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

FrOM the CradLe tO the GraVe:
COSMONaut NOStaLGIa IN SOVIet aNd pOSt-SOVIet FILM
269
Cosmonaut Kharlamov en route to the Moon in Pervye na lune Fedorchenko, Aleksei.
Pervye Na Lune (First on the Moon). Vlasov, Boris; Slavnin, Aleksei; Osipov, Andrei;
Otradnov, Anatolii; Ilinskaia, Viktoriia. Sverdlovsk Film Studio and Film Company Strana,
2005. 75 minutes. DVD: ©2004 Prokatnoe upravlenie Sverdlovskoi konostudii. ©2005
OOO “SR Didzhital.” (©Dizain Oblozhki OOO “SR Didzhital.”)
CONCLuSION
the 20th century began with great expectations about spacefight and
communist revolution. By the end of the century, although spacefight had
become a reality, it did not meet the expectations of the early visionaries,
and the revolution had become a bitter disappointment to most. In real life,
russian and Soviet cosmonauts have traveled barely higher than Yuri Gagarin
did in his 1961 fight, escaping the cradle of earth by only a few hundred
kilometers. In flm, they traveled to Mars, the Moon, and Venus, carrying with
them bold messages of interplanetary revolution and party discipline. When
russians began to reexamine the Soviet experience, they did not spare the
once celebrated experience of spacefight. Spacefight had been a central focus
of mid-century Soviet propaganda as demonstrable evidence that the Soviet
union had exceeded recovery from World War II and was overtaking the
united States. although pre-Gagarin flm directors could easily reft fctional
characters with appropriate political awareness for the given situation, once the