Red Cosmos

Reviewed by: Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry Slava Gerovitch (bio) Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry. By James T. Andrews. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009. Pp. xviii+147. $49/$23. Konstantin Tsiolkovskii (1857–1935), a nearly deaf high school teacher of mathematics and physics in the provincial Russian town of Kaluga, occupies a special place in the mythology of the Space Age. Along with Robert Goddard and Hermann Oberth, he completes the canonical trio of world pioneers of rocketry and space travel. In the politically charged Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, Tsiolkovskii’s legacy was subjected to a series of reinterpretations. In the Stalin era, he was paraded as a “poster boy” for the Soviet state’s technological aspirations. In the Khrushchev period, he was cast as a visionary “grandfather” of the Soviet space triumphs. On the wave of post-Soviet criticism of Soviet-era myths, he was denounced as a mere crank whose meager technical contributions were blown out of proportion by Soviet state propaganda. James Andrews’s short, readable biography draws on rich Russian archives to retell the Tsiolkovskii story in its fascinating complexity. While documenting the Soviet state’s efforts to enlist Tsiolkovskii in its propaganda effort, Andrews portrays his protagonist not as a passive pawn of the regime, but as an active manipulator of the system for his own agenda. Briefly sketching Tsiolkovskii’s technical ideas, Andrews argues that, contrary to a widespread myth (and contrary to what the book’s promotional material says), Tsiolkovskii’s idea of multistage rockets was not new, but had been preceded by Goddard, Oberth, and the Russian Iurii Kondratiuk. Nevertheless, Tsiolkovskii’s efforts to describe mathematically, and provide detailed sketches of, liquid-propellant rocket designs pointed the direction for Soviet rocketry enthusiasts to follow. Andrews is less interested in priority disputes, however, than in Tsiolkovskii’s role as an educator and propagandist for space travel, as a man who inspired a new generation of Soviet engineers to engage in rocketry. Tsiolkovskii wrote a large number of short stories and novellas about space travel, and Andrews persuasively argues that for Tsiolkovskii science fiction was more than a mere vehicle for conveying his ideas to the broadest [End Page 408] possible audience. In his fictional narratives, he often revealed more technical detail of his designs than in his purely technical publications. His fiction served as a “laboratory of visions” (p. 69) in which literary imagination helped rectify his technical innovations. Andrews places the story of Tsiolkovskii’s relationship with the Soviet state in the context of scholarly debates over the nature of identity formation in the Soviet Union. While some historians argue that Soviet citizens interiorized ideological dogmas and sincerely sought to model themselves after a state-sponsored ideal of the new Soviet man, others assert the opportunist motives behind Soviet citizens’ public rhetoric, noting that it took clever maneuvering to navigate the ritualized settings of Soviet power. Andrews positions Tsiolkovskii somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. Tsiolkovskii believed that he had been unjustly treated by the pre-revolutionary Russian scientific elite and was sincerely grateful to the Soviet state for the propagation of his ideas, as well as for material support. At the same time, he gained that support to a large extent due to his own dexterous appropriation of the Bolshevik rhetoric and his “self-fashioning” as a sufferer under the tsarist regime and thinker of a Marxist bent. As he worked the Soviet system, Tsiolkovskii adapted his identity to fit the Soviet pattern, but the state apparatus also adjusted its template to fit his case: Tsiolkovskii’s official obituary, for example, drew heavily on his own autobiography. Occupying a middle ground between the “true believers” and the “pure opportunists,” the Tsiolkovskii case suggests a useful framework for thinking about the relationship between Soviet scientists and engineers and the state—a relationship both sides valued and yet constantly negotiated, actively pursuing their own, sometimes differing, agendas. One important period in the evolution of Tsiolkovskii’s public image deserves more attention than it has received in this book. Andrews writes that Tsiolkovskii’s legacy went “somewhat dormant” in the 1940s

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