Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

CreatING MeMOrIeS: MYth, IDeNtItY,
aND CULtUre IN the rUSSIaN SpaCe aGe
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historian, salvaged the document from destruction, but it still was not made
available to the public. 58
the master narrative was literally written in stone—in massive monuments
that placed the cosmonauts, the leading engineers, and Soviet political leaders
on a pedestal of historical myth. In a revealing symbolic gesture, space industry
leadership actually placed space documents and artifacts in the foundation of
one such monument in Moscow. a recently declassifed petition from a group
of industry leaders to the Soviet political leadership read:
For the memorialization of the outstanding historical
achievements of the Soviet people in the conquest of space
and for the eternal preservation of documentation and other
materials about the fights of Soviet spacecraft, it would be
advisable to place in special sealed containers documents,
flms, and make-ups of Soviet artifcial satellites of earth, of
space stations, of space ships, and of the most important
research equipment used in fight, and to brick up these containers
into the foundation of a monument commemorating
the outstanding achievement of the Soviet people in the conquest
of space to be erected in Moscow. 59
an identical set of carefully selected documents and artifacts was put on display
at a museum open under the monument. Space history was written once and
for all.the master narrative was literally protected from challenge by a stone wall.
SOVIet COUNter-NarratIVeS
Individual memories that could not ft into the master narrative did not
disappear. Beneath the glossy surface of ofcial history, a myriad of private
stories circulated informally, and they formed an oral tradition totally separate
from written accounts. historians have traditionally associated such “counter
memories in the very shadow of the ofcial history” with groups which are
“excluded or overlooked.” 60 In the Soviet space program, by contrast, the
groups that secretly cultivated such “counter memories” were front and center
in ofcial history: the space engineers and the cosmonauts. they were privy
to information carefully concealed from an average Soviet citizen, and they
58. Valentina ponomareva, Zhenskoe litso kosmosa (Moscow: Gelios, 2002), pp. 118-119.
59. Leonid Smirnov et al. to the party Central Committee, February 2, 1966; russian State archive
of the economy (rGae), Moscow, f. 4372, op. 81, d. 1944, l. 50.
60. Catherine Merridale,“War, Death, and remembrance in Soviet russia,” in War and Remembrance
in the Twentieth Century, eds. Jay Winter and emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University press, 1999), quoted in Fritzsche,“the Case of Modern Memory,” p. 107.