanying quote by Secretary Khrushchev leverages on the success in the space race: "The program of the party can be compared to a three-stage rocket."

Because of the secrecy surrounding the technology, artists were involved in manipulating photographs like this one. It doesn't show an actual rocket, which was classified, but a heavily repainted and idealized version of it. The idea proposed here was that rockets could be both space explorers and weapons of war.

The cover of the January 1958 issue of the Ogonyok magazine, one of the oldest weekly illustrated magazines, which started publishing in 1899. The message ("Happy New Year!") is innocuous enough, but the imagery promotes the idea that space exploration was a means of conquest.

This was the only photograph of Laika, the first animal to orbit the Earth on November 3, 1957. It was also published quite late, as it was not emphasized that animal was on board the Sputnik-2 spacecraft. "Again, after the Western press took notice, Laika became a hero in the Soviet Union, too," said Kohonen. "But they knew from the beginning that she wouldn't come back from the flight, so they were reluctant to promote her image at first."

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, in a picture taken after her first landing. "The press emphasized the fact that Soviet cosmonauts always landed on land and not on water like the Americans, so this photo was symbolic. It contains many symbols of rural life, and the people are remarkably close to her considering she's a state secret and unknown to anybody at the time of the landing. Probably it didn't matter as the scene took place in rural Kazakhstan, but in the edited versions of the photo the people are cropped out," said Kohonen.

Valentina Tereshkova gets ready for a spaceflight in an archive photograph. "This looks very low-tech, and likely was never published," said Kohonen.

Picturing the cosmos

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Why, for example, are cosmonauts almost always shown talking on the phone in the first photograph after returning from a mission?

“This was a way to somehow put the person that they were calling into the photograph. That person was the Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, this practice stopped after his time.”

Retouching

The state-run print network was censored and controlled. No negative or critical message would pass the filter, and publishing was illegal outside of official channels. This would only change well into the 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev promoted the idea of glasnost, a more open approach to public knowledge.

Kohonen took multiple trips to Moscow and was granted access to state archives, where she could compare published photographs with the uncensored originals. “Because of the censorship surrounding the space program, they were very careful about what to show, no technical details for example. The photographs I have studied are quite heavily manipulated, so it’s interesting to see the originals, which have now been released to see the differences,” she said.

But modifications were not always motivated by secrecy or political agenda. Sometimes a photograph was painted over – the Photoshop of the era – just to embellish it. One image of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and possibly the Soviet Union’s greatest hero, shows enhanced features, a whiter smile, and the letters CCCP (the Cyrillic equivalent of USSR) carefully painted over his helmet.

Original (left) and retouched (right).

Repetition

Another trope of Soviet imagery is the constant repetition of the same photograph: most cosmonauts had one official picture that got printed over and over. “Because of the centralized press system, there were no copyright issues, so once they were happy with one image that had been approved by the state, they just kept using it,” said Kohonen.

The restricted flow of information due to extensive checks resulted in some surprising oversights. The initial news coverage of the Sputnik from the Soviet Union, for example, did not include a photograph. “It was nothing sensational, as if they didn’t quite realize that it was huge news, and it didn’t show the satellite. I realized there were very few photos of it, and one reason was the secrecy of the space program, which was overwhelming. Only after it made a splash in the Western press, they started circulating some photos of it,” she said.

The first ever published photo of Sputnik-1.

The number of space-related images in Ogonyok, the most popular illustrated weekly magazine of the time, peaked in 1961 and 1962. Those were also the years of the Berlin crisis, which led to the construction of the wall, and the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the Cold War ever got to turning into nuclear warfare. The propaganda machine was in full swing, fueled by Gagarin’s historic first venture into space on April 12, 1961.

But in the following years, the decline in the number of space pictures closely follows the reversal of fortune in the Space Race, which was ultimately won by the United States on July 20, 1969, when the lunar module Eagle landed on the Moon.