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

CreatING MeMOrIeS: MYth, IDeNtItY,
aND CULtUre IN the rUSSIaN SpaCe aGe
233
A billboard advertisement of the “Number One” cell phone calling plan by the MTS
company in the streets of Moscow, June 2006. (Photo from the author’s collection)
ostentatious self-awareness of the simulated reality of advertising was taken to a
new level in a series of MtS television ads that followed the “Number One”
billboard campaign. those ads frst depicted a cosmonaut talking on a cell phone
during preparations for a takeof, but then a wider camera shot gradually revealed
that the action was actually happening at a movie set being prepared for shooting
a takeof scene. 90 In a sly reference to the popular conspiracy theories about
entire space missions staged on a movie set, these ads again invited the viewer to
blur the boundary between reality and simulation, between an advertisement
and a game, and between space history and today’s marketplace.
Global satellite communication and positioning systems are increasingly
integrated into the russian economy, but their political and cultural ramifcations
remain peculiar to russian society and are burdened with the remembrance of
the Soviet past. as late as 1999, there still was no legal framework for using
global positioning systems in russia. In 1998, a batch of Volkswagen cars was
reportedly not permitted for sale in russia, because they were equipped with
90. See Dmitrii Kozlov,“MtS:O iaitsakh,tarifakh,sovetskoi simvolike i butaforskikh kosmonavtakh,”
Reklamnye idei, no. 5 (2006) (available at http://www.advi.ru/page.php3?id=287, including one of
the television ads).