The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857–1957

Cambridge Centennial of Flight

by Asif A. Siddiqi

The Red Rockets’ Glare is the first academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program and one of the first social histories of Soviet science. Based on many years of archival research, the book situates the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within the social and cultural upheavals of Russian and Soviet history. Asif A. Siddiqi frames the origins of Sputnik by bridging imagination with engineering – seeing them not as dialectic, discrete, and sequential but as mutable, intertwined, and concurrent. Imagination and engineering not only fed each other but were also co-produced by key actors who maintained a delicate line between secret work on rockets (which interested the military) and public prognostications on the cosmos (which captivated the populace). Sputnik, he argues, was the outcome of both large-scale state imperatives to harness science and technology and populist phenomena that frequently owed little to the whims and needs of the state apparatus.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Space, Science, Russia, Technology, Utopia

414 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2010

Reviews

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

How did Sputnik come about? What led the Soviet Union to take the world lead in the space race? Was there a pre-Soviet pro-cosmic Russian culture?

Before I say more, it's time to confess that I came to The Red Rockets' Glare from an unusual background. Like some, I'm a lifelong space exploration fiend, which predisposes me towards a book about the history of Russian and Soviet rocketry. Alongside that, I have a lifelong interest in Russian culture and history, marked by odd features like an undergrad stint doing Soviet studies, plus Russian heritage. So that, too, draws me closer to The Red Rockets' Glare. I am either the ideal audience or just too nerdy for sanity.

Asif Siddiqi traces the prehistory of Sputnik's 1957 launch. To do so he has to explore some very odd and divergent territory. And he has to make a case for the power of starry-eyed fandom to work in tandem with terrifying bureaucracies.

He begins with the astonishing figure of Konstantin Tsiolkovskii (1857 – 1935), a rural school teacher who, in the late 1800, invented on his own many of the ideas for 20th century spaceflight, from multi-state rockets to airlocks, space stations, and even the space elevator. Tsiolkovskii is a kind of mystery figure for the history of space, and Siddiqi takes care to show just how he attained prophetic status in the Soviet Union.

Tsiolkovskii won little attention from the tsarist scientific establishment, but inspired a great deal of fans, sparking a generation of space enthusiasts going into the Russian Revolution. Space enthusiasts are a special theme in The Red Rockets' Glare, as they sought to advance their field on their own, often with few resources other than wide networks of mutual interest and support (56).

That enthusiasm led in two complementary directions. On the one hand, fans did the hard math and scientific work of figuring out how to make rockets work. On the other, they created a kind of Russian space mysticism, or Cosmism. The latter saw human and universal destiny in the stars, and reached stellar heights of imagination. For example, Nikolai Fyodorov prophesied a future where humans would spread throughout interstellar space in order to accumulate bits of the dead, in order to resurrect the human race.

...using all of the resources at its disposal, including science and technology, humanity should engage in a quest to reassemble the corporeal particles lost in the "disintegration" of human death.... Fyodorov believed that there would be no birth and no death, only the progressive reanimation of the deceased millions from history.(79-81)

This vision inspired a stray political-space group, the Anarchist-Biocosmists, who "briefly published a journal... under the banner 'Immortalism and Interplanetarianism.'" (107)

In a very different but similarly inspired way, after the Revolution Viktor Khlebnikov

called on all Soviet artists to "create a common graphic language, common to all the peoples of the third satellite of the sun, to devise graphic signs intelligible and acceptable throughout this inhabited star lost in space." (97)

And so on. Cosmism would go on to become a kind of subterranean Soviet meme, which would at times appear to power that nation's more lyrical bursts of space travel. It also inspired practical work. Siddiqi shares a funny scene when a leading general visits a low-budget but energetic rocket lab in the 1930s, checking on the development of a new and very basic engine. One of the team "described his ORD-2 engine to the marshal but to everyone's alarm could not resist digressing into a discussion on flights to Mars, to which Tukhachevskii responded with polite interest." (141) . This gets funnier, or at least more absurd, when you remember than this was not only before Sputnik, but before the V-2, when Robert Goddard was hand-making little rockets and getting laughed at for his dreams.

Yet Siddiqi's book is not all about space fandom. He positions that movement alongside the Russian, then the Soviet government's powerful and fearsome state apparatus, such as that important military leader in the previous example. At times the fans nudged the state into sharing precious resources. That's a new way of understanding the great designer of the USSR's initial space efforts, Sergei Korolev: energetic, practical, visionary, a political survivor, and dead at far too young an age. Korolev was skilled at uniting starry-eyed space enthusiasts with the Soviet military and scientific establishments.

At other times, the enthusiasts lost badly. The two worlds collide in heartbreaking passages when very geeky rocket scientists, caught up in Stalin's great terror of the 1930s, turn on each other, using police denunciation and speedy executions to attempt to settle matters of engineering (173ff). Korolev himself spent awful years in the Gulag. Soviet space dreams were broken badly at this time, and only recovered with the pillaging of Nazi Germany's rocket projects in 1945-1946.

At that precise point The Red Rockets' Glare makes a subtle yet vital distinction. As victorious Soviet armies swarmed over the Reich's ruins and political agents followed to set up what would become the Warsaw Pact, few were interested in what the Nazis had accomplished with rockets. Instead, it was a distributed network of rocket-interested individuals - fans, again - who discovered German scientists and machinery, then urged the state to pay attention to this windfall (196ff). Eventually, gradually, some military leaders caught on, and helped set up a very thin space research effort. I say "very thin" because Moscow had other priorities, such as atomic energy, rebuilding a devastated economy, and scrambling to build an air force capable of global reach. Yet the space geeks made progress, building up bigger and better rockets, winning support from a cautious government, until in 1957 they cracked world history wide open with a tiny satellite riding a huge ICBM.

There are important lessons to be learned from this history. Siddiqi calls his approach "history from below", and it's a powerful reminder to historians and observers to not devote all of our attention to the actions of giant states. In his conclusion he offers a powerful contrasting vision, well worth quoting in full:

The prehistory of Sputnik contrasts strikingly with the other major post-[WWII] project of Soviet science, the development of the atomic bomb, which grew out of the interests of a community of physicists operating in elite academic, industrial, and educational institutions in the 1930s. The project of spaceflight, on the other hand, grew out of the musings of a half-deaf, lone autodictat in rural Russia, the work of amateur societies, and the handiwork of men and women who built rocket engines out of broken blowtorches in factory workshops. (364)

Let me take a step back in my recommendation. This is more of a scholarly monograph than narrative history, although the chapter about Sputnik's completion and launch is gripping. Most of the book is an incredibly detailed analysis of Russian and Soviet organizational minutiae, from rocketry fan clubs to artillery unit politics, popular science magazine numbers, duelling rocket fuel paradigms, and multiple levels of bureaucratic hell within Stalinist terror. In other words, the reader is advised to get some background on events prior to basking in The Red Rockets' Glare.

[A · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Through four decades of activism, space enthusiasts had to merge the hard and cold realities of Soviet life with an often inexplicable and irrational urge to leave Earth. When Sputnik finally reached the heavens, it encapsulated not only mathematics and reason but also utopia and yearning, and most important, hope for a new era that would forever separate those who came before from those who came after."

Asif Siddiqi does a wonderful job showing how the idea of spaceflight emerged in Imperial Russia and the USSR, along with it's popularization in the following decades. From Tsiolkovsky's papers on space travel, to the NEP-era space utopians, and future rocket designers who started out in empty basements with blowtorches and scrap metal, these stages in spaceflight history were connected to one another. This book covers these different actors and their connections with one another, and the impact they had in bringing spaceflight to reality.

It's tempting to dream about what could have been if spaceflight was invested in decades earlier. Many times in the book you see that rocket designers and space enthusiasts were on the sidelines, in the shadow of more pertinent needs of the country or other military projects. It's understandable but frustrating for those of us who desperately want more support for space exploration. We could learn a thing or two from those who dreamt about exploring the cosmos over a century ago. Being able to put space exploration into the public consciousness (when aviation was just emerging no less) is a testament to their devotion. There's something to be said about the massive demand for education, scientific literature, improvement of quality of life, and more at the time which aided in having these ideas spread. We could use some of that today.

Highly recommended read for anyone interested in the origins of the soviet space program, especially for those who don't like the more technical and dry histories that currently exist.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding: a well-researched, very informative, and utterly fascinating glimpse into the Soviet road to space. Occasionally, it can be overly academic, but that fails to detract from a great read.

[Sophie Pesek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Helping my brother with sources for his essay lmao

[Raughley Nuzzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a great dive into the early Soviet Space Program. I highly enjoyed it, with a few key caveats.

First, let me say that it wasn't the beautiful pun of a title that caught my eye, but a bibliographic reference in another book I read recently. Siddiqi's book did everything I had wanted from that previous book, and more. It covered the philosophical underpinnings of Russian and Soviet space exploration ideas, anchoring them (as the Soviets did) to the writings of Konstantin Tsiolkovski. The early chapters focus on the fits and starts with which Russian and Soviet aeronautics research began to take flight.

As the Cold War approached, the chapters sped up in intensity, covering the Great Purges, WWII, and the early years of the global confrontation with the USA. It was a fascinating peek behind the iron curtain to see what motivated Soviet politicians and scientists in these early years of the Cold War. I found the chapter on the purges and the professional sniping to be especially fascinating, as well as the final chapters which showed how public pressure from the Americans spurred the Soviet space program to greater heights.

The quibbles I have with this book are mostly minor, coming down to sloppy copyediting. There's an early reference to famed science fiction author "Edgar Allen Burroughs" a period-specific typo. An additional typo mis-places the Bolshevik Revolution as taking place after WWII instead of WWI. And an easy-to-forgive, but substantial, mistake claims that the R7 rocket that put Sputnik in orbit was traveling at 7,780 kilometers per second, instead of meters. A quick Google confirmed that this is far too fast--a speed matching the orbital velocity of a star revolving extremely closely around a large black hole. The error was only noticed by me because of the TASS press release quoted a few pages later with the correct figure. For a book that has so much technical accuracies, I was dismayed by these errors because the foretold the possibility of other, unnoticed errors in parts of the book where I could be less discerning.

The other bigger quibble is that there is much hay made over the pressure that American press and political movements had on the launch of Sputnik and some discussion of the "global reaction" to Sputnik's orbit. But given the import of the event (the whole book builds up to its success!) there is a sort of glossy treatment of the reactions. I understand that this topic is well-covered elsewhere, but it would have helped make this book stand alone more effectively to have included it. And it would have opened the door to an interesting discussion of the reactions-to-the-reactions within the Soviet political and scientific communities.

Overall, this was a great, but flawed, coverage of the early years of the theoretical and practical Soviet space program. I kinda wish it had continued through the rest of the Cold War to see how the whole situation evolved, but I believe Siddiqi has other books that cover the later periods, thankfully!