RED COSMOS

Number Eighteen:

centennial of flight series

Roger D. Launius, General Editor

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PR.indd ii 5/18/2009 3:02:25 PM
PR.indd iii 5/18/2009 3:02:25 PM
 Copyright 2009 by James T. Andrews
Manufactured in the United States of America
All rights reserved
First edition

This paper meets the requirements of

ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Binding materials have been chosen for durability.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andrews, James T., 1961

Red cosmos : K. E. Tsiolkovskii, grandfather of Soviet
rocketry / James T. Andrews. 1st ed.
p. cm. (Centennial of flight series ; no. 18)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60344-117-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-60344-117-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-60344-168-1 (pbk : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-60344-168-9 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Tsiolkovskii, K. (Konstantin), 18571935.
2. Aerospace engineers Soviet Union
Biography. 3. Authors, Russian Biography.
4. Authors, Soviet Biography. 5. Science fiction,
Soviet History and criticism. 6. Astronautics
Russia History. 7. AstronauticsSocial
aspects Soviet Union. I. Title. II. Title: K. E.
Tsiolkovskii, grandfather of Soviet rocketry.
III. Series: Centennial of flight series ; no. 18.
TL789.85.T8A53 2009
629.4092 dc22
[B]
2008051128

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 To My Mother, Eleni
Helen Raisides Andrews
Whose personal commitment and Greek cultural heritage
have instilled in me since a child the importance of education
and its enlightened powers. And who, like Tsiolkovskii, always
told me to reach for the stars.

And to My Father, Athanasios

Thomas James Andrews
Who survived the Nazi occupation of his native Athens in the
1940s and the protracted civil war that followed, only to come to
America, labor endlessly, and build a bright future for his family.

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PR.indd vi 5/18/2009 3:02:27 PM
 CONTENTS

Illustrations ix
Preface xi

Prelude:
Before Tsiolkovskii: Russian Rocketry from Peter the Great
to the Nineteenth Century 1
Introduction:
Envisioning the Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Russian Public
Culture, and the Mythology of Soviet Cosmonautics,
18571964 9
Chapter 1.
Beginnings, Teaching Science in a Provincial Context:
Tsiolkovskiis Years in the Russian Locale, 18571917 15
Chapter 2.
Dreaming of the Cosmos: Early Scientific and Technical
Experimentation in Pre-1917 Kaluga, Russia 31
Chapter 3.
Getting Serious about Rocket Flight in Revolutionary Russia,
19171928 47
Chapter 4.
Cross-Fertilizing Futuristic Literary Genres: Utopian Science
Fiction or Didactic Popular Technology in Revolutionary
Russia, 18901928 64
Chapter 5.
Stalin, Khrushchev, and the Spaceman: Technology, Soviet
National Identity, and the Memorialization of a Local Hero
in the Dawn of Sputnik, 19281957 79

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 viii contents

Epilogue and Conclusion:

Chudo (Wonder) or Chudak (Crank), the Legacy of
Tsiolkovskii in the Khrushchev Era and beyond 1964 97

Glossary 109
Notes 111
Note on Sources 131
Bibliography 133
Index 139

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 ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Photo (1939) depicting May 1, 1935, Tsiolkovskii speech 11

Fig. 2. Photo (1932) of Tsiolkovskii biking home in Kaluga,
Russia 22
Fig. 3. Photo (1903) of teachers at the local Kaluga Diocesan
School for Girls 26
Fig. 4. Photo (1913) of Tsiolkovskiis aerostat models 29
Fig. 5. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1878) of a variety of
jet-propelled machines 33
Fig. 6. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1878) of falling projectiles 34
Fig. 7. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1879) showing cannon ball of a
bow-shaped gun 35
Fig. 8. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1879) depicting gravity-free
space and curvilinear motion 36
Fig. 9. Photo (1913) of Tsiolkovskiis workshop in Kaluga 38
Fig. 10. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1898) for his Air Pressure
article 38
Fig. 11. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (19021903) of a variant of a
liquid fuel rocket 42
Fig. 12. Photo (1913) of Tsiolkovskii in his workshop with metal
models of his dirigibles 45
Fig. 13. Photo (c. 1929) of Tsiolkovskii in his peasant kaftan at
work in his laboratory 87
Fig. 14. Photo (c. 1928) of Tsiolkovskii in his workshop displaying
his wooden lathes 87
Fig. 15. Photo (1935) of Tsiolkovskii with collective farm
workers 88
Fig. 16. 1930s-era photo of a Moscow secondary school event
commemorating Tsiolkovskii 88
Fig. 17. Photo (1932) of Tsiolkovskii giving lecture to young Soviet
inventors club 89
Fig. 18. Photo (1933) of Stalin-era technical society with
Tsiolkovskii featured 89
Fig. 19. Photo (1935) of Tsiolkovskii open casket with Soviet
medals shown prominently 92

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 x illustrations

Fig. 20. September 1935 funeral procession in Kaluga 92

Fig. 21. September 1935 funeral gathering and procession in
Lenin Square, Central Kaluga 93
Fig. 22. September 1935 funeral procession of Soviet diginitaries
in Kalugas Lenin Square 93
Fig. 23. September 1935 burial site in Kaluga park, near the
present day Tsiolkovskii Museum 94
Fig. 24. September 1935 memorial speeches by Soviet figures near
burial site in Kaluga 94
Fig. 25. Photo (1928) at his desk writing in his Kaluga home 105
Fig. 26. Photo (1932) in his study amongst his papers 106

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 PREFACE

n 1935, in Stalins times, a young journalist working

I for the Young Communist Youth Leagues Newspaper

(Komsomolskaia Pravda), Evgeny Riabchikov, made a pil-
grimage to Kaluga in provincial Russia to interview the
grandfather of Russian cosmonautics, K. E. Tsiolkovskii. At that
time, Tsiolkovskii was old and sickly, and would pass away in Sep-
tember of that same year. Riabchikov, working on stories about
Soviet aeronautics and space design, was interested in interviewing
Tsiolkovskii and finding out his thoughts on new developments at
the Moscow and Leningrad centers of design research. After inter-
viewing Tsiolkovskii, Riabchikov was convinced that Tsiolkovskiis
childhood bout with scarlet fever motivated him to become an
overachiever and establish himself as a self-taught physicist and
scientist with a vision for the future. Riabchikov wrote about his
encounter with Tsiolkovskii in his famous book on Soviet space
flight, entitled Russkie v kosmose (Russians in Space), and in a series
of newspaper articles he wrote in the 1930s on the topic.
Sixty-five years later, in the summer of 2000, I began a series of
similar pilgrimages to Kaluga. However, I was in search of Tsi-
olkovskiis legacy and therefore came to this provincial town for
different reasons. I had already been working extensively in the
archives at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where Tsiolkovskiis
papers had been organized since he donated his materials to the
Soviet Communist Party on his death in 1935. One of his daughters
had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party during the
1917 revolutionary era. She had survived the cataclysmic events,
and she later organized his papers after his death in order to have
them transferred first to the Communist Party, and then eventually
to the Russian Academy of Sciences. Her father had initially
bequeathed all his papers to the Communist Party in gratitude of
its financial aid and support of his work and vision.
I came to Kaluga with much experience with central and pro-
vincial archives in Russia from my previous book projects. Further-
more, I came to revisit the Tsiolkovskii story in a much broader

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 xii preface

context; that is, I was interested in Tsiolkovskiis work as a provin-

cial teacher, a popularizer of science and technology, a visionary, a
philosopher, as well as a technical inventor ahead of his time. I was
also interested in placing this scientist and inventor within a his-
torical, cultural, and political context because I firmly believed his
story had been wrenched inadvertently from that broader context
in the past. The focus in the Soviet-era historiography (or hagio-
graphy) on Tsiolkovskii had almost exclusively been on his techni-
cal achievements and contributions to the foundations of space
flight and rocketry though, in my opinion, these are still some-
what significant achievements.
When I arrived in Kaluga by train, I happened to be wearing a
suit and a tie, because I had arranged an immediate meeting with
the head of the Tsiolkovskii National Museum of Cosmonautics.
Usually I am more discreet traveling throughout the former Soviet
empire, but this time I was in a hurry. I boarded a local bus, which
as usual was about to tip over at every turn because it was over-
crowded. Upon paying my ticket fare, the entire bus, including the
driver, began to drill me. Are you a reporter from Western Europe
or America? Have you come to write about our local hero, Tsi-
olkovskii? I was somewhat taken aback. Though I have always had
to answer questions, particularly in the provinces, from Russians
as to why I was living or working in a particularly remote place, I
never had such blunt questions thrown at me so quickly they
were usually more casual conversations in a market by interested
locals. Besides, I was a bit stunned at how proud, if not knowledge-
able, the average Kalugan was about Tsiolkovskii. Of course, every
Russian schoolkid in Soviet times, of my generation at least, knew
who Tsiolkovskii was and had a vague picture of his embellished
accomplishments. However, Muscovites today usually mock the
Tsiolkovskii story as a Soviet myth propagated in the history books
(which it was, at least to some extent). So it was interesting to see
Kalugans, at least those I met, so obsessed with letting their fellow
countrymen in central capitals know that this physics teacher was,
at least in their mind, for real.
When I left the bus that first day, everyone waved at me, with
their hands stretched through the windows, in a strange collective

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 preface xiii

(if not comical) manner from some bygone time, and at the end of
that bus line lay the Tsiolkovskii National Museum of Cosmonau-
tics. Bizarrely, it is a large, modern, stunning white building on the
banks of the Oka River, sitting there like Frank Gehrys Guggenheim
Museum among the placid birch trees in a desolate area on the
very outskirts of this provincial Russian town. I was given a warm
welcoming after I carefully explained my project to the archivists
at the museum and at the local provincial archive, which I had
papers to work at issued by the central Russian Academy of Sci-
ences Institute, of which I am an affiliate in Moscow. However,
several associates at the museum were a bit skeptical of my inter-
ests because a few space historians in Moscow (documented in the
introduction below) have recently tried to overemphasize, at least
in my opinion, that the Bolsheviks themselves created Tsiolkovskii
and propagated a purely fabricated myth about his genius. Though
there is a grain of truth in this notion, it is almost revisionist
history in the opposite extreme from old Communist Party histori-
cal propaganda and mythology. Furthermore, the Tsiolkovskii story,
as noted above, is far more complex and part of a greater history
of Russian cosmonautics, provincial education, political history,
identity formation, and even popular culture in Russia across the
revolutionary divide.
Since 2000, while working in Kaluga, I witnessed as an objective
observer a type of Tsiolkovskian world. I went on personal tours,
with local historians, of his house and workshop (now a public
museum); sat out on the second-floor balcony of his house, where
he let local schoolchildren view the stars through his telescope;
and talked briefly with his distant relatives, as well as at length
with local specialists on the history of Russian science and tech-
nology. As with my past work in Russian history, I used visits
to local sites and a myriad of local and national archives to gain
broad insight into my topic. This local knowledge expanded my
vision beyond the confines of the central archival material (which
itself was invaluable). That time in Kaluga was clearly invaluable
to this study in many ways, some of which are hard to document.
Below are listed a number of institutions, scholars, and associa-
tions that I would like to acknowledge for their help during the

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 xiv preface

time I researched this books topic in Moscow, St. Petersburg,

Kaluga, New York City, and in other parts of Russia and the United
States.

I am indebted first and foremost to my colleagues in Russia at the

Academy of Sciences, especially Irina Sirotkina and Kirill Ros-
sianov, who have provided over the last twenty years a sense of
collegiality and comradeship that goes beyond the call of academic
duty. They provided invaluable help during this project and incisive
criticism of my research. I also thank the late Victor Sokolsky and
his working group in space history at the Russian Academy of Sci-
ences Institute for the History of the Natural Sciences and Technol-
ogy. That group, and the institute in general, have been invaluable
as a source of academic advice as well as an affiliate home in
Russia over the past two decades. I also wish to thank Daniil Alex-
androv, my colleague and old friend, for his invaluable academic
advice on this and related topics, and especially for our mutual
interest in local science and public culture. Danya was critical in
helping me while I worked in the archives in St. Petersburg, his
home city. Furthermore, our conversations over tea at his home in
St. Petersburg were helpful when I first was thinking about this
topic as both a local and national history.
I owe a lasting sense of gratitude to the staffs of numerous
archives and museums where I worked at over an extensive period
while researching this book, including the Kaluga Oblast archive,
the Russian National Museum of Cosmonautics in Kaluga, the
Tsiolkovskii House Museum in Kaluga, the Moscow and St. Peters-
burg branches of the Russian Academy of Sciences archives, the
State Government Archive of the Russian Federation, and a host of
other Communist, national, and local Russian archival collections
listed in the bibliography.
In the United States, I am indebted to Chief Curator Edward
Kasinec and his fine staff at the Slavonic Reading Room of the
New York Public Library, who provided invaluable advice and bib-
liographic resources from his superb collection. Ed and the collec-
tion that he has organized over the years have been wellsprings
of information for me, and the reading room has been an intel-

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 preface xv

lectual nexus for my research projects, past and future. June Farris,
at the University of Chicago Regenstein and research libraries, has
always been a constant source of informational support, and I
thank her as well for her help over the years while I was working
on this book and related topics.
I am indebted to several colleagues in Slavic studies and the
history of technology for their advice and support of this project
from its inception. Loren R. Graham (professor emeritus at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard) has shown
constant intellectual support on my projects that intersect science,
technology, and cultural history. Lorens collegiality, friendship, and
mentoring have been invaluable to me over the past two decades.
I wish to thank Douglas Weiner and Paul Josephson for their inter-
est in this project at an early stage, and their continual collegial
support and advice. Loren, Doug, and Paul have set exemplary
standards with the high quality of their scholarship. I greatly
appreciate the advice of Alexei Kozhevnikov on two of my papers
on Tsiolkovskii and the critical conversations I had with Asif Siddiqi
on related topics. I deeply respect the work of both Asif and Alexei
in the history of Russian science and technology.
I wish to thank the Department of Space History at the Smith-
sonian Institutions National Air and Space Museum in Washing-
ton, D.C. Roger Launius has provided constant critical advice on
this project, introducing me to his cohort of space historians and
generously including me in conferences and seminars within that
subdiscipline. Stephen Dick, chief historian at the National Aero-
nautics and Space Administration, also provided invaluable support
and interest in this and a related work of mine on Soviet space
history. At the Smithsonian, I am indebted to Michael Neufeld for
his collegiality, as well as Frank Winter, Cathleen Lewis, and Martin
Collins for their generous interest in my work and constructive
criticisms at various conferences we jointly attended in D.C.
At Iowa State University (ISU), I wish to thank three successive
chairs for their encouragement while I wrote this book. George
McJimsey, the Pulitzer-nominated biographer of Harry Hopkins,
saw the national, political, and propagandistic resonance of the
Tsiolkovskii story in the developing cold war history. Andrejs

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 xvi preface

Plakans has been a constant source of academic and collegial

support for my various research projects. Andrejs has been a friend
and inspirational colleague in European and Slavic studies. Charles
Dobbs, a cold war-era foreign policy analyst, has also seen the
relevance of this story beyond Russian cultural and technological
history. I thank them all for their intellectual and administrative
support. I wish to thank Amy Bix, Hamilton Cravens, David Wilson,
Matthew Stanley, Bernhard Reiger, and Alan Marcus my present
and former colleagues in the history of science and technology
program at ISU that I once codirected. Alan Marcus particularly was
a source of constant academic support, reminding me of the impor-
tance of a cultural and biographical history of technology. I also
thank Pamela Riney-Kehrberg in history, Debra Marquart in English,
and Brenda Daly, English professor and director of the Center for
Excellence in Arts and Humanities (CEAH), for their academic
support and collegiality. The CEAH generously sponsored two of
the many summers of archival and library research on this project.
Lastly, for several years I directed a seminar series at ISU, which I
created, entitled The Workshop on the Historical Studies of Tech-
nology and Science. I presented part of my Tsiolkovskii book in
this seminar, and deeply respect the collegial environment of its
participants, which included Kevin Amidon, John Monroe, Kim-
berly Zarecor, Thomas Leslie, Michael Golec, Emily Godbey, Robert
Hollinger, and Daniella Barberis.
I also wish to thank several colleagues, institutes, and grant
organizations globally for their support, as well as hosting semi-
nars where I gave talks related to this book project. The Mellon
Foundation generously sponsored my trip to Australia, where I
presented on Tsiolkovskii at the University of Melbourne. I thank
Sheila Fitzpartick (University of Chicago) and Stephen Wheatcroft
(University of Melbourne) for their generous advice and critical
commentary on my work in Melbourne. I wish to thank Bernhard
Reiger and the history faculty at the International University of
Bremen in Germany. Bernhard, now at the University of London,
has offered incisive commentary on my work and has been a good
friend and colleague. I wish to thank Masanori Kaji and the faculty
in the history of science and technology at the Tokyo Institute of

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 preface xvii

Technology for sponsoring me at the university in the spring of

2008. I respect Masanoris work in the history of Russian chemistry,
and his collegiality and friendship is invaluable. I wish to thank
Takehiko Hashimoto and the faculty in the history and philosophy
of science at the University of Tokyo for sponsoring a seminar on
my work on Soviet rocketry and popular culture. Lastly, I wish to
thank the director of the University of Hokkaidos Eurasian Studies
Center, Kimitaka Matsuzato, for sponsoring a seminar on my work,
as well as inviting me to the center in the spring of 2008 as a visit-
ing scholar.
My family in so many ways has been a constant source of inspi-
ration and support. My wife, Margaret Rose LaWare (Maggie), has
seen this book sprout from a conception in St. Petersburg in 1998,
when we were traveling together in Russia, to the final product in
2009. She has been a constant source of love, support, and aca-
demic and intellectual interchange. Our wonderful family, and our
shared life as professors at ISU, has meant more to me than any-
thing this world has to offer. Furthermore, our daughter, Elena
Sophie, eight years old, has been a daily joy in our life. She too is
a constant inspirational force in my life: from when I was chasing
after her while she was learning how to bicycle on the sidewalks
of our neighborhood, to her input in an Ames coffee house on the
final book title, Red Cosmos.
Lastly, I dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Helen
Raisides Andrews (Eleni Raisithou Andreou), and to my father,
Thomas James Andrews (Athanasios Dmitrios Andreou). Neither of
them had the educational opportunities that they gave to my
brother and me. My fathers youth was interrupted by the Nazi
invasion of his native Greece in the early 1940s. He suffered under
the protracted civil war that followed and was grazed by a snipers
bullet while guarding the Suez Canal serving in NATOs forces in
the early 1950s, wondering why he had been sent there in the first
place. He came to the United States, taught himself English after
marrying my mother, and labored endlessly to give us an educa-
tion. He is now in his eighties. My mothers family fled the Ottoman
Empire (and its military draft) during the First World War, scatter-
ing from Alexandria to Athens, Paris, and eventually New York

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 xviii preface

City. My mother lost her father in the late 1930s and had to work
tirelessly as an administrative assistant in New York City, while
living in Queens in the 1940s, raising three younger brothers and
taking care of a mother who only spoke Turkish and Greek. My
parents therefore taught me to overcome adversity, find and respect
the decency in all human beings, and understand the value of not
just education but also what they deem the cherished basics in
life: life untouched by war and civil tension, clean water and good
food, and a warm house to live in. It is thus to my parents, whom
I love and respect, that I dedicate this book. May my daughter and
her generation understand the hurdles of their elders European
and Eurasian past and the brightness of their future.

Ames, Iowa
August, 2009

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 RED COSMOS

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PR.indd xx 5/18/2009 3:02:27 PM
 PRELUDE
before tsiolkovskii
russian rocketry from peter the
great to the nineteenth century

n April of 1961, just after Yuri Gagarin became the first

I human being to rocket into orbit, the Soviets held a

diplomatic gala in the Moscow Kremlin in his honor.
At the event, the beaming Soviet premier, Nikita
Khrushchev, embraced Gagarin and then made a toast. He said,
We used to go barefoot and without clothes and arrogant Western
theoreticians predicted that bast-shoed Russians would never
become a great power.1 Furthermore, he said, Once illiterate-
Russia, which many regarded as a barbaric country, had now pio-
neered the path into space.2 Khrushchev could not have been
more off the mark. If anything, once again, he was probably pro-
jecting his own insecurities, and humble origins, onto his countrys
past and present.3 With rhetoric that intentionally played into cold
war competition, his overview of Russian scientific and technologi-
cal traditions was far from the truth. Indeed, Russian science had
borrowed much from the West, going back to the induction of the
Academy of Sciences under Peter the Great in the first part of the
eighteenth century; on the other hand, Russian technology had
also blazed its own unique paths. Furthermore, Russians in the
tsarist era had spent much time and effort for a variety of purposes
originating designs for rockets. Some of their theories on rocket
design, ballistics, and aerodynamics were translated into European
languages, particularly French, for European scientists to digest
and ponder. From this perspective and historical context, it is not
surprising that this mighty socialist empire would in the 1960s be
the first to succeed in manned space-flight. Russias traditional
ingenuity in rocketry stretched back to the time of Peter the Greats
reign in the late seventeenth century. These roots and traditions
need to be resurrected so that we will no longer think of Soviet
cosmonautics as a late twentieth-century phenomenon.
In Russia, the earliest descriptions of rockets were written in the
seventeenth century by Onisim Mikhailov, a builder and designer

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 2 prelude

of cannons. Between 1607 and 1621, he compiled the Code of

Military, Artillery, and Other Matters Pertaining to the Science of
Warfare. Though this document contained a description of rockets
and cannon balls that burn, it primarily was a collection of articles
and decrees from a variety of military books (mostly foreign
sources). Prior to the time of Tsar Peter the Great, rockets were
mainly used for fireworks displays, particularly for members of the
tsars immediate and extended family.4 Sometimes these tsarist
celebrations were overshadowed, if not marred, by the accidental
explosions of rockets that were not used properly.5
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, however,
Peter the Great finally established, and promoted with funds, rocket
workshops in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This changed the nature
of rocketry in Russia, because after this time rockets definitely
were created for military purposes and not simply display. Peter
founded in Moscow in 1680 the first rocket factory, where both
signal and illuminating rockets were made for the Russian army.
After the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703, the tsar moved the
rocket workshop to his new capital on the Baltic and vastly
expanded the production of rockets. In these newly constructed
rocket workshops on the banks of the Neva River, hundreds of
rocket specimens were produced in the first quarter of the eigh-
teenth century alone. Though they still served as entertainment at
celebrations for the young Tsar-Westernizer, they also were used
for military forces under the guidance of western commanders
such as the Scotsman Patrick Gordon, an admiral in Peters navy.6
It was not till the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
however, that more detailed works were actually written on mili-
tary rockets. The first to actually publish detailed designs of rockets
was Aleksandr D. Sasyadko (17791837), a talented engineer and a
hero of the Napoleonic War of 1812. He designed, at the turn of
the nineteenth century, a high explosive rocket and launchers
that could fire six rockets simultaneously. He tested these rockets
successfully near Mogilev and produced them at the Petersburg
Pyrotechnic Laboratory. After 1826, a St. Petersburg Rocket Institute
(the first of its kind in Eurasia) was established on Volkovoye Field
near St. Petersburg.7 Sasyadkos rockets were first used in the

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 prelude 3

Russo-Turkish War of 182829, and Russian ships on the Black Sea

were also armed with his projectiles. Some twenty years after his
death, Sasyadkos early designs were modified and even used in
the Crimean War, between 1853 and 1856.8
Though Sasyadko made great strides in the development of
rockets for military purposes, it was Konstantin I. Konstantinov
(181771) who really helped expand the design, manufacture, and
production of rockets not just in Petersburg, but in other parts of
the Russian empire as well. Originally, Konstantinov, an artillery
officer, helped promote the extensive use of rockets that were well
suited for closely grouped accurate fire. By the 1850s, he became
chief of the St. Petersburg Rocket Institute, and was directing the
production of large-scale rockets for military purposes.9
Konstantinov originally studied at the Mikhailovskii Artillery
Academy in St. Petersburg, beginning in 1834. However, he was
influenced by a number of ingenious professors and teachers in
the imperial capital who collectively began to transform higher
education in the physical sciences in Russia. Konstantinov and
others interested in rocketry could thus study math, physics, and
the dynamics of propulsion from more sophisticated teachers. One
professor at St. Petersburg University, V. A. Ankudovich (17921856)
taught Konstantinov and others very detailed courses on ballistics.
Konstantinov was very influenced by Stepan I. Nechaev also, who
was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a superb
teacher of math and physics. Nechaev was well liked by university
students in Petersburg and purportedly was very influential with
a young cohort of students who, like Konstantinov, were interested
in applied physics and math.10
Though mostly developing rockets for military ends, Konstanti-
nov also nutured the idea of rockets for peaceful uses. He was
interested in signal rockets, and he started developing a two-
chambered life-saving rocket that could be catapulted to either a
sinking vessel at sea or through chasms in the mountains. In the
1850s he began to popularize these notions through public lectures
he gave in St. Petersburg, particularly ones at the Mikhailovskii
Artillery Academy. In 1864 the first edition in Russian of his col-
lected public lectures on rocketry was published in St. Petersburg,

prelude.indd 3 5/18/2009 3:02:34 PM

 4 prelude

and it was then translated into French by a Parisian publishing

house in the late 1860s.11 This French publication is evidence that
tsarist-era Russians were not simply adopting western technologi-
cal advances, but on the contrary, possibly influencing western
engineers.
In 1868 Konstantinov began working in Nikolaev, just to the
north of the Black Sea, near Bessarabia. It is here where he began
directing the first rocket factory outside of Petersburg. Nikolaev
made sense as a rocket center since it was close to the Black
Sea Fleet whose ships could carry Konstantinovs rockets.12
Military diaries in the late nineteenth century describe some of
Konstantinovs rockets, assembled in Nikolaev, as being used
in the Russo-Turkish War between 1877 and 1878. Purportedly,
while Russian troops were storming Silistria, rocketmen on
barges in the Danube River blew up enemy ships in order to give
Russian engineering troops time and cover to build a bridge across
the river.13
In Nikolaev, Konstantinov directed the local branch of the
Russian Technical Society and assembled a team of active rocket
specialists to lecture and write at the local branch. The members
of the Nikolaev branch of the Russian Technical Society included
M. M. Pomortsev, whose works on wind resistance, velocity, and
aerodynamics were widely published in the second half of the
nineteenth century.14 Pomortsev specifically studied the speed and
direction of wind and how they could affect the flight of a variety
of objects. The Central Imperial Russian Technical Society in St.
Petersburg became very interested in his research because it was
the basis of overcoming wind resistance for projectiles flying
through air.15 Konstantinov and Pomortsev, however, represented a
broader phenomenon in late nineteenth-century Russia, namely,
the migration to provincial areas of serious scientists. Sometimes
this migration was for practical purposes (in the case of Konstan-
tinov, he needed to be closer to strategic military areas); yet other
times, this phenomenon was a manifestation of the expansion of
Russian science beyond the capital cities.16
Throughout Eurasia in the second half of the nineteenth century,
rockets for military purposes became less useful as the artillery

prelude.indd 4 5/18/2009 3:02:34 PM

 prelude 5

cannon and other explosive arms were developed for the battle-
field. The aeronautical uses of rockets became more appealing in
Russia, as a host of engineers, technicians, and scientists began to
dream of flight and conquering the heavens. N. V. Gerasimov, a
military engineer, was the first in the late nineteenth century
to propose using a rocket with a gyroscope inside to assure the
stability of the projectile in flight.17 I. V. Meshchersky (18591935),
a design engineer, began to investigate the physical dynamics of
objects in flight with respect to their weight and the velocity they
traveled through air.18
The engineer A. P. Fedorov, who worked on jet-propelled flying
machines, designed a rocket that was propelled by a system of
tubes. N. E. Zhukovsky (18471921), the father of Russian aviation,
began lecturing widely in Moscow at the turn of the twentieth
century on general aerodynamics, mechanics of flight, and aero-
ballistics. These lectures had a huge influence on future design
engineers interested in air and space flight in Russia.19 However, it
was none other than N. Kibalchich (185381), the bomb expert of
the revolutionary organization called Narodnaya Volya (Peoples
Will), who is credited with first proposing the idea of rocket propul-
sion to carry people vertically into the atmosphere.20
Kibalchich enrolled in 1871 at the Petersburg Institute of
Transportation and Engineering and then followed his engineering
degree with studies at the Petersburg Medical Academy. Kibalchich
was implicated, and subsequently arrested, in the assassination
of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As he awaited execution, the twenty-
seven-year-old revolutionary compiled drawings in his cell of
rocket-powered aircraft and mathematical computations for veloc-
ity and thrust of a rocket through air. Buried for many years there-
after in the tsarist secret police archives was one of his memoranda,
written while imprisoned, which described his theory on how to
construct a combustible projectile. He suggested using granular
powder in a cylindrically shaped rocket and proposed having the
powder combust at a slow yet constant rate of speed and allowing
the gases to egress through the hole in the bottom of the rocket.21
Thirty-six years later, in August 1917 (just prior to the Bolshevik
Revolution), his notes were found and published for the first time

prelude.indd 5 5/18/2009 3:02:34 PM

 6 prelude

in an article. The preface to the article was written by the famous

author and popularizer of spaceflight N. A. Rynin, who credited
Kibalchich as the first to advance the idea of the use of jet engines
for flying. It was Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii (18571935), the provin-
cial physics teacher and inventor, who Rynin believes built on
Kibalchichs ideas and developed them much further.22
The heralded father, or grandfather, of Soviet cosmonautics,
K. E. Tsiolkovskii, did not therefore articulate his dreams and ideas
on rocket flight in a vacuum. He built on a long tradition of theoriz-
ing, writing, and dreaming of rockets, flight, and space travel. His-
tories of Russian rocketry have too often been contextualized solely
in cold war terms, beginning with Khrushchev, but this book begins
with the roots of rocketry in the 1850s and ends where most his-
tories of Soviet cosmonautics begin.
Also, historians have placed so much emphasis on the efforts
of European and American inventors, such as the Rumanian
mathematician Oberth and the American physics professor Robert
Goddard, and engineers and directors, such as the German rocket
scientist Werner van Braun, that we forget the pre-Soviet roots of
Russian rocketry or assume it only had a primitive nature to its
beginnings. European and American nationalistic narratives have
certainly, to some extent, driven the hagiographical and iconic
descriptions of the early rocket designers. In France, for instance,
Robert Esnault-Pelterie was promoted as one of the founders of
astronautics as early as 1908.23
Tsiolkovskiis accomplishments may have been overempha-
sized by the Soviets after the 1917 Revolution for propagandistic
purposes, as the early achievements of pioneers in Western coun-
tries were boasted of in nationalist narratives. But while those
outside Russia underestimated Tsiolkovskii in the history of
cosmonautics, his countrymen before the revolution may also
have not promoted him well enough nationally or internationally.
Working in provincial Kaluga most of his life did not necessarily
help promote his ideas initially. Tsiolkovskii was a self-made phys-
icist and inventor, and he developed his ideas in a remote setting
outside the academic circles of the capital cities and academies.
However, this was not altogether unique in prerevolutionary times.

prelude.indd 6 5/18/2009 3:02:34 PM

 prelude 7

Russia had a growing tradition of those who worked in provincial

settings outside of the prestigious academic centers. Yet Tsiolkovk-
sii also developed his own methods and mode of discourse to
publicize his ideas on rocket flight that differed to some extent
from his predecessors. More than anyone who preceded him,
Tsiolkovskii believed in not only trying to invent working rockets,
but also teaching students and the public at large about the
greater significance of these inventions for humankind in order
to transcend national projects and boundries. In this sense, he
envisioned space flight in a broad manner for its scientific,
metaphysical, didactic, and even very practical ends. Probably no
other figure in the history of rocket design globally had such a
broad, impulsive vision to approach this topic eclectically as an
inventor, teacher, publicist, science-fiction writer, philosopher, and
humanist.

prelude.indd 7 5/18/2009 3:02:34 PM

prelude.indd 8 5/18/2009 3:02:34 PM
 INTRODUCTION
envisioning the cosmos
k. e. tsiolkovskii, russian public
culture, and the mythology of
soviet cosmonautics, 18571964

Today, Comrades, I firmly believe that what were my past dreams

interplanetary travel based solely on theoretical foundations will soon
become a practical reality. K. E. Tsiolkovskii, taped speech from
Kaluga in Red Square, Moscow, May Day, 1935

n the final year of his long life, Konstantin E.

I Tsiolkovskii was sanctioned by Josef Stalin and the

Communist Partys Central Committee to give a popular
speech from his provincial home in Kaluga, where he
researched and taught for the majority of his life. It was no ordi-
nary speech, because this canonized local hero would be speaking
on May Day, 1935, to those in attendance in Red Square (Commu-
nist dignitaries and luminaries, including Stalin); but his taped
speech was also broadcast throughout the former Soviet Union
(see figure 1). Stalin would use the figure of Tsiolkovskii to focus
on the superiority of Soviet technology over technology produced
under Western capitalism and its scientific system. However,
Tsiolkovskii, though he praised the Communist Party for its vision
and support, also used the occasion to promote his own ideas
about the possibility of space flight. This speech was given while
impressive Soviet airplanes flew above, and Tsiolkovskii described
them as steel dragonflies that were only a tip of a more profound
iceberg. The airplanes and dirigibles that flew over Red Square that
day in 1935 were an outgrowth of Tsiolkovskiis dreams since he
himself sketched and analyzed the potential of blimps, at an earlier
period, more than anyone in Russia. He also told Soviet citizens
about the future of interplanetary travel, his true passion, and
elaborated on how he spent over forty years studying rocket flight
and the earths gravitational forces. He believed the time would
come soon when humans would travel in space in new rocket
ships and change our conceptualization of the universe.1

introduction.indd 9 5/18/2009 3:02:31 PM

 10 introduction

Little has been written in the West on Konstantin Tsiolkovskii.2

On the other hand, Russian scholars have mostly focused on
Tsiolkovskii as a visionary technical genius and elaborated on the
narrow technical contributions he added to our understanding of
the possibility of rocket flight and space exploration.3 Recently,
some Russian specialists, in short newspaper editorials, have pro-
posed a radical alternative, that he was not a technical master of
his field and was solely constructed as a genius by the Bolsheviks
to mythologize Tsiolkovskii as a Soviet hero. To some extent, these
editorials have been constructed to cause controversy and demy-
thologize histories of Tsiolkovskii that were written during the
Communist era therefore, they have an agenda that supersedes
their analysis of his contribution to the history of space flight.
Though they indeed offer some truth, they also obscure in
a superficial, editorialized fashion the visionary foresight of
Tsiolkovskii and do not contextualize his futurist conceptual and
fictional writings in any utopian context of his times.4 Further-
more, these so-called revisionist interpretations keep historians
locked in a hermetically sealed debate on Tsiolkovskii and his
contributions: namely, Bolshevik myth versus real technical genius.
They thus make it difficult to offer more eclectic perspectives on
his life and how it fits into broader Russian historical and cultural
trends. Furthermore, unlike this study, they tend to view mythmak-
ing in the Soviet period as solely a top-down constructive process.
Many earlier Soviet accounts of Tsiolkovskiis life also fail to
construct eclectic enough arguments to place Tsiolkovskiis legacy
in a cultural and political context.5 Though Tsiolkovskii was indeed
a technical visionary, he was also a potential poster boy for Sta-
lins (and, later, Khrushchevs) vision of Soviet technical superiority
over the West. Even though the Bolsheviks and Stalin used Tsi-
olkovskii for their propaganda, he was also an agent of his own
destiny. Much like other scientists, he worked the system for his
own benefit as a conscious actor constructing his own identity
locally, nationally, and internationally. He also used the Soviet
bureaucracy, popular publishers, and the Soviet press to popularize
his ideas on space flight and rocketry. He therefore deftly under-
stood, as his own publicist, so to speak, how to manipulate a

introduction.indd 10 5/18/2009 3:02:32 PM

 Figure 1. Photograph taken at the central park in Kaluga, Russia, Autumn
1939, commemorating the death of K. E. Tsiolkovskii in September 1935. The
painting held by participants depicts the 1935 May Day festivities in Red
Square the day Tsiolkovskii gave a taped radio address to the nation on the
future of Soviet spaceflight. The speech was sanctioned by Joseph Stalin and the
Communist Partys Central Committee. Note Tsiolkovskiis profile circled by the
painter (in the bottom left corner of the painting) as he peers over Red Square.
Photograph from Russian Academy of Sciences Archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond
555, op.2, d.161, l.3.

introduction.indd 11 5/18/2009 3:02:32 PM

 12 introduction

variety of venues to popularize his futuristic visions of human

space travel. Too often it has been assumed that scientists were
either passive resisters of Stalinist dictates, retreating into their
laboratories and studies, or lifeless putty in the hands of the Soviet
political and bureaucratic elite.
Tsiolkovskii was an autodidact who had a visionary, scientific
perspective on not only rocket flight, but also the possibility of
colonizing space. He thus was part of a broader scientific and
Russian philosophical community that included N. Fedorov, a phi-
losopher, and V. I. Vernadskii, a geochemist, and their cohort of
Biocosmists.6 Tsiolkovskii can be cast as well in the traditions of
Russian futurism and modernism, yet in a detached manner from
his own laboratory in the provinces: a type of dissociated utopian
thinker, whose ideas, though not intellectual circles and paths,
intersected broadly with Russian intellectual elites in the capital
cities. His life thus also provides Russian historians with a window
into how provincial educators and scientists made contributions
to Russian intellectual life outside the major centers and provided
a type of local nexus for the spread of popular scientific and tech-
nical education. His story thus also leaves us with a case study of
how the imperial and Soviet scientific elite co-opted and simulta-
neously ostracized provincial, less-distinguished, scientists.
A focus merely on the debates regarding his technical genius
also obscures our understanding of Tsiolkovskiis ritualized, anthro-
pological importance in early Soviet culture. A litany of rocket
scientists and journalists made pilgrimages to his home in Kaluga
to see firsthand the laboratory belonging to the father of cosmo-
nautics. Many of these scientists, mentioned in this book, were
actually inspired as children by Tsiolkovskiis science fiction. In
fact, his writings were inspirational for the first generation of prac-
tical rocket scientists, engineers, and designers. Thus Tsiolkovskiis
life offers us an understanding of the process of scientific inspira-
tion and how it, on the one hand, generated passionate engineers
and, on the other hand, was used by the Soviet regime for pro-
paganda. Many rocket scientists even defined themselves, in a
generational sense, as a by-product of Tsiolkovskiis vision. Acade-
mician Boris Chertok, the engineer and deputy director (under

introduction.indd 12 5/18/2009 3:02:32 PM

 introduction 13

Sergei Korolev) of the early Soviet rocket program, in his memoirs

recanted a story about how mythic Tsiolkovskii actually was,
despite the debates about his real scientific contributions to rock-
etry: Of the first missile decade, the last three years were certainly
the most interesting in terms of science and engineering. The
people who joined the missile programs during 195456 to a great
extent determined the subsequent development of our cosmonau-
tics program. While these people were still relatively young, some-
ones quip caught their fancy. According to our personal history
forms, our personnel fall into one of two categories: they are
either Tsiolkovskiis best students or individuals whose youth
isnt their main shortcoming.7 In essence, Chertoks generational
allusion highlighted how much Tsiolkovskii was situated (if not
revered) as a referential locus for his cohort of rocket specialists.
Lastly, Tsiolkovskiis work had important literary and semiotic
significance, because he placed his scientific theories at various
times in the context of his imaginative science fiction novels. An
analysis of the discursive elements of these stories, in addition to
their content, provides an understanding of his larger goals of
scientific popularization. Though he was able to work the Soviet
educational bureaucracy for meager funding, he never really pro-
fessed his true political support for Bolshevism. Though he rhetori-
cally cast his identity in line with the CP (and vaguely Marxist
philosophy), particularly thanking the party for its support, his
statements are even more valuable for judging how scientists fash-
ioned themselves in public. Within this context, his life story can
explicate much about how Soviet citizens created their public
identity, and this work thus hopes to fit into the recent debates
on fashioning the self in the Soviet sphere.8
Tsiolkovskiis public legacy is complex since it was both created
from above while cultivated by the man himself from below. In
essence, there was a kernel of individual identity, so to speak,
wrapped in the husk of the Soviet mythology. At several junctures
in his long life, these divergent identities intersected when a
symbiosis between state and individual occurred. While his frank
handwritten diary (or autobiographical notes) distanced himself
from the scientific establishment of tsarist Russia, he never fully

introduction.indd 13 5/18/2009 3:02:32 PM

 14 introduction

accepted his politicized role as a Soviet visionary and, therefore,

founding father of a unique type of Soviet cosmonautics.
Ultimately Tsiolkovskii was, however, co-opted by the Stalin and
Khrushchev regimes as a type of poster boy for the glorification
of Soviet scientific inventors and heroes. On the other hand, foreign
specialists in rocketry only gradually recognized his visionary
work. Furthermore, he remained until his death in 1935 committed
to working in provincial Kaluga, only corresponding by letter with
foreign and Soviet rocket scientists alike. Both a local and a national
hero, his life can thus offer the researcher of modern Russian
culture and science a chance to frame multiple identities in early
Soviet history and to understand the ramifications of his concepts,
his utopian drawings of the cosmos, and his literary imagination
with regard to space colonization.

introduction.indd 14 5/18/2009 3:02:32 PM

 BEGINNINGS, TEACHING

SCIENCE IN A PROVINCIAL

1
CONTEXT TSIOLKOVSKIIS

YEARS IN THE RUSSIAN

LOCALE, 18571917

Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii was born on September 17,

1857, in the Russian village of Izhevskoye, Spassky District, in
Riazanskaia Province. His mother, Maria Ivanova Yumasheva, was a
Russian of Tatar background, and known to be intelligent and hard
working, and his father, Eduard Tsiolkovskii (182080), a Pole from
Lithuania, had been a forest ranger by trade since 1846. His mother
stretched her husbands meager salary to feed and clothe her family
in the best possible manner. However, her husband was discharged
from his position in approximately 1867 and became a clerk in
Riazan. It was rumored that his father was fired because of his
antitsarist sentiment and his controversial politics. However, later
in his life, Eduard Tsiolkovskii became a respected teacher and then
a government official, so he probably never harbored the radical
tendencies of other leftist, provincial intellectuals of his time.1
The family moved in 1867 to Viatka, where young Konstantin
became fond of the Viatka River. He was a lively child and was
nicknamed by his mother with the Russian diminutive ptitsa (little
bird). Later the next winter, in 1868, at approximately ten years old,
Tsiolkovskii contracted scarlet fever. He had adored going ice-skat-
ing on the Viatka River and local ponds, but fell in one day and
caught a terrible cold that led to scarlet fever. He became very ill
and almost lost his hearing. His doting mother desperately tried to
help the boy continue his studies, enrolling him in the Viatka Gym-
nasium; however, his three years of classroom study between 1867
and 1870 were very difficult. His deafness, unfortunately, became
a serious impediment to finishing classroom and institutional
studies. At the age of thirteen, in 1870, his mother died, and he
shortly thereafter dropped out of high school.2

c01.indd 15 5/18/2009 3:01:36 PM

 16 chapter 1

In his diary, Tsiolkovskii described the period from 1868 to 1871

as a very sad and dark period in his lifetime: I often became and
behaved awkwardly among other children my age, and among
people in general. My deafness, due to my scarlet fever, compelled
me however to read and daydream endlessly. I felt isolated, even
humiliated as an outcast from society. This caused me to withdraw
deep within myself, to pursue great goals so as to deserve the
approval and respect of others and not be despised by my peers.3
His personal tragedy seemed to have made Tsiolkovskii more intro-
verted and interested in proving himself as an inventor and an
abstract thinker to the larger scientific community in the estab-
lished institutions of Moscow and St. Petersburg. He believed his
past studies were like a dark cloud, and that in the future he
would have to become self-motivated, driven, and a self-taught
scientist.4
For the next four to six years, Tsiolkovskii continued to have
medical troubles that forced him to teach himself scientific prin-
ciples at home. From an early age, he became very adept at making
scientific models of machines and showed a great interest in
outer space and science fiction. He considered himself very pro-
ficient in mathematics, chemistry, physics, and mechanics. He
even occasionally tutored local schoolchildren in these subjects to
bring in money for his family. After 1870, since he was no longer
able to attend school, he studied first with his brothers textbooks,
and then from his fathers personal home science library. At age
fourteen, he described in his diary how he became interested in
physics and inventions and tried to construct his first aerostat out
of paper.5
In 1873, at the young age of sixteen, Tsiolkovskii came to Moscow,
where his father had sent him to study independently in the hope
of possibly entering technical school. He knew no one in the old
capital city, was dressed poorly, and was confused by his first
impressions of this metropolis. Tsiolkovskiis reminiscences remind
us of his contemporaries who also kept diary accounts of their first
impressions of Moscow. Semen I. Kanatchikov, whose famous
memoir documents his travels from a peasant village to urban
Moscow, also reflected on his ambivalence toward the new city,

c01.indd 16 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 beginnings, teaching science in a provincial context 17

both awesome and exciting as well as overwhelming, if not

depressing.6
Tsiolkovskiis father sent him between ten and fifteen rubles a
month to survive on, but Tsiolkovskii used much of the money to
buy books, chemicals for experiments, and building materials for
inventions. Tsiolkovskii said he would use his allowance to pur-
chase glass retorts and other equipment as well as sulfuric acid
and other chemicals for home experiments. He said that he was
able to survive at times on ninety kopeks a month, eating dark
bread and water for dinner frequently, so he could save his meager
allowance for other purchases.7
He rented a room in Moscow from a laundress, who did the
washing for a wealthy man living in Moscow. The mans daughter
heard of the eccentric student Tsiolkovskii and wrote him a letter.
They began a mutual correspondence, but the girls father broke it
off, exemplifying the class barriers that aristocratic Russians still
surrounded themselves with. Tsiolkovskii eventually, however,
married a woman he met in Moscow, Varvara Yevgrafovna Soko-
lova, who would become devoted to her family and especially
respectful of Tsiolkovskiis work and eccentric inventions.8
Because his hearing was impaired, he was forced to teach
himself science in Russias national library under the guidance of
a well-known philosopher of the time, N. F. Fedorov. Fedorov influ-
enced Tsiolkovskii to consider the possibility of space flight and
inhabiting other worlds.9 Tsiolkovskii would later join a group of
scientists who saw themselves as Fedorovs disciples, amateur phi-
losophers called the Biocosmists. This group included the very
famous geologist and geochemist Vladimir Vernadskii. The Biocos-
mists believed that through interplanetary travel, humans could
find immortality and a quasi salvation. Although it was a bizarre
philosophy, it emphasized their belief in the transformative power
that travel through outer space would have on the human race.
The Biocosmists also included Leonid Krasin, designer of the Lenin
mausoleum, and Valerian Muraviev, editor of the journal at the
Central Institute of Labor in Moscow and a devout follower of both
Frederick Taylor and Fedorov. The Biocosmists could aptly be
described as millenarians and utopians, for they had a belief in the

c01.indd 17 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 18 chapter 1

unbounded ability of man to transform nature and explore and

colonize the cosmos.10
Tsiolkovskii shared Fedorovs particular worry that the Earth
was overcrowded, and they both believed the only solution to
relieve this Malthusian pressure was to explore and colonize
space.11 In the 1870s and 1880s, Fedorov was known for mentoring
informally in libraries a number of students, many of whom were
impoverished like Tsiolkovskii. This enabled Tsiolkovskii to tem-
porarily come into contact in Moscow with a group of students
interested in scientific and philosophical issues similar to his.12
These informal study groups and circles (kruzhki) were critical to
the birth of new scientific ideas in Russia.13 They were particularly
important to those students who, like Tsiolkovskii, for a variety of
reasons, could not attend formal educational institutions of higher
learning in tsarist Russia. Thus these scientific and philosophical
kruzhki had a generative value, to breed new scientific ideas, and
a more utilitarian value for nontraditional students, to analyze
complex themes outside of the traditional halls of education.
They can also be seen as venues for scientific contacts, thereby
providing nontraditional, provincial students access to individuals
and ideas they would have normally received in higher educational
institutions.
A number of Soviet-era journalists and space historians have
argued that Fedorov had a tremendous influence on the young and
impressionable Tsiolkovskii. According to V. Lvov, Tsiolkovskii
learned about the possibility of space flight from his multiple con-
versations with Fedorov in Moscow at the national library (later
called the Lenin Library), and Lvov believed that Tsiolkovskii
was one of Fedorovs greatest and most avid disciples.14 Victor
Shklovskii, a journalist writing articles on space history in the
1970s, argued that Fedorov saw Tsiolkovskii as the perfect person
to popularize notions of space travel among the Russian public. In
one of Shklovskiis articles in the widely read Soviet-era journal
Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Journal), he quoted Fedorov as saying:
Im going to do mathematics with you, and youll help mankind
build rockets so that we will finally be able to know more than
earth and so that we can see our earth from afar traveling in the

c01.indd 18 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 beginnings, teaching science in a provincial context 19

heavens. People need a distant look, because only those people

who are thinking about the future are real and present.15
Though Tsiolkovskii was clearly a type of millenarian and
utopian (much like his fellow Biocosmists), his connection with
Fedorov has been somewhat overstated. To begin with, Tsiolkovskii,
mentions very little in his diaries and writings about Fedorovs
influence on his thinking. Indeed, after he left Moscow in 1877,
Tsiolkovskii mentions Fedorov hardly at all. Though Fedorov indeed
mentored many unconventional students such as Tsiolkovskii, his
mentorship may have been less influential than the intellectual
circles and currents of thought in Moscow that Fedorov brought
Tsiolkovskii into contact with. Some of the individual Biocosmists,
Tsiolkovskiis contemporaries, would eventually go on to occupy
important scholarly positions or institutional posts in the post-
1917 Soviet era. As mentioned briefly above, they included the
renowned academy geochemist V. I. Vernadskii, Valerian Muraviev
(an important leader of the Central Institute of Labor in Moscow),
and the controversial Bolshevik organizer and economic adminis-
trator Leonid Krasin, to state a few. These Biocosmists continued
to spread and popularize not only Fedorovs philosophical notions,
but also Tsiolkovskiis unique ideas and visions of space travel.16
Regardless of the debates around Fedorovs influence on
Tsiolkovskiis future ruminations on space flight, Tsiolkovskii left
Moscow confident he could begin his own independent experi-
ments, popularize his unique ideas on the cosmos, and teach basic
sciences in high school. By 1877 Tsiolkovskii was well prepared to
teach arithmetic, physics, and geometry, subjects he had studied
quite diligently in Moscow. In 1878 Tsiolkovskii returned home
with the hope of eventually teaching the natural sciences in dis-
trict primary schools near Kaluga. In 1879 he passed the extramu-
ral courses to teach arithmetic and geometry in secondary schools,
and in January of 1880 he was placed in Borovsk where he would
stay for twelve years to teach science, until 1891. He was hired
primarily to teach arithmetic and geometry at the Borovsk District
School in the province of Kaluga near where he came from origi-
nally. He eventually expanded his teaching curriculum to teach
physics and other advanced courses, in aerodynamics even.17

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 20 chapter 1

In the Soviet era, at least, much has been written on Tsiolkovskii

as a technical scientist and inventor, yet very little has been ana-
lyzed regarding his place as a provincial educator. Furthermore, it
was part of Tsiolkovskiis greater vision to popularize ideas on
space flight and rocket flight through a variety of means, including
his educational lectures and popular science fiction. Tsiolkovskiis
role as a science pedagogue has therefore been overlooked. The
local educational sources, which documented the activities of
well-liked teachers in the late tsarist era, illuminate Tsiolkovskiis
teaching record as exemplary. Tsiolkovskii clearly made an impres-
sion on school children, and even young aspiring scientists who
read his work from afar and would later dream of becoming rocket
scientists in their own right. Therefore one can see his classroom
and public educational activities as having a metameaning: a cata-
lytic inspirational purpose to generate future rocket scientists.
Tsiolkovskii tried to unite his teaching methods with his experi-
mentation so that students could learn practical applications
of certain theories. He was a firm believer in uniting basic school-
work with practical science experiments and was known for invit-
ing his students over to his home to see his various inventions and
electrical machines. Locals continuously witnessed Tsiolkovskii
bicycling or walking in nature with his students while he discussed
basic scientific principles with them after school (see figure 2). He
had designed tin listening tubes so that he could hear better.
Purportedly, some locals, those unfamiliar with his ideas, would
see him in public with his students (with this long tube and funnel
to his ear) and thought he was a village crank. But official school
records and student memoirs seem to tell a very different story
indeed.18
It was not uncommon, in the late imperial period in Russia, for
local school inspectors to visit teachers classes and evaluate their
curriculum. As underdeveloped as scientific education may have
been in the Russian provinces, there still was a professional cadre
of inspectors (and a relatively organized administrative apparatus)
who could at least pedagogically evaluate and comment on the
performance of teachers.19 Though understaffed, this educational
inspectorate, which usually sent few inspectors to provincial

c01.indd 20 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 beginnings, teaching science in a provincial context 21

capital cities, was aided by a variety of educational officials in

gleaning knowledge of local school conditions. Ben Eklof, however,
has argued that educational inspectors, who generally lived in
provincial capitals and had much firsthand experience, still had to
rely on others for more information and help in carrying out deci-
sions regarding local schools and curriculum.20
The local educational records documented by school inspectors
and superintendents portray Tsiolkovskii as an enthusiastic teacher
who was adept at conveying both fundamental concepts in the
physical sciences and his visions of exploring space to his pupils.
In 1888 I. M. Ladozhin, the Borovsk school supervisor, in his notes
on the yearly activities of teachers, mentioned Tsiolkovskii as a
superb teacher who explained complicated scientific ideas to stu-
dents in a simple, tangible manner. In 1889 I. A. Liubimov, a local
school supervisor, added to this characterization of Tsiolkovskii,
describing him as someone who used very practical methods to
catch the attention of his students. Liubimov was impressed by
how Tsiolkovskii familiarized himself with the latest movements
in European mathematics and physics and imparted this to his
students in distilled forms.21
On February 4, 1892, Tsiolkovskii was transferred to teach arith-
metic in the Kaluga local school district. The directors of the Kaluga
province school board (P. A. Rozhdestvenskii and D. S. Unkovskii)
characterized Tsiolkovskii, in written reports the following year, as
a gifted academic, with a high degree of professionalism exempli-
fying a specialist in mathematics, and providing clear exact expla-
nations for his students.22 Tsiolkovskii firmly believed students
could learn from one another in the sciences by delineating certain
mathematical problems on the board in class, since he specifically
saw arithmetic (or mathematics) as a science that needed to be
taught visually. He also pursued learning activities that were group
oriented, where groups of students solved mathematical problems
within the context of a division of labor based on their specific
abilities. He pedagogically believed this would enhance the learn-
ing environment in the classroom by encouraging students to
choose scientific tasks that they could each handle better as they
learned from one another.23

c01.indd 21 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 Figure 2. Photo (1932) of Tsiolkovskii biking home near his laboratory on the
banks of the Oka River in Kaluga, Russia. In prerevolutionary times, he was
seen biking home from school and talking with students constantly. Locals
sometimes referred to him as the village chudak (crank). Photograph from
Russian Academy of Sciences Archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op.2,
d.136, l.8.

c01.indd 22 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 beginnings, teaching science in a provincial context 23

From the winter of 1892 until his death in 1935, Tsiolkovskii

would remain in provincial Kaluga. Kaluga was a remote town of
provincial Russia, some two hundred kilometers from Moscow on
the banks of the Oka River. Tsiolkovskii lived in a small house on
Georgievskaia Street that also served as his laboratory. He often
took long, pensive walks and bike rides among the beautiful oak
and pine groves along the river. He spent much of his teaching
salary on his experiments and equipment and thus placed much
pressure on his family. They often only had bread and vegetables
from their garden for dinner.24
Life in Kaluga was not easy for the Tsiolkovskii family on a
teachers salary. Their daughter Maria, born in 1894, remembered
how difficult domestic life was for her mother. She pointed out in
her memoirs that her mother had a very tight budget for their
material needs. Her mother sewed many of their shirts and blouses,
for four boys and three girls, and even made them winter coats.
She also remembers her father being very strict about spending
his meager salary.25 In general, Maria found her father to be frugal,
and with us economically, father was very stern, and he never
liked to change his decision once it was made firmly.26
The weather made it even harder on the struggling family,
because winters were far from mild in provincial Kaluga. Their
house, still standing today, was down the hill near the banks of the
Oka River. Tsiolkovskiis wife remembers several cold winters,
where ice would stay on the river well until April. Several times,
she recalls, the Oka would suddenly thaw in late April, and some-
times they were forced to leave their home as the banks of the river
rose quickly.27 This deluge unleashed from the banks of Russian
rivers in April was a perennial problem for homes particularly built
out of wood in provincial settings.
After seven years of living in Kaluga, on February 5, 1899, Tsi-
olkovskii became a teacher of primarily mathematics and physics
in a local Diocesan church school for girls (see figure 3). These
particular schools in provincial Russia were mainly for the children
of the Orthodox clergy. By 1900, with twenty years of teaching
service, he was given a supplemental, honorary pension from the
regional school district in addition to his salary at the church

c01.indd 23 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 24 chapter 1

school. This pension enabled him to carry out more experiments

in his home laboratory. He taught at the Diocesan school until the
beginning of the Russian civil war in 1918.28
Though it was a girls religious school, he was given remarkable
latitude to teach in the natural sciences. He single-handedly
organized a physics department at the Diocesan school, where
students could conduct rudimentary physical experiments in a
laboratory setting. He taught basic courses in applied mathe-
matics and also introductory courses in chemistry. In his chemistry
courses he spent much time, as noted in his lesson plans, on
the chemical properties of metals, atomic weights, and the
newly devised periodic table of elements. In his physics courses,
his lesson plans showed a concentration on explaining gravita-
tional forces and the basic properties of matter and physical
dynamics.29
Many girls who attended the school, and were students of
Tsiolkovskiis, wrote down their reminiscences years later after the
1917 Revolution. These recollections either ended up in the archives
at the Museum of Cosmonautics or were published in popular col-
lections of memoirs. One student writing about her class with
Tsiolkovskii noted that at first she was scared by the thought of
learning physics, a discipline she thought was only taught at the
university level. This student, A. I. Spasskaia, later recalled how
many of the girls at first did not pay attention, but Tsiolkovskiis
group method of learning brought them together in a very atten-
tive and collegial fashion. She also noted none of us could possibly
dream that we would be taught basic physics and mathematics by
someone in a local provincial school who would later gain such
an international reputation.30 Another student from Kaluga, A. A.
Kubriavtseva, who attended the Diocesan school, remembered how
Tsiolkovskii used examples of airplanes and aerostats to explain
physical principles. She and some of her classmates, though, had
never even heard of airplanes able to fly into the air, but she
remembers finding these examples practical, as well as exciting
and futuristic.31
Representatives of central and regional educational authorities
extensively evaluated Tsiolkovskiis classes when he previously

c01.indd 24 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 beginnings, teaching science in a provincial context 25

taught at provincial schools. The ecclesiastical council of arch-

priests of the Russian Orthodox Church also sent their own inspec-
tors to evaluate the classes of teachers in religious schools such as
those from the Diocesan order. One such inspector, Aleksei Kazan-
skii, commented extensively on the classes of K. E. Tsiolkovskii. He
argued in his report, dated September 19, 1907, to both the local
school board in Kaluga and the archpriests educational council
that Tsiolkovskiis classes in mathematics and physics were carried
out in a professional manner, giving students excellent practical
examples of scientific abstractions. What is most interesting was
Kazanskiis comment that it would be impossible to discern that
Tsiolkovskii did not actually receive a higher educational degree.
(He passed the extramural exams to become a teacher only via
correspondence.)32
Up through the end of the First World War, Tsiolkovskii contin-
ued to teach in the Diocesan school for girls in Kaluga. Tsiolkovskiis
classes, even during this tumultuous time, were still evaluated on
a yearly basis by educational authorities. Ioann Protopopov, a rep-
resentative of the council of ecclesiastical archpriests, visited
Tsiolkovskiis classes at the Diocesan school during the First
World War. In an evaluation dated August 12, 1916, Protopopov was
impressed with both the concrete, accurate examples Tsiolkovskii
used in his science classes as well as the basic abstract concepts
that he imparted to students. Protopopov argued that Tsiolkovskiis
methods had a clearly beneficial influence on his students
study habits. Of course, the representative had to also note that
Tsiolkovskii appeared to be a teacher of deep spiritual beliefs,
though this was an odd comment given Tsiolkovskiis strong sci-
entific worldview and belief in a type of millenarianism.33 In
general, however, the evaluative records may be interesting evi-
dence for how local ecclesiastical school inspectors valued good
scientific teaching in its schools. It is even more fascinating at a
time when the church hierarchy and theologians were disturbed
by the incremental spread of evolutionary curricula in the teaching
of biology in primary and secondary secular schools.34
During the First World War, Tsiolkovskii even put together his
own pedagogical, or advisory, brochures for young students. These

c01.indd 25 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 Figure 3. Photo (1903) of teachers at the local Kaluga Diocesan School for
Girls. Tsiolkovskii is standing in the second row, second from the left. He began
teaching there in the natural sciences in 1899. Photograph from Russian
Academy of Sciences Archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555,op.2, d.141, l.3.

c01.indd 26 5/18/2009 3:01:37 PM

 beginnings, teaching science in a provincial context 27

brochures served a variety of explicit and implicit purposes. On the

surface, they were guides for self-education for young students
to supplement their reading, or for adults to learn independently
about a particular scientific subject. On the other hand, they also
served Tsiolkovskiis popularizing goals to spread scientific ideas
to the Russian public at large. They also offered didactic prescrip-
tions on how to study and to what purpose one should direct
scientific discoveries and knowledge. Furthermore, this method of
discourse, implicit in these brochures, would serve as a paradigm
for Tsiolkovskii and his editorial supporters to spread knowledge
of space and air flight to the Russian reader in popular form. Many
times he published these works himself in Kaluga, at first with the
help of local regional studies societies and later on from his own
primitive press he developed in the 1920s and 1930s with funds
from local benefactors. In 1916 he published one such widely dis-
tributed pamphlet in provincial Kaluga entitled Grief and Genius,
in which he urged young students to study hard and apply their
scientific knowledge to useful social ends.35
These pamphlets were not the only form of public educational
discourse that Tsiolkovskii became involved in during the early
twentieth century. During and just after the First World War, he
gave public scientific lectures on a host of topics that may have
been interesting to local residents and institutions. Local regional
studies groups helped sponsor Tsiolkovskiis public science lec-
tures. These societies were involved in supporting local scholars
and popularizing scientific ideas. One such group that was
Tsiolkovskiis patron at the time was entitled the Kaluga Society
for the Study of Nature and Local History. The societies involved
in regional knowledge (kraevedenie) were especially dedicated to
spreading knowledge about the local environment, local economy
and general utilitarian scientific knowledge. They funded a number
of Tsiolkovskiis popular scientific lectures on a variety of topics,
but mainly those dealing with flight, space travel, and astronomy.
In April 1914, Tsiolkovskii gave one of these lectures on the topic
of a metal aerostat that he was designing (see figure 4). These lec-
tures did much to popularize his ideas on air flight and wet the
appetite of an eager public fascinated by the prospects of humans

c01.indd 27 5/18/2009 3:01:38 PM

 28 chapter 1

traveling in airplanes and spaceships. Provincial Russians were as

eager, on some level, as cosmopolitan Muscovites to absorb the
latest ideas on new technologies and scientific discoveries regard-
ing both their immediate and distant surroundings.
During the 191617 school year, besides teaching at the Diocesan
school, he supplemented his earnings by teaching part-time at a
local Kaluga high school. After the February and October revolu-
tions, he relied on his meager pension from the local school board,
until in October of 1918 he began teaching at Soviet school #6 in
Kaluga, at the secondary level. He taught physics, math, chemistry,
and astronomy until he retired from teaching completely on
October 15, 1921. Between 1921 and 1935, the Soviet government
gave him a small honorary stipend to go along with his educational
pension, which enabled him to survive with difficulty until his
death in 1935.36
Tsiolkovskii, in his diaries, expressed a sense of liberation after
he moved to the local Soviet school between 1918 and 1921.37 He
was quoted in the local press as saying, I am deeply fulfilled by
the freedom of teaching in the local Soviet school, and the com-
radeship engendered by the student body. Though he may have
honestly felt that or was pandering to his new Soviet benefactor,
he did not seem, at least on the surface, very constrained in teach-
ing the natural sciences at the Diocesan school.38 However, at the
Soviet school, he continued to develop an extensive curriculum in
physics. His basic physics course dealt with a variety of topics, such
as cosmology and astronomy, the basics of thermodynamics, radi-
ology, the liquefaction of gases, the basics of hydrostatics, and a
host of other topics sophisticated for this level of schooling.39
Regardless of his noninstitutional educational background,
Tsiolkovskii was clearly a thoughtful and conscientious teacher of
the natural sciences. He brought an eclectic perspective to class-
room teaching, forcing students to understand the fundamentals
and ponder the multivariegated applications of the physical sci-
ences. Furthermore, he used a variety of nontraditional means
outside of the classroom to popularize not only his pedagogical
techniques, but also his more visionary perspective on spaceflight
and the cosmos in general. Soon his popularization and public

c01.indd 28 5/18/2009 3:01:38 PM

 Figure 4. Photo (1913) of Tsiolkovskiis aerostat (metallic airships) models
leaning against the fence in his backyard that was directly below his workshop
and laboratory in his Kaluga home. Photograph from Russian Academy of
Sciences Archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op.2, d.124, l.32.

c01.indd 29 5/18/2009 3:01:38 PM

 30 chapter 1

educational activities would be simultaneously sponsored and cul-

tivated by a host of local societies, editors, and established scien-
tific figures from central Soviet institutions. When Tsiolkovskii
retired from teaching in the 1920s, he became more active in public
scientific endeavors, while others helped him cultivate that pursuit
while they molded his image as well. The 1920s in Soviet Russia
was a decade when both the government and informal institutions
were active in promoting the sciences in public. Tsiolkovskii natu-
rally fit into the role of science popularizer in the decade following
the Russian Revolution of 1917.

c01.indd 30 5/18/2009 3:01:39 PM

 DREAMING OF THE

COSMOS EARLY

2
SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL

EXPERIMENTATION IN

PRE-1917 KALUGA, RUSSIA

There has been much conjecture on when Konstan-

tin Tsiolkovskii first began writing scientific papers or theoretical
pieces on rocketry. While living in Riazan between 1878 and 1879,
he sketched in a notebook humans living in outer space, with
mathematical annotations. These sketches, collectively known
later as Pages from a Young Mans Notebook, were assembled by
scholars and placed in the Russian Academy of Sciences archive.
It was in connection with these early drawings, done between the
ages of twenty-one and twenty-two, that he would later experi-
ment in Kaluga with a rotary machine and subsequently ascertain
the effect of gravity on living organisms. He made several sketches
of future apparatuses he hoped to construct in envisaged experi-
mental settings.1 These images and sketches were also a means or
method by which Tsiolkovskii could physically visualize and envi-
sion his scientific ideas. They were an active medium, so to speak,
by which the inventor could play out ideas for later scientific
research (see figures 58). Unlike his published science fiction
stories, which he also believed were media to develop new ideas,
these drawings were more private ruminations on future research
projects. All the same, they offer us a window into the mechanics
of scientific invention as an evolutionary thought process.
Three years later, in 1882, he sent an unpublished manuscript
entitled On the Theoretical Mechanics of the Living Organism, to
the Russian Physical-Chemical Society (RPCS). This paper was an
early analysis of the effect of gravity on human beings. A distin-
guished member of the RPCS, I. M. Sechenov, the noted neurophy-
siologist, saw great theoretical potential and scientific talent in
Tsiolkovskii. Tsiolkovskii had sent the RPCS two earlier papers:

c02.indd 31 5/18/2009 3:01:44 PM

 32 chapter 2

Theory of Gas (1881), which analyzed the kinetic theory of gases,

and The Graphical Depictions of Sensations, which included
basic mathematical evaluations of human sensations. These
papers, though not original scientific findings, earned Tsiolkovskii
some respect (for his industrious and scientific capabilities) with
the members of the RPCS in St. Petersburg.2
Yet it was truly Tsiolkovskiis unpublished 1883 manuscript,
entitled Free Space, which established his reputation as one of
the first Russians to theorize on bodies in motion in space. In this
piece, Tsiolkovskii examined the most elementary phenomenon of
mechanical motion in space in the absence of gravitational forces
and without the resistance of any medium. Tsiolkovskii believed
motion in free space was impossible without the loss of matter,
and thus the only possible mode of propulsion in airless space
would be the reaction of particles of matter ejected from a body
(that is, a rocket). In this classic essay, Tsiolkovskii also proposed
an elementary gyroscopic device for stabilizing a flying machine.
He also postulated, on the most rudimentary level, what the con-
ditions would be for plants and animals to survive in interstellar
space.3 Tsiolkovskii did not give, however, any quantitative compu-
tations for any of his analysis, and all his conclusions in this piece
were based on qualitative references from the law of conservation
of momentum for closed mechanical systems. All the same, even
famous Soviet rocket specialists, such as Sergei Korolev, believed
that this early theorizing had great value. Korolev argued in a 1957
speech on the centennial of Tsiolkovskiis birth that in his 1883
manuscript, Tsiolkovskiis desire to utilize the reaction effect of
exhaust jets for moving in free space was formulated in a definite
and clear-cut fashion.4 Korolev believed that Tsiolkovskii was fully
aware of the parameters of reactive motion since he understood
even back in 1883 that curvilinear uniform motion or rectilinear
nonuniform motion is associated, in free space, with a continuous
loss of matter.5
During the decade after the publication of Free Space, Tsi-
olkovskii started to construct wind tunnels in his laboratory in
Kaluga (see figure 9). He tried to establish, with his primitive inven-
tion, a free current of air so he could then test a variety of objects

c02.indd 32 5/18/2009 3:01:45 PM

 Figure 5. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1878) of a variety of jet-propelled
machines, which he entitled Homage to Inventors of Jet-Propelled Machines.
Drawing from Russian Academy of Sciences Archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond
555 (uncatalogued collection of drawings).

c02.indd 33 5/18/2009 3:01:45 PM

 Figure 6. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1878) showing how, in his view, a falling
projectile has no weight. He wrote that with this drawing he attempted to
show how, for instance, with a carriage that is just starting to move (or is
about to stop), a horizontal gravity is produced, which added to the terrestrial
gravity, resulting in an inclined relative gravity. He believed, as illustrated, that
the same takes place in the cannon ball ejected by a horizontally mounted gun
that he drew here in the lower left of the figure. Drawing from Russian
Academy of Sciences Archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555 (uncatalogued
collection of drawings).

c02.indd 34 5/18/2009 3:01:45 PM

 Figure 7. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1879) showing his own depiction of
phenomena occurring with a cannon ball moving through a bow-shaped gun
and on various swings. Drawing from Russian Academy of Sciences Archive in
Moscow, ARAN, fond 555 (uncatalogued collection of drawings).

c02.indd 35 5/18/2009 3:01:46 PM

 Figure 8. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1879) attempting to show how, in
gravity-free space, curvilinear motion produces relative gravity proportional to
the arc curvature and square of the carriages velocity. Drawing from Russian
Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555 (uncatalogued
collection of drawings).

c02.indd 36 5/18/2009 3:01:47 PM

 dreaming of the cosmos 37

floating in a medium that simulated artificially air-current resis-

tance (see figure 10). He published the findings of this air resistance
research in 1898 in the Russian journal Herald of Experimental Physics
and Elementary Mathematics. The article in the journal was entitled
Air Pressure on Surfaces Introduced into an Artificial Air Flow, and
was based on his artificial air-current resistance experiments in
Kaluga.6
Because of the interest generated by his article and wind-resis-
tance experiments, Tsiolkovskii submitted in September 1899 a
request to the Russian Academy of Sciences for further research
funding. Academician M. A. Rykachev reviewed the proposal favor-
ably for the physico-mathematical department of the academy,
and Tsiolkovskii was allotted funding to expand on these air resis-
tance studies between 1899 and 1900 with a slightly larger device
that he also invented. Though his reports were never published in
the academys proceedings, a number of smaller publications
appeared in a variety of journals such as Science Review.7
Between 1900 and 1903, Tsiolkovskii continued his various prim-
itive experiments on wind-resistance, gravity, and a host of other
topics. It is during these years that he developed mathematically
his famous formula or equation that established an analytical
relationship between the rocket speed at any instant, the speed of
gas exiting from the nozzle of the engine, and the mass of the
rocket and mass of consumed explosives. At this time, Tsiolkovskii
also argued that the rate of motion in empty space was theoreti-
cally unlimited, and depended solely on the exhaust velocity of
gas particles and the ratio of the mass of explosives (propellants)
to the mass of the rocket. According to Tsiolkovskiis formula,
increased rocket velocities would derive from increasing the
exhaust velocity of gas particles and the relative (not absolute)
supply of rocket propellant. In the history of rocketry, Tsiolkovskii
was one of the earliest to theorize on obtaining these types of
cosmic velocities, thereby directing more qualified engineers inves-
tigating this field in the future to new directions.8
Though some of his other postulates and theories on rocke-
try might have less scientific durability, his famous equation
seems to have had more long-term resonance among historians of

c02.indd 37 5/18/2009 3:01:48 PM

 Figure 9. Photo (1913) of Tsiolkovskiis workshop and laboratory located above
his house in Kaluga featured are his lathe and a variety of primitive rotary
machine models. Photograph from Russian Academy of Sciences archive in
Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 135, l. 13.

Figure 10. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (1898) for his Air Pressure article
published that year. This was a diagram of his installation for future
experiments with air resistance. The inscriptions on the drawing on the top
from left to right are flow exit, axis of flow, air flow; and on the bottom, air
blower. Drawing from Russian Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN,
fond 555 (uncatalogued drawing collection).

c02.indd 38 5/18/2009 3:01:48 PM

 dreaming of the cosmos 39

technology and physicists themselves. This may be his most lasting

contribution scientifically and technologically. Roald Z. Sagdeev,
Mikhail Gorbachevs science advisor and internationally renowned
physicist, also claims that Tsiolkovskiis equation is probably
his most lasting scientific achievement. Sagdeev discussed in his
memoirs how Tsiolkovskii, from a provincial backwater in Kaluga,
invented the principle of multistage rockets, and considered con-
structions of orbital spacecraft, which are the prototypical basis of
todays space stations. Yet Sagdeev recounts how he and his gen-
eration of young physicists mostly gained enormous inspirational
quality from Tsiolkovskiis vision of spaceflight. Sagdeevs parents
were even there, marching in Red Square, on May Day 1935 when
Tsiolkovskiis famous speech was transmitted across eleven time
zones in the USSR.9 It is this inspirational quality, if not populariza-
tion of space travel, that is Tsiolkovskiis other lasting and influen-
tial legacy.
Loren Graham, a historian of Russian science, argues that
Tsiolkovskiis legacy is less a function of the actual design of
working rockets and more his conceptualization of space travel.
Graham believes, like Sagdeev, that the Tsiokovskii equation is one
of his crowning technical and scientific achievements.10 Sergei
Korolev, the dean of Soviet rocketry in the Khrushchev era, believed
Tsiolkoskiis equation had far-reaching ramifications. According to
Korolev, it was Tsiolkovskii who understood that higher rocket
velocities are attained more effectively by increasing the relative
velocities of the ejected particles than by increasing the relative
fuel supply carried by the rocket.11 Korolev was also impressed
with how Tsiolkovskii made mathematical equations to determine
the fuel supplies necessary for overcoming gravity and to find the
optimal conditions under which energy expenditure at take-off
would be a minimum.12
At the turn of the twentieth century, Tsiolkovskii furthered his
analysis of rocket travel with the publication of his seminal piece
Investigation of World Spaces by Reactive Vehicles in 1903. In
this work, he discussed rockets as a means to enter intergalactic
space, while also providing formulas for computing trajectories.
Many nineteenth-century theories of rocketry were based on using

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 40 chapter 2

solid-fuel or powder as a propellant. However, Tsiolkovskii, in his

Investigations, insisted on the use of liquid fuel, offering a basic
operating scheme for this type of engine.
This work also dealt with the mechanics of bodies of variable
mass. He basically developed a theory of rocket flight with allow-
ances made for varying the mass of the rocket while in flight. The
piece also displayed a rigorous analysis of the possibility of using
liquid fuels to attain cosmic velocities.13
This 1903 piece thus devised and sketched a rocket of enormous
dimensions with vast explosive power. His vision was one of an
elongated metallic chamber (shaped in a way to cause the least
atmospheric resistance), equipped with lighting, supplied with
oxygen, and even with substances to absorb carbon dioxide for the
intelligent being in control of the chamber. Though the idea in
general might not have been so novel, what may have been more
significant is Tsiolkovskiis unique conceptualization and his cal-
culations to form a mixture in the chamber for the explosive gas.
He envisioned liquid oxygen and hydrogen combining to form a
propulsive mixture that would ultimately flow in the form of hot
gases through pipes that flare out the end of the rocket like a
megaphone (see figure 11). For the turn of the century, this was an
interesting proposition with detailed calculations on the required
velocity the ship would need to exit the earths atmosphere.14
However, Tsiolkovskii himself became disillusioned with the
reception of this 1903 piece in Russia and abroad. In a series of
diary entries, written after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Tsioilkovskii
reflected on the reception of his research at the turn of the century
with some consternation. He noted that although many of his
visionary ideas were actually conceived by the 1890s, only after the
First World War did many of his treatises become packaged and
published for more popular consumption at home and an aca-
demic community abroad in Europe.15
Tsiolkovskii believed there was much criticism of his early theo-
retical ideas by Russian scientists in the capital cities, and this
forced him to turn inward and conduct experiments in his house
and self-made laboratory in Kaluga. Furthermore, Tsiolkovskii, in
his diary, hinted that the Russian scientific community during the

c02.indd 40 5/18/2009 3:01:50 PM

 dreaming of the cosmos 41

late tsarist era in Moscow and St. Petersburg was a clique, not easily
impressed with a self-taught scientist and inventor from a provin-
cial Russian town. Even after his groundbreaking article was pub-
lished in 1903 in Nauchnoe obozrenie (Scientific Survey), he regretted
that few people read his article seriously. In his diary, he later
bemoaned the fact that if a more famous scientist in Imperial
Russia, such as Dmitrii Mendeleev, had published these ideas on
rocketry, they might have been transferred abroad and translated
into French or German much earlier.16
On some level, Tsiolkovskiis assumptions were correct, since
the 1903 article went relatively unnoticed both in Russia and
abroad. However, in 1912, two years prior to the First World War,
the editors of Vestnik vozdukhoplavaniia (Herald of Airflight), repub-
lished the work in their journal asking Tsiolkovskii to expand dra-
matically on the earlier 1903 piece.17 In the revised and expanded
article, Tsiolkovskii was especially interested in how a rocket could
overcome air resistance, and he also discussed the atmospheric
pressure the rocket would face lifting itself into outer space. He
postulated that the force required to overcome the resistance to
air amounted to only a fraction of the energy needed to overcome
gravitational forces.18
It is here in the expanded 1912 version that he first suggested
using the energy of disintegrating atoms as a rocket propellant. His
conceptual theory was to harness the potential of radioactive par-
ticles from radium particularly. He believed that as radium disin-
tegrates continually into elementary matter, it liberates particles
of different masses moving with amazing, inconceivable velocities
close to that of light. Though not feasible today as a source of fuel,
he had hoped to accelerate the disintegration of radioactive bodies
such as radium in order to supply the rocket with an energy source
able to yield explosive velocities.19
Tsiolkovskii also suggested the use of ozone as an oxidizer while
formulating his theorems for reactive motion and had hoped to
cool the walls of the rockets combustion chamber by using ozone
as a type of propellant. However, embedded in the text of the
revised 1912 version of his Investigations was his ceaseless
pontification about colonizing space as a means to rejuvenate the

c02.indd 41 5/18/2009 3:01:50 PM

 Figure 11. Tsiolkovskiis hand sketch (19023), annotated with notes, entitled
First Variant of a Liquid-Fuel Rocket of K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Drawings by K. E.
Tsiolkovskii. In this diagram from a Tsiolkovskii prototype space rocket, liquid
hydrogen and liquid oxygen are separated by a partition. The gases mix and
explode at point A in the diagram; cold highly rarefied vapor (explosion
products) exits the rocket at point B. The pipe AB is surrounded by a jacket
with circulating liquid metal. In the forward part of the rocket is a room for
passengers. ARAN, fond 555 (uncatalogued drawing collection).

c02.indd 42 5/18/2009 3:01:50 PM

 dreaming of the cosmos 43

human race. In this piece, he expressed his views on the future

development of mankind, on mans expansion throughout the lim-
itless space of the universe, and on literally conquering the enor-
mous reserves of the globes energy resources in order to achieve
those goals. He also visualized establishing artificial settlements in
interplanetary or interstellar space.20
In May 1914, on the eve of the First World War, Tsiolkovskii took
part in the Third All-Russian Aeronautics Congress in St. Peters-
burg. There he delivered a paper on his dirigible designs and dem-
onstrated for the audience a number of models he had constructed
out of metal in his workshop back in Kaluga (see figure 12). Though
he received patents for some of these designs in Europe, the designs
did not bring him any substantial financial benefits. In that same
year, he published his work entitled The Second Law of Thermo-
dynamics, in which he considered the gravitational reversibility of
energy.21
In his Second Law of Thermodynamics, Tsiolkovskii argued
against the relatively widespread view of the constant devaluation
of energy in the universe (which was the logical extension of Clau-
siuss famous entropy postulate). Instead, Tsiolkovskii believed in
the possible reversibility of the process of heat dissipation in the
universe. He believed that heat cannot always pass spontaneously
to a body of lower temperature and was thus doubtful that the
entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum.22
During the year just prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution,
Tsiolkovskii entered a phase of his life where he became depressed
and introverted. His family was in difficult financial times, and he
obsessed in his diary about the lack of recognition he received from
Russian scientists in the capital cities. He tried in September 1916
to get funding for some of his experiments related to his research
interests in his article The Second Law of Thermodynamics. He
appealed for funding to the Society for Advancing the Experimen-
tal Sciences in Petersburg, headed by Kh. S. Ledentsov; however,
the commission responded negatively to Tsiolkovskiis research
agenda.23
In the supplemental version of his Investigations of World
Spaces by Reactive Vehicles, which appeared in 1914, Tsiolkovskii

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 44 chapter 2

lamented how it is hard to work by oneself for many years and

under unfavorable conditions and not experience any gratification
or support at all.24 In his diary, he also expressed a critique of the
elitist attitude of the Russian scientific community in the major
centers prior to the Russian Revolution. He was also critical of
European scholars working in prestigious institutions, because he
believed the international science community was more prone to
suppress nonconformist ideas such as his that appeared by a pro-
vincial Russian scholar prior to World War I.25
Only later, after the war, did the European and American scien-
tific community, according to Tsiolkovskiis notes, realize the huge
potential in exploring space through jet-propulsive rocket technol-
ogy. This indicates that Tsiolkovskii would have to forcibly, after
1917, not only work the Soviet system for funding, but also rhetori-
cally promote his visionary ideas to the international and domestic
Russian scientific communities alike a difficult task from his
provincial outpost. In order to accomplish this task, Tsiolkovskii
needed to develop an alternative scientific discursive medium
outside the established academic and scientific institutional frame-
works of tsarist and eventually Soviet Russia.
Yet Tsiolkovskiis diaries must be contextualized and analyzed
from a number of perspectives. Many of these notes were written
after the Bolshevik Revolution; thus, though sincere, they may
reflect a type of rhetorical shaping and fashioning of his support
of the Soviet regime that became his potential patron. These notes
are also interesting in their criticism of the obdurate nature of the
Russian and European science community regarding the visionary
ideas of local scientists working outside established institutions.
Until Robert Goddard in the United States and Hermann Oberth
in Germany substantiated and devised theoretically the basis for
jet-rocket propulsion by the early 1920s, ideas such as Tsiolkovskiis
seemed more futuristic, utopian, and not technically feasible.
Lastly, Tsiolkovskii has been overlooked as both a popularizer of
science and technology, as well as a figure of inspiration for future
generations of Soviet rocket scientists. Earlier debates on his legacy
have focused, as mentioned earlier, too much on his technical
contributions and their scientific grounding. Yet he himself wrote

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 Figure 12. Photo of Tsiolkovskii (1913) shown standing in his Kaluga
workshop with metal models of his dirigibles and aerostats. Tsiolkovskii
constructed these models himself on his lathes with his own tools at night after
teaching. Photograph from Russian Academy of Sciences Archive in Moscow.
ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 124, l. 6.

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 46 chapter 2

voluminous science fiction novels, and many scientists made pil-

grimages to Kaluga to talk to him about how his stories inspired
them to become physicists. This narrative, the provincial scientist
as a catalyst (or impulse) to spark future research, will also tie
together a new understanding of this withdrawn physics teacher.
In his second version of his Investigation, Tsiolkovskii men-
tions that he himself was inspired to derive mathematical calcula-
tions of rocketry by reading the science fiction novels of Jules
Verne. In turn, Tsiolkovskii believed that he could spread ideas of
rocketry through a variety of media: science fiction, technical writ-
ings, and short pamphlets. He also firmly believed that his task was
to begin the process that future engineers and physicists would
refine and develop: I shall be happy if my work induces others to
further the effort. . . . But there must be an idea: execution must be
preceded by an idea, precise calculation by fantasy.26

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 GETTING SERIOUS

ABOUT ROCKET FLIGHT IN

3 REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

19171928

In the revolutionary era of 1917, during the Russian

civil war (191820), and the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP,
192127), Tsiolkovskiis ideas became more widespread nationwide
than they did in tsarist Russia. Three venues or media accounted
for this transformation and evolution: Tsiolkovskiis pamphlets
and science fiction novels, books, journals, and press articles on
his life and work written by well-known Russian scientific figures,
and the institutional patronage of the new Soviet state. These
multivariegated venues to propagate his visionary ideas attest to
Tsiolkovskiis own abilities to promote his ideas in public, as well
as the growing interest in helping him on the part of Soviet state
institutions, scientific societies, and distinguished scientists them-
selves in the capital and provincial cities in the 1920s and 1930s.
Each of these constituencies (at different times), however, wanted
to claim Tsiolkovskii as either a genius or one of their own for
particular reasons. Furthermore, the official canonization of Tsi-
olkovskii as a Soviet hero did not come until the year of his death
in 1935, first under Stalin, and then in 1957 (simultaneously the
centennial celebration of his birth and the launching of Sputnik I)
under Khrushchev. Prior to 1928, therefore, one could argue there
was a type of symbiosis between Tsiolkovskii and his patrons, sup-
porters, and the government itself. Lastly, in the 1920s at least,
Tsiolkovskiis visionary ideas on spaceflight resonated with popular
readers, and thus the general Soviet public, who were fascinated
at the time by astronomy, flight, and the cosmos beyond. This reso-
nance and interest on the part of a cosmopolitan urban reading
public in Soviet Russia, shaped by European-wide sensibilities

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 48 chapter 3

cultivated prior to 1917, created a ready-made audience for these

ideas on rocketry.

THE SOVIET STATE AND THE SELF-FASHIONING

OF A NATIONAL SCIENCE HERO

As mentioned earlier, in the revolutionary era of 1917, Tsiolko-

vskii was given a small pension from the local Kaluga school board,
and he then finished his teaching career between 1918 and 1921
at a local Soviet secondary school. In the 1920s, Tsiolkovskii
and his family struggled during his retirement financially, as he
relied on his local educational pension and a very small honorary
pension from the Soviet governments Ministry of Enlightenment
(Narkompros).
However, this was an energetic time for a provincial autodidact,
because the new regime welcomed self-made men who could
spread science to the masses. Tsiolkovskiis daughter, Liubov K.
Tsiolkovskaia, remembered how immediately after the Bolshevik
Revolution, Tsiolkovskiis popularizing goals seemed to mesh inex-
tricably with the scientific enlightenment programs of the young
Soviet state. In her memoirs, she argued that Tsiolkovskii had
already done this prior to the revolution throughout Kaluga oblast,
so it was only a natural continuation of his pre-1917 interests. He
gave several lectures in 1918 at the Kaluga Peoples University, in
a general lecture hall, and also gave lectures on air flight and rock-
etry at the Kaluga Proletarian University. This was a strenuous
activity for him during the difficult times of the Russian civil
war when the family struggled financially at home and he was
still teaching in school and lecturing publicly in the evenings. His
daughter believed even as early as 1919 that his health began to
decline, mainly due to long working hours, since he did research
well into the night at home after teaching or giving public lectures.
Yet it was after the Bolshevik Revolution that new Soviet academic
institutions began to pay attention to this local physics teacher for
both his popularizing activities and his rocket designs.1
In late 1918, the Soviet state began to make further overtures
towards Tsiolkovskii. During that year, Tsiolkovskii was elected as

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 getting serious about rocket flight in revolutionary russia 49

a member of the Communist Academy. Founded in June 1918 as a

center for the development of Marxist interpretations of society,
the academy had a small section for the study of the natural
sciences where Tsiolkovskii briefly belonged.2
The traditional perspective was that the Soviet state indepen-
dently cultivated its patronage ties to Tsiolkovskii. However, archi-
val letters tell a different story, one of a wise, old man rhetorically
fashioning his utilitarian virtues as a scientist who could benefit
the new Soviet state. On August 1, 1918, two months after its initial
founding, K. E. Tsiolkovskii sent an unsolicited letter to the scien-
tific-academic section of the new Socialist Academy of Social
Studies. In this letter, he explained how he had toiled as a lower
and middle school teacher for thirty-eight years, while conducting
experiments of flight in his laboratory in provincial Kaluga on his
own time. He stressed how everything in his laboratory was hand-
made, and he was now surviving on a meager pension of twenty-
seven rubles with supplements from his daughters salary to
make ends meet. Tsiolkovskiis rhetorical strategy for the time was
complex. He tried to refashion his early theories on monism and
universal matter in a way to argue that they were really part of a
grand theory to study ideal social questions similar to the Marxist
ideology of the Bolsheviks. However, he bemoaned the fact that his
early works, published before the Russian Revolution, were edited
during a period of strong tsarist censorship, while his ideas back
then were considered bizarre and strange by most of his critics.
Appealing to a new patron, he summarized, I plea to you to give
me the monetary sustenance to finish my work. . . . I need to have
my work better known amongst the people of the USSR.3
His letter is a fascinating document rhetorically because he
portrayed himself as a self-taught thinker who made all his appa-
ratuses by hand. Furthermore, Tsiolkovskii argued that he was
neglected by many prerevolutionary scientists who had more elab-
orate laboratories and that he was marginalized by the central
academic institutions of pre-1917 Russia. He portrayed himself also
as someone who thought about socialist-oriented philosophical
tracts before 1917, therefore trying to ally himself, in this case
literally for monetary gain, with the socialist orientation of the

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 50 chapter 3

new academy. (Tsiolkovskii, however, was never, unlike one his

Socialist-Revolutionary daughters, allied with any political move-
ment or party before the October revolution.) Tsiolkovksii was in
retrospect quite clever in portraying himself to the Bolshevik
Academy as someone who was ostracized during the time of the
tsars, a poor provincial scientist, yet simultaneously as someone
who was ready to serve the new regime.4
In essence, he rewrote his avtobiografiia (autobiography), com-
posing a Soviet one for official consumption. Sheila Fitzpatrick
has argued recently that in the Soviet period, individuals under-
took a process of self-fashioning in order to fit their own life-
histories into the greater social fabric and narrative constructed
by the state.5 In essence, this is almost a process of role-playing,
as one presents oneself in public to fit state-constructed public
identities. The social theorist Erving Goffman has viewed this
process as actors taking on roles and identities we construct our-
selves as we enter the public sphere on a daily basis.6 Tsiolkovskiis
self-fashioning and plea was deftly constructed, and within a
months time he was elected a corresponding member of the new
Socialist Academy, given a stipend to continue some of his work
in his laboratory and workshop in Kaluga, and informed he could
come to Moscow to use the academys library and book collections
if he needed.7
One should not necessarily view Tsiolkovskiis plea, or his auto-
biographical synopsis, as insincere or a full falsification (masking)
of events in his life. Indeed, as mentioned earlier, Tsiolkovskii did
deeply feel he was ostracized by the more elite academic centers
of tsarist Russia. Furthermore, he did have high hopes, as many
scientists did originally, for the Soviet regimes ability to reach out
and fund the work of those scholars from autodidactic or non-
traditional educational means. Additionally, Tsiolkovskii may have
seen the regime as not only supporting grandiose scientific visions,
but also interested in popularizing new, nonconformist scientific
ideas to the broad masses both in Russia and internationally one
of his own goals. Yet, as Natalia Kozlova has reminded us in her
own work on Soviet identity and autobiography, many people
learned how to be Soviet, so to speak, and thus describe them-

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 getting serious about rocket flight in revolutionary russia 51

selves (either in public or private dialogue) within the context of a

new Soviet ideology and language that imbibed the era.8 Thus, at
the very least, one could argue that Tsiolkovskii was well aware of
this new language when he wrote his plea to the academy and
tried to describe himself as a destitute scholar (and focus on his
supposed Marxist philosophical worldview) willing to ally himself
with the Soviet regime.
In any case, during the 1920s, as a retired teacher with Soviet
government funding and support, Tsiolkovskii became more active
in independently promoting and popularizing his ideas about
space travel. The support from a more activist state may have given
him more initiative to publicly spread his ideas on space travel.
Furthermore, rocket science and space travel were only part of a
more general interest on the part of the Russian reader during the
1920s in astronomy, the cosmos, and the exploration of the solar
system itself. Long lines for public disputations on planets, the
solar system, and the universe beyond were recorded at various
museums in Moscow such as the Polytechnic. Tsiolkovskiis ideas
thus fell on an eager audience in the capital and provincial cities
alike.9 Russians were especially captivated at this time with notes
on air flight and dirigibles, so much so that Tsiolkovskii spent as
much time writing popular pamphlets on these topics as he did
on rocket flight itself.10
Many theorists were also interested in Tsiolkovskiis ideas and
helped promote them in popular journals, periodicals, and the
Soviet press. Probably the best known popularizer of space travel
and astronomy during the 1920s was the Leningrad physics pro-
fessor and editor of popular journals, Iakov I. Perelman. Thanks
to Perelmans initiative, Tsiolkovskiis theories and drawings
about rockets were featured in many popular scientific journals
during the 1920s.11 Furthermore, Tsiolkovskii wrote voluminous
science fiction novellas that contained narratives serving two
purposes: to entertain while they didactically taught the public
about rocketry and space travel. He believed science fiction works
could condition the public mind to accept ambitious technical
projects and inspire future engineers and physicists to carry out
his dreams.12

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 52 chapter 3

Tsiolkovskii, in the 1920s, also gave public scientific lectures in

Kaluga and its environs on a host of topics that interested local
residents. These talks, though diverse, focused on space and the
cosmos and were sponsored by local regional studies groups. These
kraeved (regional studies) societies in the Russian provinces were
especially interested in dispersing utilitarian scientific knowledge
to the public, while simultaneously whetting the appetite of an
eager provincial public fascinated by the prospects of humans
traveling into outer space.13 Thus, by the late 1920s, around the
time of Stalins ascension, Tsiolkovskiis name was slowly becom-
ing a household word in Soviet Russia as the inspirational focus of
Russian cosmonautics. Encouraged by students and local societies
in the provinces, patronized from metropolitan editors, scientists,
and the Soviet state itself, yet consistently promoting himself
across the revolutionary divide, Tsiolkovskii and his ideas attempted
to transcend generational, cultural, and educational barriers as
they entered the public sphere.

POPULARIZING TSIOLKOVSKIIS VISIONS: SPACE

FLIGHT, SCIENTIFIC INSPIRATION, AND THE
SOVIET PUBLIC SPHERE IN THE 1920S

Tsiolkovskii had trouble prior to the twentieth century publiciz-

ing his somewhat unorthodox visions of rocketry and spaceflight.
However, with the advent of the twentieth century, and the help
of certain popularizers, his ideas were slowly penetrating the
Russian public scientific realm. One of the main catalysts for this
change was Perelman. From World War I through the Soviet inter-
war period, Perelman became famous for his series of science
books entitled Zanimatelnaia nauka (Science for Entertainment).
Many readers used these books as self-educational texts in the
sciences. His most popular books were the ones that focused on
physics, astronomy, and the cosmos beyond.
Perelman, from his home in Leningrad, started receiving letters
from his readers, and he noted distinctly that popular rocketry
and articles on the cosmos were very interesting to the public
in the 1920s. Young readers seemed obsessed, according to the

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 getting serious about rocket flight in revolutionary russia 53

physicists unpublished letters, with rocketry and the possibility

of interplanetary travel. Furthermore, most of these letters
made references to the Russian space visionary K. E. Tsiolkovskii
asking particularly for more information on his ideas and
visions.14
Prior to the revolution, Perelman became editor of the well-
known scientific-popular journal entitled Priroda i liudi (Nature and
People). After the revolution, he served in the Commissariat of
Enlightenment working in the department of school reform. He
was thus very interested in the issue of science curricular reform,
especially in mathematics, physics, and geometry. He also became
the editor of the popular journal V masterskoi prirody (In Natures
Workshop), in which he published many articles on space travel
and rocketry.15
On Perelmans editorial initiative, Tsiolkovskiis drawings and
theories on rocketry began to appear more readily, especially in the
Leningrad-based popular science journals. There was a great irony
to this, especially since it had been the prerevolutionary Petersburg
scientific and editorial establishment that had shut Tsiolkovskii
out of some journals. Drawings of Tsiolkovskiis rocket ships
appeared in Priroda i liudi as early as 1918, with editorial overviews
that indulged readers while elaborating on the possibility of inter-
planetary travel.16
Perelman and the editorial board of Priroda i liudi had been
in extensive correspondence with Tsiolkovskii between 1917
and 1918.17 This correspondence, solely between Perelman and
Tsiolkovskii, continued throughout the 1920s, especially when
Perelman was the editor of the Narkompros journal entitled V
masterskoi prirody. He wrote Tsiolkovskii on May 16, 1921, with an
original request to republish some of his works in edited or abridged
form in his journal.18 Yet he also indicated to Tsiolkovskii two year
later, in January 1923, that many other journals had contacted him
as editor to popularize or summarize Tsiolkovskiis writings for
their readers this included the Communist Youth League jour-
nal, popular in the 1920s, Molodaia gvardiia (The Young Guard). He
believed there was a veritable craze among editors for Tsiolkovskiis
writings on outer space travel and the cosmos.19

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 54 chapter 3

Perelman, according to his reminiscences, was obsessed with

promoting Russian rocket theorists and visionaries abroad as
well. Perelman truly believed that Russia had a long tradition of
space visionaries, but the European press and popular journals
only recently began to pick up on this phenomenon. In a February
18, 1926, letter from Perelman to Tsiolkovskii, the physicist noted
that even in Russian migr journals, there is little mention of
those such as Tsiolkovskii. He noted that a recent issue of the
New York City-based migr journal Russkii goloc (The Russian
Voice) recently published a laudatory article on Goddard and
Oberth, with no mention of Tsiolkovskii and his Soviet cohort. In
that letter he also lamented to Tsiolkovskii that the visionarys
work was not as well known outside of the USSR, and Perelman
informed Tsiolkovskii he hoped to have his own Mezhplanetnoe
puteshestvie (Interplanetary Travel) appearing in an English lan-
guage version soon.20
Perelman, interestingly enough, literally monitored the U.S.
and European press to see how extensively Russian theorists were
treated within various issues. He wrote Tsiolkovskii on March 3,
1928, that a one hundred-page manuscript in the French journal
Astronomy on spaceflight written by the famous Esno-Pelterie had
no explanation of any Russians and their contribution to the theory
of interplanetary flight.21 Though he tried to lobby foreign editors,
Perelman also believed starting at home was of critical impor-
tance. He therefore extensively wrote editors of Soviet journals
and newspapers in the 1920s to publish articles on Russian rocket
visionaries. He wrote Tsiolkovskii back on May 5, 1928, that the
Soviet military newspaper Krasnaia gazeta (Red Star) was going to
publish one of Perelmans popular articles on rocketry. Perelman
promised the aged Tsiolkovskii that besides the contributions of
Americans and Germans, he would add in this article a section on
the Russian pantheon of early rocket theorists.22 One can thus
see the intensive efforts of popularizers such as Perelman to
expose the Russian and European public to the ideas of Russian
theorists like Tsiolkovskii. Tsiolkovskii may have been canonized
later by the Stalinist regime, yet popularizers in Russia initially
catalyzed this process from below.

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 getting serious about rocket flight in revolutionary russia 55

To further accomplish these goals, Perelman himself became an

almost professional popularizer of rocketry and space travel, pub-
lishing in the 1920s his widely read Mezhplanetnoe puteshestvie. In
this popular piece he offered Russian readers insight into how
rockets could overcome the earths gravitational forces with multi-
stage rockets similar to those Tsiolkovskii envisioned in the nine-
teenth century. He discussed how rockets could use combustible
liquid fuel in order to reach particular velocities necessary to lift
the booster into outer space. The general circulation of Perelmans
books numbered in the millions.23
Perelmans books on outer space travel and his popularization
of Tsiolkovskiis ideas caught the imagination of those beyond the
educated elite of Russian society. Even workers read these popular
journals, and as evidenced by letters to editors, they were particu-
larly fascinated by rocketry. Workers were especially interested in
the physics of rocketry, and learned much by reading Perelmans
simplified edited pieces.24 Workers even sent letters to be published
in sections of the journals called notes from subscribers. One
worker sending a letter into the journal In Natures Workshop, edited
by Perelman, wrote I am very interested in the nature of cosmic
rays falling down to earth from interplanetary space. He wanted
to know what affect this had on the earths surface and how they
penetrated the atmosphere.25
The demand for articles on rocketry, especially the visions of
K. E. Tsiolkovskii, became so great in the 1920s and 1930s that
editors were flooded with requests by readers on what new mate-
rial was available to read. Bibliographers and science educators
started compiling lists of accessible readings on these topics and
publishing them in conjunction with editors in Chto chitat (What
to Read?). The journal also engaged popularizers like Perelman to
write popular scientific overviews of these bibliographies, and
these pedagogically inclined articles, though didactic, served as
guides to those who wanted to know more about this topic.26
In Soviet Russia during the 1920s, professors like N. A. Rynin in
Leningrad became almost full-time popularizers of particularly
space flight, while the public eagerly consumed journal and
newspaper articles devoted to this topic.27 Rynin, a prolific writer

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 56 chapter 3

on Russian rocketry and astronautics, was also interested in

organizing public astronautical societies in the 1920s. In the late
1920s, he began to write and publish a multivolume encyclopedia
on cosmonautics that placed him at the forefront of the popular-
ization of rocketry in Russia.28
This Soviet aeronautical and cosmonautic craze, sponsored by
those such as Perelman and Rynin, was certainly part of a pan-
European phenomenon, as the reporting of aeronautical feats in
Europe were popular news items and anticipated well ahead of
time. This presentation of air flight and the cosmos in both the
European and Russian public media of the 1920s was similar to the
way rocket flights by the United States and the USSR were both
elaborately portrayed by television reporters and eagerly antici-
pated by a viewing audience in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Agitational Propaganda (Agit-Prop)
researchers, working for the Central Committee of the Communist
Party, also noted that readers both in central and provincial towns,
and even some rural areas, were interested in scientific ideas about
the cosmos. Workers surveyed in factories by Agit-Prop officials
were very interested in self-educational pamphlets, especially
Perelmans books on rocketry. Letters collected by Agit-Prop offi-
cials showed that workers were especially interested in the ideas
of Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii. In rural areas, however, peasant
readers seemed more interested in practical scientific books on
horticulture and animal husbandry. Flying in outer space seemed
other-worldly to those in the countryside, because many had not
even seen early automotives. An Agit-Prop researcher, in the Orel
region of Russia, found many villagers asking him questions about
boats moving along the streets by themselves in Moscow, and
saying things like, Could people really fly in the air?29 However,
in their science educational programs in the countryside, espe-
cially Agit-Prop lectures, activists still tried to spread astronomical
ideas to dispel religious notions of the universe. While this was an
inherent part of their Marxist materialist doctrine, the lectures for
Agit-Prop, all the same, provided an arena for those in remote areas
to hear about the possibilities of leaving the earths atmosphere
and visiting other planets, even if it sounded fantastical.30

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 getting serious about rocket flight in revolutionary russia 57

In the 1920s, the popularizer N. A. Rynin was particularly inter-

ested in spreading the cosmic visions of Konstantin Tsiolkovskii
to as broad an audience as possible. Prior to the Russian Revolu-
tion, Rynin had been a professor of descriptive geometry at the
St. Petersburg Institute of Transportation Engineering. He had
organized, back in 1909, the first All-Russian Aviation Club in
St. Petersburg. However in his autobiographical writings he
attributes his interest in Russian rocketry to the early writings
of Tsiolkovskii, among others, on reactive devices.31 To further
institutionalize his interests in rocketry, Rynin developed the
Department of Interplanetary Travel at the Leningrad Institute of
Transportation Engineers. He was also involved in the formation
of another space travel group generated in the 1920s entitled the
Leningrad Group for the Study of Reactive Motion (LenGIRD).32
Though Rynin and his associates were particularly focused on
the formation of institutional structures and organizations to
spread space research in Leningrad, they were most fascinated by
popularizing ideas about rocketry. Like Perelman, and other space
enthusiasts in Leningrad, he started publishing popular articles on
rocketry and spaceflight in a host of public science journals such
as Vestnik znaniia (Herald of Knowledge) and Mir prikluchenii (World
of Adventures). However, clearly his crowning achievement in this
arena was the nine-volume encyclopedia to space fantasy, rock-
etry, and visionary thought begun under his editorship in the late
1920s in Leningrad. Chapter 7 was devoted entirely to Tsiolkovskiis
conceptual ideas and works, and served as another venue to popu-
larize the provincial science teachers ideas among a broader
Russian audience.33
Like Perelman, Rynin had been in extensive correspondence
throughout the 1920s with Tsiolkovskii prior to the publication of
the volume dedicated to his work. This correspondence began back
in 1924 when Rynin first wrote Tsiolkovskii with a request to have
him send along some of his significant writings, manuscripts, and
drawings.34 Tsiolkovskii received this request with great interest,
even sending Rynin over a two-year period up to 1926 some of his
own autobiographical notes and other writings.35 In the midst of
this, Rynin sent a synopsis of his biographical sketch on Tsiolkovskii

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 58 chapter 3

to A. L. Chizhevskii, a Russian rocket enthusiast and graduate

student, who at the time was working and studying in Germany.
Evidently this helped popularize Tsiolkovskiis notions on rocketry
in Europe, as Chizhevskii translated them from Russian into
German for a variety of German language popular science jour-
nals.36 In his own memoirs, Chizhevskii argued that this is how
many Europeans, especially German rocket specialists, first became
interested in the work of this somewhat obscure, provincial Russian
school teacher.37
One year later, in October 1927, Rynin mentioned finally to
Tsiolkovskii that the volume dedicated to his lifelong work, includ-
ing his autobiographical summary, would appear sometime soon.
In a letter dated October 7, 1927, Rynin sent a detailed description
to Tsiolkovskii informing him (with a table of contents) what the
volume in his honor would contain. Throughout the era of Stalins
cultural revolution, the two theorists continued to correspond with
one another and Tsiolkovskii would send Rynin his newest books
or manuscripts, which he hoped would in turn promote his ideas
on rocketry amongst the Russian reading public.38
The final volume, edited by Rynin and his cohort, was a
comprehensive survey of most of Tsiolkovskiis writings and theo-
ries on rocketry through the late 1920s. The volume included a
short autobiographical sketch that Tsiolkovskii wrote for Rynin.
Tsiolkovskii mentioned in this piece how his health was failing in
the 1920s, and for many years he had grown tired of long hours
teaching, while only having holidays to work on his own experi-
ments.39 Rynins volume also included a bibliography of both
Tsiolkovskiis published works and some of his manuscripts.
Leningrad, and Kaluga province, had obviously not been the only
places where rocketry and space travel were being popularized.
Moscow had also been a center for the research and interest in
aeronautics, astronomy, and rocketry. Throughout the 1920s the
famed Moscow Polytechnic Museum had hosted numerous lec-
tures on planets in the solar system. Long lines could be seen
outside the museum on Saturdays when they held public disputa-
tions on outer space the planet Mars was of particular interest
to Muscovites. The Moscow Society for the Amateurs of Astronomy

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 getting serious about rocket flight in revolutionary russia 59

was particularly active in soliciting the help of astronomers, such

as A. A. Mikhailov, to give public lectures. At the beginning of NEP,
in the first half of 1921, twenty of these weekend lectures drew
huge audiences, who eagerly paid to see pictures of stellar configu-
rations and hear diluted lectures on popular astronomy.40
The Moscow Society of Amateur of Astronomers had a technical
section that was interested in flights to other planets. In 1924, this
section organized the Moscow Society for the Study of Inter-
planetary Communication, which also sponsored public lectures
on rocketry and spaceflight by those such as Fridrikh Tsander and
M. I. Lapirov-Skobolo. Another Moscow society, called the Society
of Inventors, also had an Interplanetary Section, under its purview.
This section was more interested in organizing public exhibitions
in the 1920s, which, like popular lectures and disputations, had
been a Russian tradition well back into the 1880s.41
The Interplanetary Section of the Moscow Society of Inventors,
however, became famous for its series of exhibitions in 1927 on
models and mechanisms of interplanetary travel that it held
between February and June of 1927. The exhibition had corners
devoted to those great inventors who now are part of the pantheon
of the early rocket specialists. The exhibition thus included a
corner to the American physics professor Robert Goddard and the
Rumanian-born mathematician Hermann Oberth. The exhibition
had a display entitled the scientific-fantastic period with mate-
rial from Jules Vernes novels. It also included a display on early
inventors including Russians such as Kibalchich who designed
rockets while in a tsarist Okhrana (The Defense), the secret police,
prison in 1881.42
The exhibit was particularly known for publicizing the work
of Russias own K. E. Tsiolkovskii, with an entire corner of the hall
dedicated to the local physics teacher from Kaluga. Tsiolkovskii
was thrilled to be included and sent the organizers personal letters
thanking them and mentioned this was a wonderful way to spread
and popularize his ideas amongst Muscovites and visitors to the
capital.43 What is fascinating is that a number of famous Muscovite
poets and literary elites visited the exhibit and it was particularly
mentioned in the curators notes that futurist poets such as Vladi-

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 60 chapter 3

mir Mayakovsky frequented the halls several times taking notes.

This alludes to the fact that the modernist literary elite was at least
indirectly interested in Tsiolkovskiis visions of outer space and
interplanetary travel.44 Mayakovsky in some of his love poetry
made allusions to the heavens beyond the earth in a dream-like
fashion. In his 1928 poem Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov,
he wrote, The sky has a lot of stars. And if I were not a poet, I
would surely be a stargazer.45
The Tsiolkovskii exhibit had a variety of his rocket diagrams
displayed, as well as an overview of his writings claiming he had
made some of these discoveries as early as 1895. This section
included a prominent bust of Tsiolkovskii surrounded with pic-
tures of the models of his dirigibles and pictures of him in his
Kaluga workshop. It also prominently displayed some of his science
fiction novellas that, according to the curators notes, were of par-
ticular interest to futurist poets, playwrights, and novelists, such
as Anatoly Glebov, who also visited the exhibition frequently.46
This was part of a genuine cultural fascination with spaceflight
in Soviet Russia during the 1920s especially. Playwrights, poets, and
film directors alike were engrossed in the topic for their artistic
productions. The Soviet writer Anatoly Glebov, who wrote and pro-
duced at the Zamoskvoretsky Theatre the play Gold and Brain,
touched on rocketry in many of his works. In a 1932 article in
the journal Tekhnika (Technology), Glebov said, In my latest play
Morning (shown at the Revolution Theatre in Moscow), as in the
1920s, I likewise again touch on the issue of rocketry. Furthermore,
I am always ready to propagandize about Russian achievement in
this useful arena.47 By the 1930s, these cultural figures would help
the Soviets to figuratively storm the stratosphere, as Glebovs
article was entitled. However, in the 1920s, writers like Alexei
Tolstoy, and film directors such as Iakov Protazanov, had more
complex visions of Soviet theories of outer space. In Protazanovs
1920s film Aelita, based on the Tolstoy short story, a Soviet engineer
dreams of a space trip to Mars to escape his earthly problems
in Russia. (Protazanov, one of the most commercially successful
Soviet-era filmmakers, was highly criticized by the Soviet press
for this supposed critique of Soviet society). Protazanov, himself

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 getting serious about rocket flight in revolutionary russia 61

intrigued by Russian notions of spaceflight, had elaborate set con-

structions for actions on the alien planet that won the film director
much technical praise.48 Mayakovsky, Protazanov, Tolstoy, and
Glebov are but a few Soviet-era cultural figures interested in
these imaginative dreams. They reflected the countless science
fiction pieces on outer space, particularly famous ones such as
A. Bogdanovs Red Star, also about a future utopia on Mars.49
Taken as an aggregate whole, these exhibits, public lectures,
cultural productions, and popular journal and newspaper articles
were part of an aeronautical and outer space craze, so to speak,
in Soviet Russia during the 1920s. Though not the initiator of
these efforts, nonetheless, Tsiolkovskii was continually mentioned
regardless of the venue for propagating these ideas. In a remote
sense, isolated in Kaluga oblast, Tsiolkovskii became the aged sig-
nifier of the hopes, dreams, and visions of these rocket enthusiasts
and modernist cultural elites. His work fascinated the futurist liter-
ary elite, while simultaneously whetting the appetite of physicists
and ordinary Russians alike.

THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION AND THE DEVELOPMENT

OF TSIOLKOVSKIIS IDEAS IN THE SOVIET 1920S

With the advent of the October revolution and the 1920s under
Soviet power, Tsiolkovskii continued to write voluminous scientific
treatises on rocketry and aeronautics from his home base in Kaluga.
At the beginning of the NEP, the Council of Peoples Commissars
issued him a personal government pension, and several Soviet
institutes became more interested in some of his inventions and
even his dirigible designs.
One of the themes he was obsessed with in his research and
writing was the design and use of reactive engines and devices
suitably powerful enough to propel a rocket through the earths
gravitational forces. Tsiolkovskii bequeathed to the Russian
Academy of Sciences several unpublished manuscripts analyzing
that phenomenon. One of these pieces, dated November 1921, was
entitled Rocket, while another was entitled The Spread of Man
in Outer Space. He argued in these pieces that reactive engines

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 62 chapter 3

(operating possibly on compressed gas or liquid fuel) would be

essential to overcome the earths gravitational forces. He also
believed once a rocket ship had the potential to escape the earths
gravitational forces, it would have to enter what he argued was a
dynamically balanced state, using a series of low-thrust engines
(similar to a series of engines used in early rocket designs of the
1960s and 1970s).50 He also spent time pondering the conservation
of jet fuel in outer space, and suggested in his unpublished manu-
scripts the idea that the rocket ship could use the resistance of the
earths atmospheric forces to minimize the use of rocket fuel when
reentering the earths gravitational pull. Other serious designers
and physicists in Russia, such as F. A. Tsander, had also considered
this possibility at a similar time.51
In the 1920s, Tsiolkovskii also began work on his theories of jet
aircraft. His papers in manuscript form led eventually to a compila-
tion published in 1928 entitled The New Aeroplane. Tsiolkovskii,
in these essays, examined a variety of aircraft suitable to different
velocities and altitudes. He anticipated jet-propulsion aircraft
that would eventually enter the stratosphere. He also believed that
piston-driven engines would become obsolete. Probably one of
the more interesting conclusions he drew in his work was that as
altitudes increase beyond four kilometers, and as speeds increase
beyond five hundred meters per second, liquid fuel reactive engines
would have to replace the more prevalent piston engines.52
Probably his most extensive research in the era of the 1920s
was published between 1924 and 1926 culminating in a compila-
tion entitled The Spaceship. These essays and theoretical for-
mulations also focused on his technical obsession, so to speak:
the nature of jet-propulsion rockets in outer space and calculat-
ing velocities and angles of exiting and reentering the earths
atmosphere.53
In his piece the The Spaceship, Tsiolkovskii designed a series
of tables with calculations showing the angles and speeds of
rockets exiting the earths atmosphere. Here too, he based these
calculations and hypothetical rocket projections on his idea of
using compressed gases or liquid fuels to propel them into outer
space. He argued that his mathematical calculations showed the

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 getting serious about rocket flight in revolutionary russia 63

most advantageous angle of direction to the horizon lies between

twenty and thirty degrees. He also came up with his own mathe-
matical ratio between the liquid fuel and the vessel itself. Accord-
ing to Tsiolkovskii, If the explosives (in the form of liquid oxygen
and hydrogen) are on the average three times lighter than water,
these materials should be at least fifteen times lighter than the
rocket itself. To put it otherwise, the mass of explosive material
cannot make up more than 1/15 the weight of the rocket.54
It is interesting to note that by the 1920s, Tsiolkovskii became
more aware of the rocket designs and theories of Goddard and
Oberth. In his work, The Spaceship, Tsiolkovskii, however, was
incorrect in his assertions that the complex rocket of Goddard and
Oberth does not alter the matter at all.55 Tsiolkovskii, in this piece,
also believed that the number of vessels in a rocketship, and the
relative order of their explosion, would not yield any reduction in
weight. Tsiolkovskii apparently later realized he was incorrect in
this assertion as well, and would have to rethink this issue in his
1929 publication Cosmic Rocket Trains.56
In the last six years of his life, from 1929 until 1935, during
Stalins reign, Tsiolkovskii continued to ruminate over these calcu-
lations and other related theories of rocket flight. He would also be
in contact with numerous organizations in Moscow and Leningrad
where dedicated professional rocket engineers began to seriously
put some of his visions into more practical and efficient designs.
In the meantime, throughout this period (and at earlier times)
Tsiolkovskii continued to write voluminous science fiction novels
that hoped to inspire young enthusiasts and future rocket scien-
tists alike. His passion for writing these utopian, yet also didactic
pieces, made him an inspiration to an entire generation of future
Soviet technicians who remember him later in their memoirs
and correspondences. Though not on the artistic level of Vladimir
Mayakovsky or Alexei Tolstoy, all the same, they reflect the general
interest in outer space that enveloped the European reader.

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 CROSS-FERTILIZING

FUTURISTIC LITERARY GENRES

4
UTOPIAN SCIENCE FICTION

OR DIDACTIC POPULAR

TECHNOLOGY IN REVOLUTIONARY

RUSSIA, 18901928

In July 1935, K. E. Tsiolkovskii published an editorial

entitled Is This Mere Fantasy? in the Soviet youth newspaper
Komsomolskaia pravda. He wrote this piece near the end of his life
when he was simultaneously a consultant on the science fiction
film Cosmic Journey. For the past decade he had been thinking a lot
about the public resonance of his science fiction, especially since
there were several attempts to adapt his fiction to the silver screen.
In the article, he argued that cinema would soon have a broader
appeal to the masses than books: films are more graphic and
closer to nature than a mere literary description.1 He was pleased
to hear that one of his books would be made into a film soon, and
believed that film adaptations would greatly help science fiction in
convincing the public about the feasibility of spaceflight.
Tsiolkovskii had a relationship with the newspaper Komsomols-
kaia pravda and was interviewed by its famous science journalist
Evgeny Riabchikov on several occasions. Tsiolkovskii was particu-
larly interested in educating a younger readership and populariz-
ing science among it. Not only was he a popularizer of science, he
was also a skilled and experienced science teacher. In 1925, ten
years earlier, he had been asked to have his story Outside the
Earth adapted for the screen, but the production was a compli-
cated affair at the time and never came to fruition. Tsiolkovskii,
however, had been aware that Oberth had collaborated in a similar
vein with the famous German director Fritz Lang in the immensely
popular Women on the Moon which opened in Germany in
the late 1920s. (The film premiered in October 1929 in Berlin, and

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 cross-fertilizing futuristic literary genres 65

Oberth had tried unsuccessfully to build a rocket for the opening.)2

Finally, in 1935, Mosfilm, under the guidance of the Soviet director
V. N. Zhuravlyev, produced a version of Tsiolkovskiis book and
entitled the film Cosmic Journey.
For Tsiolkovskii, popular science fiction and science film truly
were great media to carry new ideas to the masses. He saw these
as inspirational and educational media. In his 1935 article, he
stated emphatically, Science fiction stories on interplanetary
travel carry new ideas to the masses . . . they excite interest . . . and
bring into being people who sympathize with, and in the future
engage in, work on grand engineering and technical rocketry pro-
jects. He believed furthermore that while he wrote voluminous
science fiction novels and short stories, they never veered away
from science proper. He believed ultimately that his science fiction
was imbued with the profound conviction that someone would,
in the future, more precisely than he undertake these important
projects and bring them to fruition with technical exactitude.3 He
therefore saw his science fiction as serving a primary didactic
purpose imbuing the stories with visionary scientific concepts.
At the same time, he believed these fantasies could be inspira-
tional, if not catalytic getting future engineers and technicians
motivated to study, correct, and move beyond Tsiolkovskiis vision-
ary, yet elementary, conceptions.
Tsiolkovskii, in his diary, clearly argues that he himself was
inspired by the stories of Jules Verne that he read at a young
age. When he was studying in Moscow during the 1870s, he read
science fiction voraciously, and began to think deeply then about
colonizing outer space through interplanetary travel.4 Further-
more, when Tsiolkovskii began writing science fiction novels in
the 1890s, he did not do so in an intellectual and literary vacuum.
Indeed, there was a proliferation of American and European science
fiction novels that Tsiolkovskii could engage in his own, somewhat
didactic, way.
In the late nineteenth century, H. G. Wells enjoyed enormous
popularity in Russia, and his novel The War of the Worlds was
eventually translated into many European languages, including
Russian. The British writer Percy Gregg and the German writer Kurd

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 66 chapter 4

Lasswitz also wrote several utopian science fiction novels set

on planets, such as Mars.5 Brezhnev-era Soviet scholars such as
A. Britikov have argued that A. Bogdanov was the authentic founder
of this genre of science fiction in Russia. Britikov believed that
A. Bogdanovs stories about Mars combined a unique mixture of
utopian science fiction with dialectical materialist analysis.6
However, Richard Stites, a cultural historian of Russia, has argued
against Britikovs perspective on Russian utopian science fiction.
Stites believes that there was a rich tradition of utopian science
fiction in Russia prior to Bogdanov and the 1917 Russian Revolu-
tion. While referencing the stories of those such as V. Taneev
and V. N. Chikolev,7 written from the late 1870s to the 1890s, Stites
believes there were many stories written by Russians about themes
as diverse as alien life, new forms of energy, and interplanetary
travel.8
Darko Suvin, while agreeing with Stites, sees the blossoming
of utopian science fiction in Russia as occurring much later, in
the Soviet 1920s.9 By the 1920s, as even Stites himself argues,
Soviet writers were not only reading many foreign science fiction
novels in Russian, but also producing many stories. Unlike in the
West, there was a perpetual dynamism inherent to Soviet utopian
science fiction, with a sense of the limitless capacity to harness
and exploit the stratosphere.10 To some extent, Tsiolkovskii believed
in this endless, optimistic, if not transformationalist, quality to the
stratosphere.
For average Russians of the 1920s, these science fiction stories
may have provided a window through which to view how science
and technology could meet the dreams, visions, and even basic
human needs, of future Soviets. Anthony Vanchu has argued
that Soviet prose writers such as Andrei Platonov and Marietta
Shaginian, like Tsiolkovskii, dwelt on the relationship between
science and the cultural sphere through their literature.11 Platonovs
stories, such as Masters of the Meadows, had numerous engineers
and technicians who brought science and learning to the masses.12
Tsiolkovskii believed his science fiction works could simultane-
ously inspire future scientists while bringing basic scientific ideas
to the masses therefore he too saw this as a popularizing medium.

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 cross-fertilizing futuristic literary genres 67

Michael Holquist, a literary theorist and Russian cultural spe-

cialist, has argued that Tsiolkovskiis fiction could be seen as a type
of parabolic mandate, where the writer feels a human imperative
to shape the world through allegories or narratives. Holquist, to
some extent, bases his approach on his reading of the philosopher
Fedorovs notion of human transformation and resurrection. For
Holquist, Tsiolkovskii would try to overcome gravity, while Fedorov
was trying to overcome death through conquering outer space.13
Holquists short piece analyzing a few of Tsiolkovskiis works
provides a fascinating perspective on science fiction narratives in
the revolutionary era. Holquist also focuses on how Tsiolkovskii
overcomes the stasis of narrative with playful emplotments
free play providing some dynamism to the life story.14 Holquist,
however, may have overstated Fedorovs influence on Tsiolkovskii.
Furthermore, he understates Tsiolkovskiis popularizing and edu-
cational motives. While Beyond the Earth may have a hybrid dicho-
tomy to its narrative structure, many of Tsiolkovskiis other works
are also simple educational stories with little or no exciting or
visionary qualities to them.
Like Tsiolkovskii, Alexander Bogdanov had a scientific back-
ground, for he was a medical doctor. Richard Stites argues that
while writing Red Star, Bogdanov developed his own systems
theory which he called tectology. This was the study of the regu-
latory processes and organization of all systems melded into a type
of general science. Bogdanov thus, in his science fiction, played out
his inchoate cybernetic ideas within the context of this imagina-
tive Martian system of feedback and regulation.15 Tsiolkovskii
also used his science fiction to play out new visionary ideas about
rocketry and interstellar travel.
However, unlike Bogdanov, Tsiolkovskii knew his ideas would
have to be revised and refined by future scientists, and he was
well aware they contained scientific and technical mistakes.
Tsiolkovskiis assumptions were riddled with scientific problems,
especially regarding his basic notions of astrophysics. For instance,
in his short story Island of Ether, he assumes, like the physicists
of the nineteenth century, that our solar system and galaxy are
isolated from other similar systems since those may not have an

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 68 chapter 4

ether medium capable of transmitting light and, thus, are inac-

cessible to our observation. Furthermore, one could argue, that in
many of his stories, he underestimates the danger of collision of
meteorites for his primitive rocket ships. Yet these mistakes did
not seem to constrain Tsiolkovskii, or some of his famous readers,
for that matter, who became part of the Soviet space establish-
ment. Tsiolkovskii believed ultimately his stories could inspire, and
thus they may have had a utilitarian component as well.
Thus Tsiolkovskii saw his stories as a multifaceted medium of
experimentation. On the one hand they were narratives to future
scientists. I would describe this science fiction novel genre as
paeans, songs for future triumph tropes which future scientists
could latch onto and transform into literal realities, not figurative
visions. Some of these stories were visionary in scope, while others
were didactic and had more basic educational meanings embed-
ded in their simplistic, dry text. Some employed an international
cast of characters envisioning a symbiosis among nations, while
others had less dynamic characters with somewhat faceless
qualities that hid behind the science itself. In any case, they pro-
vided yet another medium for Tsiolkovskii to dream, envision, and
ponder about placing humans in outer space, while transforming
the universe in astounding ways.

Tsiolkovskii certainly used his science fiction as a medium to try

out his new ideas that he was simultaneously investigating scien-
tifically in his laboratory. In his reworked 1926 book, written while
living in Kaluga, entitled The Exploration of Space by Reactive-Propelled
Devices, he argued that first the idea must be conceived, almost
like a fantasy, then with scientific work and calculation ultimately
the idea is crowned.16 In essence, he also saw this science fiction
as a way to condition the public to prepare for mans breakthrough
into cosmic space. Tsiolkovskii furthermore believed the process
of writing a science fiction plot as part of his own learning experi-
ence, thus it provided him with a very personal experience that
did not envisage a reader always. He argued that the process of
writing science fiction could also play out ideas which he would
then experiment with in his workshop: I was also attracted to

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 cross-fertilizing futuristic literary genres 69

science fiction. Many times I essayed the scientific concept through

the task of writing space novels, but would then wind up becoming
involved in exact compilations and switching to serious work.17
Thus Tsiolkovskiis fiction could also be viewed as a very personal
medium, where the author thinks through technical ideas. This
process could be seen as a laboratory of visions, where fiction
meets reality within two simultaneously dynamic projects by
author-inventor.
When he was teaching in Borovsk in the late 1870s, he began
sketching in his notebook ideas and drawings of humans living in
outer space. This drawing process also provided a medium of con-
centration and invention that would then lead to further experi-
mentation in the laboratory. In 1892, he moved to Kaluga, a larger
provincial town, where he met other people who were interested
in Russian literature. There he thought about writing science fiction
as a means to ponder new ideas and spread them among the
reading public. This led in 1893 to the publication of his first work
of fiction, On the Moon, which was published in the Moscow
magazine Vokrug sveta (Around the World). Vokrug sveta was the
most popular late-tsarist-era journal covering global exploration,
and its editors thus took an interest in the young provincial
teachers visionary fiction on exploring outer space. Around the
World carried articles on world expeditions, geographic and geo-
logic analysis, anthropological logs, and even travel log narratives
of Russians visiting distant lands.18
Tsiolkovskiis story On the Moon is about our nearest celestial
body, the earths satellite. Its main protagonist is a young astron-
omy enthusiast (a popular hobby in Russia at that time), who
relates a dream he had while in a very deep sleep. The young man
dreams that he and his physicist friend had been transported to
the moon. There they travel, take observations, perform scientific
experiments, and just enjoy their stellar adventure. Toward the end
of the story, they are about to freeze during one of the long, cold
lunar nights, when suddenly the young man awakes from his
dream and writes it down in his journal. This story thus confronts
men setting foot on the moon eventually, as they would in the
late 1960s. It also provides an imaginative escape for its main

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 70 chapter 4

character to go beyond what was capable at that moment much

like Tsiolkovskii himself, who constantly envisioned the technical
achievements of the future.19 The story is truly visionary consider-
ing it evoked space travel that would be realized some seventy
years later in the Khrushchev era.
The 1890s (and the late 1920s) were probably the most prolific
literary times for Tsiolkovskii, when he wrote many of his most
important narratives. Actually, with the exception of the protracted
writing of Beyond the Earth, there was an unusually large chasm
in his science fiction writing from 1900 to approximately the
late 1920s at the beginning of the Stalin era. This is not unusual,
however, given how prolific a technical and scientific writer he was
during that twenty-year interval. But during that era, he was also
teaching and giving many popular scientific lectures. Nonetheless,
the period of the 1890s saw the publication of some of his most
seminal science fiction.
In 1894, he finished a piece in two parts entitled Changes in
Relative Weight. While it is imaginative and visionary, it does not
have the traditional plot lines that his other novels had, and seems
more like a fantastical treatise than a story itself. In this work,
Tsiolkovskii deals with how one could organize studies of changes
in relative weight while humans traveled in interstellar space.
In the story, he devised a space cottage for humans to conduct
experiments in outer space (a type of modern-day space station).
The story, however, falls short on how astronauts would build this
space cottage.
In the second part of the story, he imagines for his reader
what one might observe on other planets from the cottage. He
describes these imaginary voyages that the participants take to
Mercury and Mars, as well as depictions of large asteroids such as
Ceres and Pallas. Here the space traveler in the story has these
series of conversations with the inhabitants of these planets. While
this was an interesting form of narrative structure, his actual
descriptions of these planets are less phenomenal. His narrative at
this point in the novel is somewhat comical in retrospect, with his
notions that Martians use glaciers and oceans of ice as a means of
communication.20

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 cross-fertilizing futuristic literary genres 71

In this story, Tsiolkovskii spends an inordinate amount of

time discussing in a fantastical manner how different modes of
transport would be possible on various planets in our solar system.
He discusses Mercurian trains and Venetians with solar engines
living in a gaseous space. On Mercury he imagines a slender air-
tight transport vessel that can change its volume much like a
pair of bellows does. While he imagined many of the asteroids
discussed in the novel, a belt of asteroids in the vicinity des-
cribed coincidentally by Tsiolkovskii has been documented by
astronomers. This belt of asteroids was thought to be fragments
of a large planet that once existed between the orbits of Mars and
Jupiter.
In 1895, Tsiolkovskii began his newest science fiction piece,
entitled Dreams of Earth and Sky & the Effects of Universal
Gravitation. In this work, he described the majestic panorama
of the universe and emphasized the importance of the law of
universal gravitation on our lives. The actual narrative, however,
describes the chaos that follows from the disappearance of gravity
on the earth. To show the importance of gravity, he imagined
a planet where air disappeared, rivers became still, animals per-
ished. In chapter 4 of the novel, Tsiolkovskii introduces one of
his most important characters, the gravity hater. He is a bizarre
figure who spends much time lecturing on how worthless gravity
is and what would come to pass with its abolition. Tsiolkovskii,
however, embedded in this character a multitude of hidden
meanings. Tsiolkovskii was obsessed with overcoming the earths
gravitational forces in order to travel in outer space. So, on one
level, Tsiolkovskii himself was a model for his gravity hater. On
the other hand, Tsiolkovskii the teacher revered gravity for its
utilitarian purposes on Earth. In retrospect, one could see how
this novel in particular became popular in the Stalinist 1930s,
when the transformational and overreaching metaphors were
so prevalent in socialist realist literature. Overcoming gravity to
create a new colony for the Soviets in outer space could be seen in
the same light as transforming nature on earth for human pur-
poses. The gravity hater could be seen as someone storming the
heavens.21

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 72 chapter 4

While the gravity hater provides an interesting respite from

some of Tsiolkovskiis more dry pedagogical narrative, the story
does indeed engage and reference some of Tsiolkovskiis important
scientific analysis in his other nonfictional works. In the story,
as mentioned above, Tsiolkovskii describes the importance of
building an artificial satellite (or space station) to conduct experi-
ments beyond the Earths gravitational forces. In the story, he also
described the term jet propulsion in order to overcome gravita-
tional pull on objects in the atmosphere. It is also interesting
to note that Tsiolkovskii came up with the idea of using solar bat-
teries to power this satellite or space station.22 Sputnik III, which
was launched in May 1958, actually employed solar batteries (of a
type Tsiolkovskii only envisaged) to feed radio equipment and
communication nodes. Furthermore, the automatic interplanetary
station the Soviets fired at Venus in February 1961 used these solar
batteries as well.23
In 1896, Tsiolkovskii began his most ambitious science fiction
project Beyond the Earth. That year he only completed nine chap-
ters, and then he put the novel to rest because he entered a very
prolific phase of technical and theoretical writing. It was not till
the First World War that Tsiolkovskii returned to the novel. In 1916,
the editors of the well-known popular science magazine Priroda
i liudi (Nature and People) suggested to Tsiolkovskii that he finish
his science fiction novel so they could possibly serialize it in their
magazine. Unfortunately, the magazine ceased publication with
only about half the story printed. In 1920, Tsiolkovskiis friends, and
the local Kaluga Natural History Society, managed to finally publish
the novel in its entirety but only in a print-run of three hundred
copies. By 1923, this novel would be published in Moscow and
Leningrad by central presses on the encouragement of those such
as Iakov Perelman.24
Beyond the Earth has six main characters of different nationali-
ties, all scientists. They have come together to conduct investiga-
tions at a castle in the Himalayas especially built for that purpose.
They have at their disposal a virtual army of engineers, craftsmen,
and highly skilled workers all surrounded by the most efficient
and contemporary equipment. In the story, we hear about multi-

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 cross-fertilizing futuristic literary genres 73

stage rockets, astronauts in space suits, the mooring of people and

objects, light signalization, a three hundred-ton manned liquid fuel
rocket, and lunar studies that envisaged the future. The story,
finally completed in the 1920s, is emblematic of how a state-run
command style economy can commandeer a team of specialists
and equip them with the latest technical devices. However,
Tsiolkovskii problematizes this somewhat simple tale. He names
all his characters, from different countries, after famous scien-
tists the Italian he named Galileo and the Briton Newton. One
could argue therefore that Tsiolkovskii develops more than a
simple literary device in this story. By naming his main characters
after scientific celebrities from around the world, he hinted that
only by working collectively could the countries of the world
conquer outer space. Since this was not the work of a single
country, it even envisioned the cooperative work in the postCold
War era that went into the international space station.25 In his
memoirs, M. S. Gorbachevs leading space and science advisor,
Roald Z. Sagdeev, develops the importance of some of Tsiolkovskiis
ideas later in the twentieth century. He argued it was Tsiolkovskii
who envisioned orbital spacecraft and even a prototype of a
future space station in his stories. According to Sagdeev, through
Tsiolkovskiis stories, He invented the principle of multistage
rockets, and he considered constructions of orbital spacecraft the
prototypes of future space stations. He discussed different sce-
narios for docking in space and landing on earth.26
In Tsiolkovskiis dream team of scientists, it is really the un-
assuming Russian scientist (Ivanov) who suggests a project which
the others are at first reluctant to carry out. However, as the story
progresses, they are eventually won over, and enthusiastically
embark on Ivanovs project to build a rocket, a jet-propelled space-
ship the working principle of which Tsiolkovskii designed in
his technical piece Free Space, written back in 1883. In this novel,
Tsiolkovskii is more imaginative, and even more detailed in his
descriptions. He envisions more practical and realistic scientific
inventions than in his earlier Dreams of Earth and Sky. In Beyond
the Earth, Ivanov convinces the other scientists to join his cause by
giving them very specific data on how the rocket could overcome

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 74 chapter 4

the Earths gravitational force. This literary device is somewhat

consistent in all Tsiolkovskiis science fiction, as he combined
imaginative impulses with a more didactic and technical side.
Probably one of the most interesting parts of the novel is how
Tsiolkovskii embedded his own practical science popularization
methods into the story. The scientists give a series of popular sci-
entific lectures in the round hall near the castle for those in the
area who wish to attend, including their staff. Average workers,
who labored on the project in the Himalayas, attended the lectures
in the story and even interact and ask questions of the scientists.
What is fascinating about this series of lectures in the novel is
that Tsiolkovskii envisaged his actual readers as possibly average
Russian workers (or white-collar workers) who would ask simple
questions of the scientific and technical experts. This was a typical
pattern of science education embedded in the Soviet-era popular
science journals of the 1920s, all of which had question and answer
sections that were very popular and interactive among readers.27
Toward the end of the novel, a space-crew of four scientists
(which included Newton and Ivanov) was sent up in the rocket in
order to circle the earth. The outside world was totally unaware
of the flight originally. The circling of the earth by the rocket ship
hypothetically occurs in the year 2017 in the novel. Average citizens
and newspaper reporters eventually site the spaceship orbiting the
Earth in the night sky. However, they first thought it was a bright
flashing star. Tsiolkovskii has much interesting commentary on his
notion that new technology takes a while for the general public to
comprehend and believe its feasibility. He also discussed at length
in the novel his notion of colonizing space to surmount the Earths
overpopulation problem. He believed this was a key issue and
purpose in the development of rocketry.28
As the story ends, a report from the spaceship is received by
many telegraph operators and printed in newspapers. Scientists on
earth, not at the project site in the Himalayas, then study the data
and confirm the authenticity of the voyage. This is then followed
by a wave of public excitement spread all over the earth. What is
fascinating is that one of the reports in the fictional newspapers
(set in 2017) indicates that while these ideas on rocketry had been

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 cross-fertilizing futuristic literary genres 75

developed earlier (by a little-known Russian visionary in 1903), they

had been generally ignored as technically unfeasible. Therefore, in
the novel itself, Tsiolkovskii is self-referential, and this possibly
speaks to both his optimism about the literal future of rocketry and
his past frustration with Russian academics and their views of his
nonconformist ideas in the tsarist era.29
As the book draws to an end, Ivanov and one of the engineers
prepare to fly off to the Earths moon. They finally visit the moon
and use a lunar vehicle to travel on its surface. American astro-
nauts would use a lunar module to collect samples and research
the moons surface some forty years later, much like Ivanov and
his fictional cohort do in Tsiolkovskiis novel. In the end, the
message left by Tsiolkovskii to the actual reader, and fictional
earthlings in the novel, is that humans need to make use of the
vast expanses of space. Tsiolkovskii, one can argue, thus develops
a fictional plot line in which ordinary humans slowly realize the
vast potential in colonizing space as they realize the voyage is
feasible. The plot line then transcends the observers (within the
novel) as the author tells the readers themselves that the technical
expertise to achieve these goals is not too far off on the horizon.
Beyond the Earth, Tsiolkovskiis magnum opus, was finished
in the 1920s. However, he spent much of the bulk of that decade
engaged in research, popularization activities, and lecturing. He
also wrote voluminously on rocketry in his theoretical and scien-
tific treatises. He thus put science fiction writing on the backburner
for the mid-1920s, as he was involved in a myriad of other activi-
ties. However, in the late 1920s, toward the end of his life, when
Tsiolkovskii was finally attracting the attention of the Soviet
public for his visionary ideas on rocketry and space exploration,
he returned briefly to fictional narratives.
Tsiolkovskii returned to write science fiction after he had retired
permanently from teaching with his imaginative piece on astro-
nautics. His Aims of Astronautics, published in 1929, captured the
imagination of its readers because of the thoroughness with which
the author describes the tremendous labor and pursuits man will
make in outer space in order to colonize the cosmos. In this piece,
he spent a considerable amount of time discussing the creation of

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 76 chapter 4

an artificial dwelling in space and the specific temperature and

oxygen levels necessary for humans to survive there. He also dis-
cussed various satellites and their potential movement in space
through an ethereal medium. He thus still believed at this time in
ether as an element one needed to transgress in the cosmos.30 He
was criticized for some of his scientific arguments in his fictional
work ether as a medium of transport being one of them. Many
Soviet physicists, such as Iakov Frenkel, dismissed the notion
of ether, though Tsiolkovskii never referenced these debates in
his work. Frenkel argued in his The Mystique of World Ether,
published in 1925, that it was more of a religious mystical con-
cept than a scientific one.31 Though, as the historian of science
Alexander Vucinich pointed out, Einstein himself in April 1920 (five
years before Frenkels work) presented a paper at Leiden University
where he argued that according to the general theory of relativity,
space without ether was unthinkable.32 So it was not completely
unrealistic for Tsiolkovskii to be discussing an ether medium in
outer space toward the end of the decade.
Toward the beginning of the Stalin era, Tsiolkovskii finished his
science fiction endeavors with a number of short pieces conceived
at the end of the 1920s. Living Beings in Space and The Biology
of Dwarfs and Giants mostly dealt with issues of the biology of
beings in the future, and the evolutionary changes of living crea-
tures conquering, according to Tsiolkovskii, solar space. In both of
these stories Tsiolkovskii dealt with the periodicity of matter and
proposed his bizarre visions of animals living in outer space. He
also proposed, in almost a Fedorovian fashion, how through exer-
cise and living in outer space, humans would also evolve into more
fit and superior beings.
In Biology of Dwarfs and Giants, he proposed rhetorical ques-
tions to his readers regarding what humans could achieve if they
lived in a gravity-free world. This story focused on Tsiolkovskiis
obsession with overcoming gravitational forces and hinted at the
transformation of the human body as it evolved in outer space.
Biology of Dwarfs and Giants was actually a spin-off of an earlier
manuscript Tsiolkovskii had been trying to finish back in 1920 and
1921, entitled Mechanics and Biology. In actuality, he had begun

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 cross-fertilizing futuristic literary genres 77

Mechanics and Biology back in 1882 and had sent an earlier draft
of the first part of that piece to the well-known Russian physiolo-
gist I. M. Sechenov for his appraisal. Sechenov was interested in
Tsiolkovskiis manuscript, but it was only completed in abridged
form later in the late 1920s as the fictional Biology of Dwarfs and
Giants.33
His last major piece of science fiction was a story called the
Island of Ether. This was again one of his more didactic, pedagogi-
cal stories that detailed, mostly for young readers, the Milky
Way Galaxy and its many stars and planets. Tsiolkovskii discussed
the various dimensions of these interstellar configurations, and
how the larger bodies were suns in the period of their greatest
brilliance.34
In Tsiolkovskiis piece, the narrator described his perspective
on the outskirts of the Milky Way Galaxy. Here he believed we had
clusters of stars that resembled miniature galaxies. He believed
they were hundreds of light years across and thousands of light
years apart. Tsiolkovskii described in this story how the Milky
Way consists of thousands of millions of gaseous nebulae and suns
that are either childless or have what he called families (that is,
planetary systems). The explosions of the fading suns fill space
with a host of comets and help to create new gaseous nebulae.35

Tsiolkovskiis Island of Ether was a very poignant and personal

last science fiction educational tale to end his career on, especially
for his young readers. It was indeed on the roof of his porch, just
outside of his laboratory and workshop, that he often was seen
lecturing to his students and local amateurs on the galaxy they
could see through his telescope. While working in Kaluga, I sat
one afternoon out on that veranda with one of the curators of
Tsiolkovskiis museum. The curator told me that in the 1920s,
Tsiolkovskiis family members used to refer to the door that led
to this sloping roof as the door to outer space. This was both
a literary metaphor as well as a literal depiction for how his stu-
dents entered into this astronomical world of wonders when
Tsiolkovskii had his astronomy nights. The curator imparted to me
that Tsiolkovskii also had a hand-held telescope that children and

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 78 chapter 4

his family enjoyed peering through on clear nights as they gazed

at the stars above.
On these occasions, Tsiolkovskii would gather everyone around
and tell marvelous stories of the constellations, planets, nebulae,
and shooting stars. Like in Island of Ether, which gives a wonder-
ful description of the Milky Way, Tsiolkovskii would actually recant
these stories on evenings at his house. Thus his informal stories
and his published science fiction became interchangeable, a part
of both his imaginative, educational, and informal social world.
(This was similar to the way he argued penning his science fiction
was a process, like in a laboratory, for playing out scientific ideas
in his own mind.) This visionary rocket theorist exemplified all
these complex characteristics wrapped in one; and his stories
reflected his visions, imagination, transformational notions, and
his pedagogical instincts. Ultimately, he was a good and simple
storyteller, and sought to inspire young minds in person and in
print.

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 STALIN, KHRUSHCHEV, AND THE

SPACEMAN TECHNOLOGY,

5 SOVIET NATIONAL IDENTITY,

AND THE MEMORIALIZATION OF

A LOCAL HERO IN THE DAWN

OF SPUTNIK, 19281957

In the final years of his life, K. E. Tsiolkovskii contin-

ued to theorize and write about the possibility of spaceflight and
inhabiting other worlds in the cosmos. He was in voluminous cor-
respondence with a variety of technical and engineering institutes
involved in rocket research. Throughout the last seven years of his
life, prominent technicians and scientists visited him in Kaluga.
These scientists also wrote to him about his inspirational novels
and writings, saying he was a catalyst for their own scientific work.
Tsiolkovskii, in the final year of his life, would be canonized by the
Stalinist regime with a celebrated May Day speech from Red Square
in 1935. Furthermore, his legacy would live on during countless cel-
ebrations, particularly during the 1957 centennial celebration of his
birth that coincided fortuitously with the launching of Sputnik I. By
the time the Khrushchev era came to a close, he would become a
household name in Soviet Russia; furthermore, his impact on rock-
etry globally would be heralded as visionary by the Soviets and
westerners, and then modified and critiqued from within Russia
after 1991 for its limitations.

STALINS CULTURAL REVOLUTION,

TECHNOLOGICAL VISIONS, AND THE END
OF TSIOLKOVSKIIS CAREER, 19281935

In the last seven years of his life, Tsiolkovskii traveled little,

barely leaving Kaluga, with the exception of a few ceremonial visits
to Moscow between 1932 and 1935, the year of his death. He
corresponded avidly with young scientists, however, and wrote

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 80 chapter 5

voluminous passages on rocketry and interplanetary travel.

Throughout the 1920s, Tsiolkovskii struggled to design a rocket on
paper that would not be weighed down excessively by liquid pro-
pellant. His solution was to develop a two-stage rocket, which he
elaborated upon in his 1929 piece Space Rocket Trains.1 The first
stage would be the ground rocket, which would move along the
ground and in the dense layers of the atmosphere at high speeds.2
However, it should be noted that his idea of multistage rockets
was not new. Goddard had thought of this in 1914 as well as
Oberth in 1923. Even Russians had conceived of this notion, such
as Iuri Kondratyuk in 1917. Yet Tsiolkovskii in Space Rocket Trains
did not confine himself to enunciating the operating principles
of multistage rockets. He actually was more interested in detailed
mathematical formulas to generate cosmic velocities by means
of rocket engines with chemical propellants in reality, one of
the main technical contributions he would be remembered for by
later engineers, such as Sergei Korolev. Furthermore, Tsiolkovskii
believed that the maximum velocity attained by multistage rockets
was given by the sum of the additional velocities of all the stages.3
In Aims of Astronautics (1929), he continued to discuss the
colonization of outer space by humans. He believed the chief
purpose of space exploration, and therefore rocket flights, was the
ultimate establishment of colonies or extended settlements in the
cosmos. He believed this would first take place around the Earth
and then in the vast reaches of the universe. He envisaged a cosmos
literally filled with industrial and residential bases in which
humans organized their life in a radically new environment.4 Fur-
thermore, he had an optimistic view of the future of the human
race, in that by colonizing the cosmos it would achieve a type of
immortality. Though this immortality differed from N. Fedorovs
notion of resurrection, it had an element of the ceaselessness of
mankind as it conquered the outer limits of the universe.
There may have been a subtle eugenic notion to Tsiolkovskiis
faith in the perfection of the human race as it conquered nature.
This transformationalism, however, may have fit into the Stalinist
industrialization project and transplanted Stalins ecological
paradigm of the transformation of nature with a concept of

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 stalin, khrushchev, and the spaceman 81

transformation of the cosmos. Yet one must be careful comparing

his unbounded vision of space colonization and immortality to the
totalitarian notions of racial or social perfection and domination
(of nature and other humans) so common to the 1930s in Germany
or Soviet Russia.
Though Tsiolkovskii continued to write in Kaluga, as his health
deteriorated he seemed to write pieces that were summaries of
earlier concepts. In 1932 he wrote Reaching the Stratosphere,
in which he summarized his many years of research on rocket
energetics and the properties of explosives in engines. Most of
this piece discussed the properties explosives must possess to
fire rocket engines, and in this piece he formulated the thermody-
namic characteristics of liquid propellants.5 His last summary
piece, Rocket Squadron, suggested a slightly different method,
however, of generating cosmic velocities than his earlier work on
this topic suggested. Here he elaborated on connecting rockets in
parallel so they could transfer propellants to one another in stages.
The process of transferring the propellant continued, in this model,
until one rocket was left which carried the spacecraft to the desired
cosmic velocity.6
From the late 1920s until the mid-1930s, Tsiolkovskiis residence
in Kaluga almost became an informal nexus for the birth of Soviet
cosmonautics. He not only popularized notions of spaceflight,
but also corresponded and met with numerous representatives of
space institutes (which were founded in this period) as almost
the spiritual patron of Russian rocketry. On the one hand, this
phenomenon alone can be viewed as an anthropological ritual in
which rocket specialists would contact the visionary of Kaluga.
However, it can more plainly be understood as an indication of how
Tsiolkovskii was a catalytic inspiration to an entire generation of
Soviet rocket enthusiasts.
It is not surprising then that during this period a number of
rocket societies and institutes sprang up in Moscow and Leningrad
and that these organizations kept in close contact with Tsiolkovskii.
In 1928, a Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) was set up in Leningrad
under the Soviet military, with the specific guidance of General
M. N. Tukachevsky. In Leningrad the GDL began theoretical and

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 82 chapter 5

experimental studies in the field of electric and liquid-fuel

rocket engines, experiments that were led by V. P. Glushko. Like
Tsiolkovskii, Glushko was interested in artificial satellites and
space exploration and was inspired by Tsiolkovskiis early novels
on these topics. Glushko himself even wrote popular scientific
articles on space and rocketry in the Leningrad journal Nauka i
tekhnika (Science and Technology).7
Before working for the Leningrad GDL, Glushko had been a
young student at Leningrad State University. He avidly corre-
sponded with the elder Tsiolkovskii, whom he saw as a popularizer
as well as a space visionary. On September 9, 1923, Glushko wrote
Tsiolkovskii in Kaluga saying he had read I. Perelmans book on
interplanetary travel, and was fascinated by the part that popular-
ized the work of Tsiolkovskii.8 He continued to tell the rocket
specialist how his novels were particularly interesting and inspi-
rational to him. Furthermore, in October 1923 he began a lengthy
exchange with Tsiolkovskii on more substantive matters, such as
Tsiolkovskiis notion of the slow release of a liquid propellant in a
hypothetical rocket engine.9 These letters clearly attest to the effect
Tsiolkovskii had on young rocket specialists, especially those such
as Glushko, who would later go on to design real rockets such as
Energiya (energy).
In 1931 in Moscow and Leningrad, two groups to study jet pro-
pulsion formed around a number of young researchers. These
groups became known collectively as GIRD (Group for the Study of
Reactive Motion), with the Moscow branch headed by the young
S. P. Korolev, who would become the most famous of the earliest
rocket designers. Some of Korolevs early influences included the
many space exhibits, science fiction novels, and films of the Soviet
1920s discussed earlier. Most of all, he claimed that the writings of
K. E. Tsiolkovskii had an influence on his early interest in space
flight and rocketry.10 In September 1931, the secretary of GIRD in
Moscow contacted Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, informing him of the
formation of the organization, and that Korolev was directing its
Moscow group.11
By 1933 the GIRD institutions amalgamated, a process that
would lay the foundations for the future development of Soviet

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 stalin, khrushchev, and the spaceman 83

rocketry. This aggregate organization became known as the Scien-

tific Research Institute of Reactive Motion (RNII). The founders of
this organization, including Korolev, claimed that Tsiolkovskii was
their inspirational leader and they made him an honorary member
of their engineering board in 1934. A top-ranking military engineer,
I. T. Kleimenov, was named head of the institute, with Korolev as
his deputy. In November 1933, RNII was officially housed under the
Peoples Commissariat of Heavy Industry, and the new organiza-
tion contained many members of the Leningrad GDL as well as
both GIRD organizations.12
Nearly every engineer and rocket designer who played some role
in the development of Soviet cosmonautics corresponded with
Tsiolkovskii during the end of his life. Among these included popu-
larizers (such as I. Perelman and N. A. Rynin) and scientists such
as those involved in the aforementioned organizations (such as
S. Korolev and I. Kleimenov). Tsiolkovskii corresponded with not
only famous Soviet engineers, but also specialists from Western
Europe. This correspondence, held in the Academy of Sciences
archives, shows the adulation that was widely felt for the don of
Russian rocketry.
Though Tsiolkovskii had been aware of Oberths work, he only
corresponded with him briefly toward the end of 1929. Tsiolkovskii
had sent Oberth handwritten and printed copies of his theoretical
work on rocketry. Oberth wrote Tsiolkovskii from Berlin on October
24, 1929, thanking him for the manuscripts Tsiolkovskii had sent
and added, I am sorry I did not hear about your work prior to now,
or I may have even been further along with my own analysis and
discoveries.13 Tsiolkovskii replied later that month with a letter to
Oberth where he mentioned, I appreciate your correspondences
and admire your work, it is sincerely what I have been dreaming
of all along.14 As evidenced by Oberths letter, Tsiolkovskiis work
was finally being recognized as seminal to the growth of rocketry
and space exploration.
Besides these more cordial, laudatory exchanges of letters with
foreign scientific luminaries, Tsiolkovskii had more substantive
exchanges with a number of engineers from the aforementioned
institutes. On May 31, 1933, the head of Moscows famed GIRD

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 84 chapter 5

institute asked Tsiolkovskii to send them material on his theoreti-

cal work and drawings and schemata that they could place in their
working library at the institute.15 When the Moscow and Leningrad
GIRDs were amalgamated into the RNII, the institutes Jet Propul-
sion Laboratorys chief wrote him in 1935 and said he was very
interested in seeing his tables and graphs on velocities of rocket
engines.16 After they received some of his manuscripts, they wrote
him back on June 20, 1935, thanking him for corresponding with
them, and they urged him to continue to participate in their work
even from Kaluga by correspondence.17 Though at times ceremo-
nial and even ritualistic, these correspondences also combined a
sincere reverence for Tsiolkovskiis early theoretical and mathe-
matical calculations. These institutes and their staffs held it both
obligatory and inherently interesting to have the grandfather of
cosmonautics as an honorary member, further substantiating
their own position in a history of Russian rocketry going back to
the tsarist era.

MYTHOLOGY AND THE SOVIET CANONIZATION OF

DED COSMOSA (GRANDFATHER COSMOS), 19351957

In Stalins Russia, from his home in Kaluga, Tsiolkovskii tried to

shape his identity as an educator of the people (see figure 13) with
a close connection to the locale and his students. He had endless
photos taken of himself as an inventor, laboring in his workshop,
where he also wrote his voluminous tracts (see figure 14). Yet as
the Stalinist state evolved in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tsi-
olkovskii was more consistently called on to serve as a poster boy
for the regime as his picture appeared in newspapers and journals
alongside collective farm workers (see figure 15), pioneers and
Komsomol groups (see figures 16 and 17), students, and aeronauti-
cal technical societies (see figure 18). His image and public identity,
therefore, was slowly being shaped as the founding father of
cosmonautics, whose eclectic talents as educator, specialist, and
lecturer made him eventually a Soviet household name.18
To some extent he fostered that official identity, because he had
taken part in soliciting funding from the state back in 1918, though

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 stalin, khrushchev, and the spaceman 85

he simultaneously resisted being fully co-opted by the Soviet state

for propaganda. In the editorial Is This Mere Fantasy, he argued
that his popular tracts and science fiction novels had a purpose to
inspire future physicists to create rockets of superior design to his
own, and to help cultivate a public mindset that would support
funding these projects. He insisted these were the words of a uni-
versal, public educator dreaming of spaceflight, and his words were
devoid of Soviet jargon or phraseology. Furthermore, near his death,
he realized the need for integration and international cooperation
in space research, while a few of his novels and science fiction even
had a variety of characters from capitalist and socialist countries
working together.19
Nevertheless, the nationalistic regime to some extent saw
Tsiolkovskiis research and his persona as an opportunity to boast.
On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday celebration in 1932,
numerous rocket institutes invited him to Moscow to partake in
festivities in his honor. However, because of his health (and general
unease with crowds in the large cities), he declined most (but not
all) of these invitations. However, it was difficult for this visionary
to decline the request of the Soviet regime itself. Finally, in Novem-
ber 1932, he ventured to Moscow to receive the famed Order of
the Red Banner of Labor, which was presented to him by M. I.
Kalinin, a member of the Politburo, during a ceremony at the
Kremlin.20
The festivities in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday began in
Kaluga oblast in 1932 but soon spread to Moscow and the Central
Committee itself. These festivities, held in September 1932, were
planned and financed by the Kaluga City Soviet many of the
meetings and festivities were either outdoors in the Kaluga town
center or in the Kaluga Concert Hall on Lenin Street. These gather-
ings were held in his honor, and Tsiolkovskii (with his entire family)
attended many of these, with crowds in the street getting a glimpse
of the local hero.21 A month later, in October 1932, a motion
was made by the Narkompros Collegium in Moscow to honor
Tsiolkovskii nationally in some manner.22 This was soon followed
by a recommendation by the Moscow Oblast Soviet to the Central
Committee of the Communist Party on October 17, 1932.23 On

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 86 chapter 5

October 18, 1932, the next day, the presidium of the Central Com-
mittee of the Communist Party approved a protocol to issue in
November 1932 to Tsiolkovskii the Order the of Red Banner of Labor
in the Kremlin hall itself.24
In 1932, after these festivities, the Soviet government awarded
Tsiolkovskii financially for his technical feats. The Central Com-
mittee of the Communist Party in Moscow ordered the local Kaluga
Soviet in October 1932 to raise Tsiolkovskiis meager pension from
225 to 600 rubles. They also told the Kaluga City Soviet to fix his
house and help finance his laboratory. Furthermore, the Moscow
Oblast Soviet created a fund of twenty thousand rubles in his
honor to be given as grants for inventive young students who came
up with aerodynamic designs beneficial to the state.25
Three years later, in the same year of his death, Tsiolkovskii was
also asked to give the famous 1935 May Day Speech about rocketry
from Red Square and was heralded as a Soviet hero. As mentioned
in the introduction, Tsiolkovskii could not attend this event because
of his health. Instead, he taped a speech in Kaluga that was broad-
cast from speakers in Red Square atop the Lenin Mausoleum during
the May Day parade with Stalin and his lieutenants in attendance.
Tsiolkovskii, while carefully praising the Communist Party itself,
predicted that humans would soon travel into outer space as they
easily flew jet engines in the air in the 1930s. This speech was
broadcast as Soviet jets and dirigibles filled the sky over Red Square
in honor of both Tsiolkovskiis dreams and Soviet power.26
When Tsiolkovskii died on September 19, 1935, his funeral (the
following day) in Kaluga was a Soviet public spectacle with local
throngs and Soviet government representatives alike hailing his
virtues in memorial speeches given in Lenin Square in Kaluga
(see figures 1924). Stalin sent official condolences and letters to
Tsiolkovskiis remaining family members, and sent dignitaries
from the party (A. Kiselev was sent from the Central Committee in
Moscow) to Kaluga to mourn his loss. As evidenced from copies of
letters shown to the author (the originals are located in the presi-
dential archival records of Russia), Tsiolkovskii had actually sent
Stalin several letters six days prior to his death, one of which
bequeathed his entire diary, handwritten notes, and manuscripts

c05.indd 86 5/18/2009 3:02:09 PM

 Figure 13. Self-portrait
(c. 1929) of Tsiolkovskii in
his workshop in Kaluga,
located on the second floor of
his home. Photo courtesy of
Russian Academy of Sciences
archive in Moscow, ARAN,
fond 555, op. 2, d. 129, l. 1.

Figure 14. Self-portrait

(c. 1928) of Tsiolkovskii in
his workshop in Kaluga
among his homemade
wooden lathes on which he
made his models of dirigibles.
Photo courtesy of the Russian
Academy of Sciences archive
in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555,
op. 2, d. 144, l. 5.

c05.indd 87 5/18/2009 3:02:09 PM

 Figure 15. Photograph of Tsiolkovskii with collective farmers near Kaluga
oblast in 1935 the year of his death. Photo taken by unknown Pravda
photographer, courtesy of Russian Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow,
ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 149, l. 57.

Figure 16. Photo of young pioneer event at a local Moscow school

(c. 1930s-era) in honor of Tsiolkovskii and Soviet rocketry. Photo taken by
unknown Komsomolskaia pravda photographer, courtesy of Russian
Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 161, l. 7.

c05.indd 88 5/18/2009 3:02:11 PM

 Figure 17. September 18, 1932, photograph, by unknown Komsomolskaia
Pravda reporter, at a Tsiolkovskii lecture (Tsiolkovskii at podium) at the Kaluga
Dom Uchitelia (House of Education for Youth) with a special section of the
Union of Young Inventor-Workers. Photo courtesy of Russian Academy of
Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 148, l. 1.

Figure 18. Photograph of a 1933 public demonstration of the Stalin-era

technical society, Aviation and Chemistry. Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, second from
the left, was more frequently asked to take part in these festivities glorifying
the regime as the 1930s unfolded. These festivities were part of a larger
movement to expand public spectacles, while focusing on the achievements of
Soviet science and technology. Photo courtesy of Russian Academy of Sciences
archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 149, l. 3.

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 90 chapter 5

to Stalin and Kaganovich (and thus to Communist Party archives)

for further use by researchers. In another letter, Tsiolkovskii again
cleverly told Stalin how it was really only after the 1917 Revolution
that his ideas were more accepted and realized only with the
help of the Communist Party.27 Four days before Tsiolkovskiis
death, arrangements were made between local Kaluga party
leaders, such as B. Talia and Lazar Kaganovich (a ruling Politburo
member), with Stalins discretionary advice, to have the huge
amount of personal papers sent to Moscow after Tsiolkovskiis
death. Eventually the material was transferred from a Communist
Party storage site to its present day holding source in the Academy
of Sciences archives.28
The great irony is the academy and other elite tsarist institu-
tions had earlier in the century not been as receptive to some of
Tsiolkovskiis ideas. Sheila Fitzpatrick has recently argued that
letter writers to Soviet authorities, such as Tsiolkovskii, can be seen
as supplicants thanking the state and thus entering into a client-
patron communicative discourse. Sometimes these supplicants
show they are achieving goals for Soviet power, and simultane-
ously argue they were oppressed by the tsarist regime. Tsiolkovskii
in his autobiographical letters and appeals to authority for funding,
as shown earlier, followed to some extent this pattern described
by Fitzpatrick.29
On September 20, the day of the funeral, A. Kiselev from Moscow
gave the official party memorial speech, while the head of the
Kaluga Raikom (Treivas) gave the memorial speech that followed.30
Furthermore, an official Communist Partystyle obituary appeared
prominently in Pravda on September 20, 1935, further substantiat-
ing the preeminent position that Stalin placed on Tsiolkovskiis
image in Soviet history. Both the eulogies at the funeral and the
Pravda official obituary focused on how Tsiolkovskii was a man of
the people and an autodidact in essence this made his scientific
feats more special and Soviet.31
Jeffrey Brooks, in his seminal work on the Soviet press and
public culture, has argued that these eulogies, such as those at
Tsiolkovskiis funeral, were part of the theatrics of Soviet state
propaganda. Brooks argues that this role-play between patron

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 stalin, khrushchev, and the spaceman 91

(Stalin) and recipient of the gift (Tsiolkovskii) was part of an

elaborate construct of state mythology.32 Brooks, drawing on the
work of identity theorists such as Charles Taylor, further argues
that the Soviet state diminished the role of individual citizens as
historical actors and shifted agency from society toward the state
and party leader.33 Yet Brooks does not necessarily recognize how
those such as Tsiolkovskii constructed and fashioned their own
identities within these political frameworks. In Tsiolkovskiis case,
he actually believed he was ostracized by the Russian scientific
elite of tsarist times, while he did not completely envisage himself
in official Soviet terms either. Furthermore, in this case, the official
Soviet obituary incorporated some of Tsiolkovskiis own biographi-
cal fashioning as a so-called Soviet grassroots teacher. The Soviet
obituary thus ironically appropriated the autobiographical mate-
rial that Tsiolkovskii himself created back in 1918 when he appealed
to the Socialist Academy for monetary patronage. This elaborate
discursive venture is thus more generatively complex, particularly
as to whether the client (that is, Tsiolkovskii) or the new patron
(that is, the Soviet state) is responsible for shaping the content of
these rhetorical rituals.
Though the Communist Party had started to mythologize
Tsiolkovskii as a founding father of cosmonautics, his legacy went
somewhat dormant in the 1940s and early 1950s. However, the
launching of Sputnik in 1957 fortuitously coincided with the cen-
tennial of his birth. The Khrushchev regime, and particularly the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, decided to feature Tsiolkovskii in their
celebratory ceremonies for Sputniks success by hosting centennial
lectures and events in his honor. Thus Stalins founding father of
cosmonautics cleverly became Khrushchevs grandfather space
(Ded cosmosa).
With the launching of Sputnik in 1957, as part of the myriad of
celebratory events, a host of journals filled pages with laudatory
articles on Soviet rocketry, the history of space flight, and the life
of the new cosmonaut. They included eclectic journals such as
Ogonek (Little Flame), literary journals such as Literaturnaia gazeta
(Literary Journal), and more politicized official ones such as Kom-
munist and Partiinaia zhizn (Party Life). Paul Josephson has argued

c05.indd 91 5/18/2009 3:02:15 PM

 Figure 19. September 20, 1935, photo of Tsiolkovskiis open casket with Soviet
medals shown prominently by Pravda photographer. This photo accompanied
various obituaries in prominent Soviet newspapers such as Pravda. Photo
courtesy of Russian Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555,
op. 2, d. 154, l. 1.

Figure 20. September 20, 1935, photo of the funeral procession for Tsiolkovskii
in Kaluga Russia. Photo courtesy of Russian Academy of Sciences archive in
Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 155, l. 1.

c05.indd 92 5/18/2009 3:02:15 PM

 Figure 21. September 20, 1935, photo of a gathering in Lenin Square, Kaluga,
Russia, for the funeral procession of Tsiolkovskii. Throngs of local Kalugans,
and those from surrounding provincial towns, came to view the burial of
Tsiolkovskii. Photo courtesy of Russian Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow,
ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 155, l. 13.

Figure 22. September 20, 1935, photo of the funeral procession for Tsiolkovskii
with local and central Soviet officials (accompanied by a local band) present in
Lenin Square, Kaluga, Russia. Photo courtesy of Russian Academy of Sciences
archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 155, l. 14.

c05.indd 93 5/18/2009 3:02:17 PM

 Figure 23. September 20, 1935, photo of burial site of K. E. Tsiolkovskii in local
Kaluga park near his home and laboratory by the Oka River (near the current
National Museum of Soviet Cosmonautics) in Kaluga, Russia. Photo courtesy of
Russian Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 155,
l. 26.

Figure 24. September 20, 1935, memorial speeches by Soviet officials after the
burial of K. E. Tsiolkovskii in a local Kaluga park near his home. Placards of
Stalin were prominently placed around the burial site to show the unity of
Tsiolkovskii and the Communist Party leader. Photo courtesy of Russian
Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 162, l. 2.

c05.indd 94 5/18/2009 3:02:18 PM

 stalin, khrushchev, and the spaceman 95

that while most writers (and journalists) glorified Soviet achieve-

ments in space, there were the occasional letters to editors (which
were actually published in newspapers such as Komsomolskaia
Pravda) that questioned the efficacy of the space effort yet they
were generally anomalies.34 Still, some literary figures such as Ilia
Ehrenburg were concerned about how technology and the space
race obscured the importance of other aspects of Soviet life on
earth, such as the development of literature and the arts. Yet even
these public rhetorical queries were never outright diatribes against
the regimes achievements.35
Celebrations and mass rallies (particularly in Moscow), how-
ever, became an important site for the Soviet masses to become
involved in the spectacle of display for Soviet cosmonautics in the
late 1950 and early 1960s. Planetariums hosted lectures on outer
space, short stories for adults and children were written with
exaggerated platitudes by writers, while Soviet composers created
popular songs (especially short chastushki) to be sung to children
at schools celebrating Sputnik.36 Official institutions such as the
Academy of Sciences, however, became the greatest proponents
and conduits for disseminating more detailed public lectures on
the significance of these achievements. In actuality, it was the real
father of the Russian space program, S. P. Korolev, the director of
the postWorld War II Soviet rocket program, who was asked to
direct these celebrations at the academy and give the 1957 keynote
commemorative speech for the capstone series of events in
Tsiolkovskiis honor.
Korolev was clearly directed by the academy to mythologize
Tsiolkovskiis feats as the roots of great Soviet achievements.
Indeed, many of the speeches honoring Tsiolkovskii claimed he
was the first to conceive of multistage rocketry and spaceflight in
general. In the 1940s during the war, but primarily after the war
and into the 1950s, the Soviets make unsubstantiated claims of
national priority in scientific discoveries. These claims ranged from
the ludicrous assertion of the invention of the electric light, radio,
and telegraph, to more specific scientific assertions that Soviets
discovered, for instance, a variety of disciplines such as structural
chemistry.37 In the case of Tsiolkovskii, however, Korolev (as well

c05.indd 95 5/18/2009 3:02:20 PM

 96 chapter 5

as other physicists) tried to simultaneously normalize Tsiolkovskiis

achievements, and isolate his more concrete contributions thus
not completely glorifying his legacy. In the keynote 1957 com-
memorative speech at the academys celebration, Korolev argued
that Tsiolkovskiis equations and studies came to a number of
cardinal conclusions that were the basis of rudimentary technol-
ogy in the rocketry of the Soviet 1950s and 1960s. He claimed that
it was Tsiolkovskii who first advanced the notion that the velocity,
and hence range, of a rocket increase by increasing the relative
supply of explosives (propellant) carried by a rocket.38
In his recent memoirs, the Soviet physicist and director of the
former Soviet Space Research Institute, Roald Sagdeev, believes
that in scientific terms Tsiolkovskiis series of equations on velocity
were probably his greatest crowning achievement and that earlier
Soviet propaganda on Tsiolkovskii probably overshadowed this
small, yet important technical fact. Sagdeevs subtle, yet important,
point is that overt Soviet propagandizing of scientists achieve-
ments often obscured or overshadowed (as in Tsiolkovskiis case)
real technical contributions.39 However, all the same, Tsiolkovskiis
notions of multistage rockets, artificial earth satellites, and a host
of futuristic dreams of humans living in outer space should not be
discounted as they were certainly visionary for his time. Further-
more, even those such as Sagdeev realized the inspirational, less
palpable, significance of Tsiolkovskiis dreams particularly how
this autodidactic visionary touched the minds of so many young,
future rocket scientists, engineers, and dreamers such as himself.
By seeing him in this manner and framing him with other scien-
tists, Tsiolkovskii can be characterized as an inspirational catalyst,
and ethereal mentor, for an entire generation of Soviet rocket spe-
cialists. This may also be another of his subtle, but equally potent,
legacies in Russian scientific culture.

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 EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION
chudo (wonder) or chudak (crank),
the legacy of tsiolkovskii in the
khrushchev era and beyond 1964

he year after the 1957 Tsiolkovskii centennial

T celebrations, laudatory memorialization of his

legacy continued at the local, national, and inter-
national level. In 1958, the Khrushchev regime
approved the building of a monumental statue to Tsiolkovskii in a
local Kaluga park near his home. The Khrushchev regime then sent
Central Committee representatives, as well as Pravda reporters, to
commemorate Tsiolkovskii during the public ceremony on June 1,
1958. The ceremony, including a speech by committee member
A. A. Egorov, was covered prominently in Pravda the next day.1 On
April 8, 1959, a number of academicians in the Soviet Academy
suggested to the regime that a national museum of cosmonautics,
in honor of Tsiolkovskii, be built in Kaluga. This request came from
well-known specialists in Soviet aeronautics, with high connec-
tions, such as A. N. Tupolev.2 Through the public cajoling of these
academics, the museum would be built and completed eight years
later.
Between 1957 and 1960, a number of documentary and artistic
films were made about Tsiolkovskiis life and legacy in relation to
Soviet rocketry. The first was made in late 1957 (the year of Sputnik
I) as a popular-scientific film entitled Path to the Stars. The movie
was filmed at the Leningrad motion picture studios, starring
G. Solovev, the Soviet actor, as Tsiolkovskii.3 Another film, loosely
based on Tsiolkovskiis life, appeared in 1958 and was entitled
Man on the Planet Earth. This film was actually funded by the
publishing-administrative division of the Central Committee of the
Soviet Communist Party. V. Solovevas laudatory screenplay was
actually printed by the party in the journal Artistic Film in 1958.4
However, letters (found in the Academy of Sciences archive) were
sent to the Central Committees print division complaining about
the scientific and biographical accuracy of the film. Most of these
letters to authorities came from anonymous citizens of Kaluga

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 98 epilogue and conclusion

who evidently (at least according to the letters) felt the Communist
Party was propagandizing Tsiolkovskii as a national hero without
paying homage to his true technical contributions to rocketry.5
This tension and discourse between local citizens, eager to nor-
malize Tsiolkovskiis scientific contributions, and the Soviet state,
ready to mythologize a local hero, is a fascinating dynamic in the
process of hero worship or hagiography. It also offers a window
into local public and central state tension and dialogue.
On September 18, 1960, the Leningrad State film studio released
the artistic-documentary film entitled Great Foreknowledge, on
the life, dreams, and scientific work of K. E. Tsiolkovskii. The film
opened in the autumn of 1960 in Moscow, Leningrad, Kaluga, and
Sverdlovsk, among others.6 Finally, on June 13, 1961, Yuri Gagarin,
touring Russian cities, came to give a well-publicized speech in
Kaluga in honor of Tsiolkovskiis legacy. He laid the first brick for
the national cosmonautic museum to much fanfare in the local
and national press. He argued that even in our present day, many
cosmonauts and academics have studied the work of Tsiolkovskii,
to whom this museum will be dedicated in spirit.7
Three years after Khrushchev was ousted from power, in the fall
of 1967, the National Museum of Cosmonautics, dedicated to K. E.
Tsiolkovskii, opened its doors in Kaluga to the public. Simultane-
ously, the local Kaluga Soviet opened the house where Tsiolkovskii
lived and worked most of his life as a national relic to one of the
great Soviet heroes of early cosmonautics.8 The museum to this
day has exhibits in the upstairs floor on Tsiolkovskiis early experi-
ments in aerodynamics. While living and working in Kaluga, I was
given several private tours of this house and museum, and this
experience gave me an important sense of Tsiolkovksiis surround-
ings and working conditions. This firsthand understanding of his
workspace certainly added to what I have pieced together from
archival sources and photographs as well.
In the post-Khrushchev era, Tsiolkovskii was posthumously her-
alded in a variety of countries as one of the three founding fathers
globally of cosmonautics Goddard and Oberth being the other
two. In the 1960s, the French Aeronautic Society in Paris inducted
Tsiolkovskii into their ranks as one of the pioneers of cosmonau-

Epilogue.indd 98 5/18/2009 3:01:17 PM

 epilogue and conclusion 99

tics and rocketry. Furthermore, in the 1970s, the International

Aerospace Hall of Fame in San Diego, California, (among other US
institutions) gave recognition to Tsiolkovskii as one of the pioneers
in developing space velocities to escape the earths gravitational
field (as well as his early notions of the use of liquid propellants
in rockets).9
This international distinction (or myth) of the three giant fore-
bears of the modern space age has stuck to this day and has even
been substantiated in the popular mindset in journals and maga-
zines such as Life.10 At the beginning of their retrospective issue
in 2003, Life editors heralded Tsiolkovskiis 1903 visions of multi-
stage rockets (that would affect later Soviet engineers) as a pio-
neering notion of space travel. The editors clearly placed him in
the pantheon of three, dubbed the fathers of space travel:
Three modern pioneers who, as adults, freely acknowledged
having been influenced by Jules Verne in their youth were the
Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, the American
physics professor Robert Goddard and the Transylvania-born
Hermann Oberth, who would become the driving force of Germa-
nys missile and rocketry program. Each has been dubbed the
Father of Space Travel, and each can stake a reasonable claim.11
The editors at Life argued that Tsiolkovskii was all but ignored in
his homeland during his lifetime. This book, however, has tried to
not only resurrect the attention Tsiolkovskii was given before 1917
and during Stalins times, but also fill the void for interested readers
on his true life story and its relative place in modern Russian social,
cultural, and political history.

Understanding the making of a unique Soviet identity as Tsi-

olkovskiis is fundamental to his life story and its role in Russian
cultural and political history. Recently, Jochen Hellbeck, in analyz-
ing Stalin-era diaries, has focused on the formulation of a unique
Soviet subjective mindset when revolutionaries forged their
identity within the context of Stalins times.12 Using Foucaults
perspective on individual subjects as actors, Hellbeck has focused
particularly on how ideology in Soviet society worked as a creator
of individual experience. In his words, Anyone who wrote himself

Epilogue.indd 99 5/18/2009 3:01:17 PM

 100 epilogue and conclusion

into the revolutionary narrative acquired a voice as an individual

agent belonging to a larger whole.13 This perspective is similar, to
some extent, to Stephen Kotkins notion of speaking Bolshevik,
as his Magnitogorsk workers, in his opinion, positively engaged
the local and central Communist regime in building a Stalinist
city thus learning to act and speak within the context of a larger
movement.14
This newer sophisticated focus on subjectivity has been recently
challenged in the historiography of Soviet Russia in different and
subtle ways. For instance, Jeffrey Brooks, a modern Russian cultural
historian, has approached these issues more from a top-down
perspective when analyzing the Soviet-era press and its message.
Though his emphasis is on the states control of the process,
Brookss methods are more complex analytically in terms of the
development of cultural production and framing of choices that
citizens had to do to engage with the state. His analysis has em-
phasized more the economy of the gift, as the patron (the Soviet
regime) exclusively set the terms of engagement from above for
those who wished to forge a new Soviet identity.15
While these new perspectives cast complex analytical webs on
the development of a patron-client relationship and identity for-
mation in Soviet Russia, they dont necessarily offer a paradigm to
fully understand all Soviet individuals and their dynamic social
relationship, as well as struggle, with the state. Or if they do, they
leave out particularly those who, while engaging the Soviet state
with laudatory messages and pleas, may not have felt a part of the
holistic project of reshaping humanity that Hellbeck writes about
in his work. The Tsiolkovskii story may fall more into the pattern,
to some extent (yet not completely), outlined by Sheila Fitzpatrick,
in her most recent work, Tear Off the Masks.16 Fitzpatrick is meth-
odologically interested in social rather than personal identity in
her words the way people locate themselves in a social or group
context rather than the way they think about themselves as
individuals.17
David Laitin, a political scientist who studies the Baltic states
and linguistics, also concurs with Fitzpatrick that social identity
can be constructed, yet he argues the historical context people

Epilogue.indd 100 5/18/2009 3:01:18 PM

 epilogue and conclusion 101

live in defines the parameters within which they can fashion

their lives, so to speak.18 Modeling identity on earlier social psy-
chological work of Rom Harre and Erving Goffman, Fitzpatrick
(like Laitin) believes an individual can fashion his or her identity
based on not only cultural norms or subjective yearnings, but
also the historical context and sociopolitical parameters he or she
lived within.19 One could thus argue that Laitin, and Fitzpatrick
to some extent, offer a sociopolitical identity analysis of indivi-
duals that is somewhat a middle ground between Brooks and
Hellbeck.20
Tsiolkovskiis life can be framed within the context of these
debates since as mentioned earlier he starting fashioning his auto-
biography in 1918 after the revolution when appealing to the new
Soviet state for funding. Tsiolkovskii thus fashioned his own
identity within the political context of Soviet Russia to garner
support from a patron, knowing consciously the rules of the game.
Yet, at the same time, he was a believer that the imperial intel-
lectual elites had ostracized him as well. Though he did not espouse
the totality of the Stalinist transformationalist vision, he did seem
to acknowledge the Communist Party for its support of interplan-
etary rocketry and research. All the same, near his death in 1935,
within the context of interviews he gave and editorials he wrote
for the Soviet press, Tsiolkovskii seemed to fall back on his own
personal motives and independent ends that is as an inspirer
of individual physicists and engineers, as a popularizer of physics
and a public educator, and as a public interlocutor of the virtues
of interplanetary spaceflight that included international coopera-
tion. The Tsiolkovskii story vis--vis the Bolshevik regime is
riddled therefore with ambiguity. As Natalia Kozlova has argued,
Soviet identity stories are filled with ambiguity in the period prior
to World War II especially. A citizen, appealing to authority, while
living in Soviet Russia, generally wrote themselves into the larger
political metanarrative; but also, as Kozlova reminds us, the result
never coincides with the expectation of power.21 In essence, this
created a system of mutual understanding between patron (Stalin
and the Soviet state) and supplicant (Tsiolkovskii) and does not
necessitate that the ideological underpinnings of that system be

Epilogue.indd 101 5/18/2009 3:01:18 PM

 102 epilogue and conclusion

completely adopted and assimilated as dogma by the recipient of

the gift.
Furthermore, Tsiolkovskii truly believed in the potential of even
didactic science fiction literature (devoid of politics and ideology)
to transform young scientists into visionaries ready to conquer,
through technical genius, the complexities of exiting the earths
atmosphere with the aid of jet-propelled rockets, though simulta-
neously, till days before his death, especially in letters to Stalin,
he still thanked the Communist Party for helping to realize his
dreams. He thus clearly knew how to either play the rhetorical
client-patron game of Soviet officialdom, or he more sincerely and
realistically knew it helped him garner support and meager finan-
cial aid and thus he literally recognized this basic premise and
made rational pleas to Stalin and his Politburo.
In Fitzpatricks or Brookss terms, Tsiolkovskiis pleas may
have been part of a simple transaction between a cultural and
scientific figure and the patron-state political leadership. Yet this
paradigm certainly does not explain all his complex motives and
actions. Like Hellbecks Stalin-era diarists, Tsiolkovskii also realisti-
cally and sincerely believed the Soviet state was more supportive
of nontraditional autodidacts. Indeed his story fit the local self-
taught hero paradigm of the new Soviet man or scientist quite
well. Yet this local Soviet hero, in his own terms, may not have
been bound ideologically to the new leadership. In the words of
Eric Naiman and Chistina Kiaer, Tsiolkovskiis ambiguous story
can be seen within the context of the lived contradictions of
the encounter between individual subjects and institutions
of power the contradictions through which modern modes of
identity are formed. This story thus offers a look at identity forma-
tion divorced from the totality of ideological modeling, yet focused
on support, patronage, and how ostracized individuals could liter-
ally be recognized from above (while inserting themselves from
below) within a new political and educational medium in the
Soviet era.
Furthermore, Tsiolkovskiis less official, less politicized, dreams
have been echoed in the countless memoirs of physicists and
scientists who were personally touched by his science fiction

Epilogue.indd 102 5/18/2009 3:01:18 PM

 epilogue and conclusion 103

novels, inventions, and popular articles. This direct anthropological

relationship, between scientists and patron saint, is not part
of the state-client relationship. For instance, Valentin Glushko,
designer of Energiya and many rocket engines that operated on
Tsiolkovskiis dream of using liquid propellants, corresponded
with Tsiolkovskii as a teenager and was inspired by his popular
books.22 Though they recognized his constructed, luminary iden-
tity (see figures 25 and 26) and its politicized component, they
recollected mostly their personal impressions as either children
reading and deeply inspired by his works (therefore seeing him as
a chudo or miracle or wonder of Kaluga), or as young scientists
making pilgrimages to Kaluga to see the old man who the locals
sometimes called the chudak (crank) of provincial Kaluga.
Roald Sagdeev himself, the eminent Soviet physicist and science
advisor to Premier Mikhail S. Gorbachev, recognized the duality
in Tsiolkovskiis public identity. On the one hand, he believes
Tsiolkovskii was co-opted by the regime for its own purposes.
Furthermore, he argues that Stalin used Tsiolkovskiis 1935 broad-
cast from Red Square to further build the notion of the superiority
of Soviet technology. On the other hand, Tsiolkovskiis work became
better known in the 1920s and 1930s, precisely during Soviet
power, and many future space scientists read his popular work
voraciously.23 Furthermore, Sagdeev, in his recent memoir, believes
Tsiolkovskii must be revisited in this inspirational light that
has been shined on this complex issue.24 He vividly remembers
how his parents, mathematicians, walked proudly through Red
Square on the day of Tsiolkovskiis 1935 May Day speech and were
truly inspired about the possibility of space flight and the new
technological future as well.25 Loren Graham, the eminent histo-
rian of Russian science, in his recent memoirs recalled a similar
inspirational Soviet event when he marched through Red Square
in April 1961 to celebrate Yuri Gagarins circumnavigation of the
globe in a satellite. Graham too believed the celebration, though
part of Soviet propaganda, was actually genuine and heartfelt on
the part of the Soviet citizenry who participated, believing their
system had fostered great technical achievements in human
spaceflight.26

Epilogue.indd 103 5/18/2009 3:01:18 PM

 104 epilogue and conclusion

While focusing on his more important, if not narrow, technical

contributions to the history of rocketry, this book has also attem-
pted to circumnavigate the recent Russian historiography that
has either castigated Tsiolkovskii as a pure Bolshevik myth or
the previous Soviet-era historiography (or hagiography), which
has alternatively praised him as a technical genius. Instead, I
have attempted to place him in the context of his visionary
perspective on future rocket flight. He was part popularizer,
important local educator, a national and international inspira-
tional force, as well as a popular literary writer. His story tells us
much about the nature of provincial science education, science
popularization of rocketry, the cultural patron-client politics of
Soviet Russia, as well as how scientists are inspired to overcome
great obstacles.
Like his supposed mentor N. Federov, Tsiolkovskii did indeed
have a transformative vision for humans to live eternally in outer
space and thus regenerate, to some extent, the human race.27
However, this was neither the more utopian vision of earlier science
fiction writers such as A. Bogdanov writing about Communist
utopias on Mars, nor was it the Stalinist transformational para-
digm of the new Soviet man either. While he lamented the elite
nature of tsarist Russias science cohort, he also did not see himself
as purely a Soviet local hero. Yet he both rhetorically and realisti-
cally navigated the new Soviet terrain much like other scientists
learned to pursue their patron, while he also acknowledged how
the Soviet state had benefited his cause and that of countless
autodidacts like himself who were possibly ostracized by the tsarist
scientific elite. Furthermore, his popularization goals fit well into
the schemata of the young, scientized Marxist state in the 1920s
and 1930s that wished to spread science to the public.
The Russian etymological root chud perhaps leaves us with
this binary, ambiguous identity of either visionary inspirational
physicist or crank that the regime raised to glorifying heights to
use as the base to construct its superstructural pantheon of heroes
of Soviet cosmonautics.28 Yet, in the end, it is the personal (private)
and the public, as well as their nuanced points of intersection,
which provide the eclectic realm to reconstruct a unique multiple

Epilogue.indd 104 5/18/2009 3:01:18 PM

 Figure 25. 1928 photo taken at his writing desk in his home in Kaluga, Russia.
Photo courtesy of Russian Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond
555, op. 2, d. 128, l. 26.

Epilogue.indd 105 5/18/2009 3:01:18 PM

 Figure 26. 1932 photo taken in his study amid his papers and journals. The
photo was used widely by local and national newspapers when depicting
Tsiolkovskii as the wise old sage of Kaluga, Russia. Photo courtesy of Russian
Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow, ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 135, l. 9.

Epilogue.indd 106 5/18/2009 3:01:18 PM

 epilogue and conclusion 107

Soviet identity as Tsiolkovskiis. On some level, Tsiolkovskii also

served to link the countryside (simple life of this provincial teacher
and autodidact) with the sophisticated, urbane technological
future. To some extent, his deification by the theocratic state
became a quintessential official Soviet narrative of the Stalin and
Khrushchev eras, yet one that he wrote, refashioned, and com-
posed in his own individual manner as well thus leaving
Russians to this very day with varied opinions and conceptions of
who he was and what his legacy actually means.

Epilogue.indd 107 5/18/2009 3:01:19 PM

Epilogue.indd 108 5/18/2009 3:01:19 PM
 GLOSSARY

Selected List of Russian Terms and Abbreviations

Agit-Prop: The Administration of Agitation and Propaganda of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party
Central Committee: central decision-making body of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, elected by periodic
national congresses of the party
Glavnauka: Scientific Department of the Ministry of Enlightenment
Gosplan: The Soviet Governments Economic Planning Organization
khozraschet: commercial cost-accounting (programmatic under NEP,
critically relevant to book sales in the 1920s)
kolkhoz: collective farm
kolkhoznik ( f. kolkhoznitsa): collective farm member
Komsomol: Communist Youth League
kraeved: the regional studies movement
krai: province containing ethnically distinct autonomous regions
(oblasts) in the Soviet period
Narkompros: Soviet Commissariat (or Ministry) of Enlightenment
(Ministry of Education)
NEP: the New Economic Policy, introduced March 1921
obkomi: oblast (regional) Communist Party structures, provincial
party committee
oblast: administrative unit, province
Peoples Commissar: head of a government ministry (Peoples
Commissariat)
Politburo: political bureau of Communist Partys Central Committee
raion: administrative district, subordinate to oblast or krai
soviet: elected body with administrative functions
Stakhanovite: peasant or worker recognized for outstanding
production record
VTsIK: All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of
Peoples Deputies

glossary.indd 109 5/18/2009 3:01:20 PM

glossary.indd 110 5/18/2009 3:01:21 PM
 NOTES

PRELUDE
1. Pravda, April 15, 1961, 2.
2. Ibid.
3. For a monumental analysis of Khrushchev as a leader and politi-
cian, with a deft understanding of his psychological traits, see
William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2003).
4. See I. A. Slukhai, Russian Rocketry, A Historical Survey (Moscow,
1965).
5. See V. N. Sokolsky, Russian Solid-Fuel Rockets (Moscow, 1961).
6. Michael Stoiko, Soviet Rocketry: Past, Present, and Future (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 67.
7. Evgeny Riabchikov, Russians in Space (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1971), 11516.
8. Stoiko, Soviet Rocketry, 8.
9. A. V. Khramoi, Konstantin Ivanovich Konstantinov (Moscow, 1951), 23.
10. For an overview of these circles of professors in the physical sci-
ences in St. Petersburg in the nineteenth century, see A. Platov and
L. Kirpichev, Istoricheskii ocherk obrazovaniia i razvitiia artilleriiskogo
uchilitsa, 18201870 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1870). For more specific
biographical material on these particular professors, see Russkii
biograficheskii slovar (St. Petersburg, 1914), 26364.
11. For his collected lectures and for information on his rocket
designs and interests, see K. I. Konstantinov, O boevykh raketakh
(St. Petersburg, 1864). Konstantinovs work was published in an
array of artillery and military journals throughout the 1860s and
1870s. For an example of his analysis of rocketry and warfare, see
K. I. Konstantinov, Boevykh rakety v Rossii v 1867, Artilleriiskii
zhurnal, no. 5, 1867, 68.
12. For Konstantinovs work in Nikolaev, see Nikolaevskii vestnik,
no. 19, 1871.
13. Riabchikov, Russians in Space, 116.
14. See Khramoi, Konstantinov, 1819.
15. For a collection of some of Pomortsevs key writings on velocity
and wind resistance, see M. M. Pomortsev, Priviaznoi, svobodnyi
i upravliaemyi aerostaty (St. Petersburg, 1895).

Note.indd 111 5/18/2009 3:01:29 PM

 112 notes to pages 49

16. For a more detailed analysis of the relationship between pro-

vincial cultural development and science in Russia, see Andrews,
Local Science and Public Enlightenment: Iaroslavl Naturalists
and the Soviet State, 191731, in Provincial Landscapes: The Local
Dimensions of Soviet Power, 191753, 10524 (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). The first part of the chapter discusses
the roots of provincial science and its relationship to the state in
the prerevolutionary era.
17. For an elaboration of Gerasimovs design, see A. A. Blagonravov,
Soviet Rocketry: Some Contributions to Its History (Moscow, 1964).
18. For his classic analysis of dynamics and rocket projectiles in
motion, see I. V. Meshchersky, Dinamika tochki peremennoi massy
(St. Petersburg, 1897).
19. G. A Tokaty, Soviet Rocket Technology, in The History of Rocket
Technology: Essays on Research, Development, and Utility, 273 (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1964).
20. For an overview of Kilbachich and his work, see Blagonravov, Soviet
Rocketry.
21. Riabchikov, Russians in Space, 11718.
22. For an understanding of the early attempts in revolutionary Russia
to popularize ideas of air and space flight, as well as the original
historian who uncovered Kibalchichs legacy, see N. A. Rynin, Inter-
planetary Flight and Communication: Dreams, Legends, and Fantasies,
vol. 1 (Leningrad, 1928).
23. See Lise Blosset, Robert Esnault-Pelterie: Space Pioneer, in First
Steps toward Space (San Diego, CA: American Astronautical Society
Publication Press), 533. For the German side of the story, which
especially focuses on the early rocket specialists and their national
promotion, see Mike Neufeld, The Rockets and the Reich: Peenemunde
and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995).
For the promotion of an American iconic pioneer, see the early
biographical work of Lehman on the topic, especially Milton
Lehman, The High Man: The Life of Robert Goddard (New York: Farrar,
Straus, 1963).

INTRODUCTION
1. K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Osyshchestvliaetsia mechta chelovechestva,
Pervomaiskoe prevetstvie K. E. Tsiolkovskogo na plenke, speech
transcribed in K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Sbornik posviashchennyi pamiati
znamenitogo deiatelia nauki (Kaluga, 1935). Tsiolkovskii taped the

Note.indd 112 5/18/2009 3:01:30 PM

 notes to page 10 113

speech in his laboratory in Kaluga, Russia, during the last week of

April 1935.
2. One exception is an interesting yet short cultural analysis of
Tsiolkovskii and literary modernism by Michael Holquist. Though
sophisticated in its analysis of Tsiolkovskiis narratological
literature, this piece contains very few detailed references to
Tsiolkovskiis work, personal papers, or archives. Furthermore, it
does not analyze Tsiolkovskiis relationship with the Bolshevik
state and local and central scientific communities. See Michael
Holquist, Tsiolkovskii as a Moment in the Prehistory of the
Avant-Garde, in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and
Cultural Experiment, eds. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
3. At the Museum of Cosmonautics in Kaluga, one can read news-
paper articles about Tsiolkovskii and his role in Russian rocketry
written by many archivists, librarians, and space enthusiasts.
Many glorify his achievements in short editorial pieces in local
Kaluga journals, and the press offers very little perspective on his
role in Russian culture. While detailed and biographically infor-
mative, these articles indirectly defend Tsiokovskiis luminary
status against the new revisionists in the Academy of Sciences,
who have deconstructed this image to some extent. Many of these
articles have appeared in the local Kaluga newspaper over the last
decade, which I have read through extensively. The main regional
newspaper is entitled Vest Gazeta Kaluzhskoi Oblasti (Piece of
News Newspaper of the Kaluga Region). Articles from the
keepers of the faith, so to speak, include: Vera Alekseeva,
C nevesomostiu shutit nelzia, Vest, April 4, 1998, 1213. Alek-
seevas article is a short overview of Tsiolkovskiis important place
in the space pantheon.
4. For an analysis of this new journalistic movement to deconstruct
Tsiolkovskii in Russia, see G. Salakhutdinov, Blesk i nishcheta
K. E. Tsiolkovskogo, Inzhener, no. 11, 1999, 1821. Salakhutdinov
argues in his articles that the projects of Tsiolkovskiis rockets
were purely fantastical and did not differ from the fantasies of
Jules Verne and his underworld ships.
5. One can refer to A. A. Kosmodemianskiis classic 1950s-era bio-
graphy of the physicist, entitled Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: His Life
and Work. However, this was a very narrow technical description
of some of his hypotheses, with very little analytical, critical,

Note.indd 113 5/18/2009 3:01:30 PM

 114 notes to pages 1215

or cultural dimensions in placing Tsiolkovskiis life in the larger

historical or technological context. See A. A. Kosmodemianskii,
Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii, 18571935 (Moscow, 1987).
6. Russian cosmism has loosely been defined as the collective agency
to perfect the human race, overcome death, and achieve immor-
tality. For an analysis of the philosophical context of Tsiolkovskiis
cosmist visions, see Michael Hagemeister, Russian Cosmism
in the 1920s and Today, in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture,
ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, 18586 (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997). Nicholai Fedorov, however, has traditionally been
considered the founder of cosmisms philosophical foundations.
Other major representatives of this national tradition in Russia
of cosmic thinking include the aforementioned geochemist,
Vladimir Vernadskii (18631945), as well as the scientist Aleksandr
Chizhevsky (18971964).
7. Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, Creating a Rocket Industry, vol. 2,
NASA History Series, NASA Sp-20064110 (Washington, D.C., 2006),
168.
8. For a look at how Soviet citizens worked the system, so to speak,
while fashioning their lives, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the
Masks: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). For an innovative look at
how Soviet citizens (particularly aspiring Communists) wrote
their own biographies, and thus thought deeply about their own
subjectivity, see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a
Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2006). Hellbecks work is part of a broader school that attempts to
highlight Soviets as agents and thus focuses on subjects partici-
pating in a conscious process of engagement with the state.
Alexander Etkin takes on the recent Soviet subjectivity school by
arguing that, though sincere, some of these edited and resurrected
Soviet life-stories do not clearly delineate that there were few
alternatives in these Communists lives. See Alexander Etkin,
Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of Salvation? Kritika 6,
no. 1 (Winter 2005).

CHAPTER 1
1. See Evgeny Riabchikov, Russians in Space (New York: Doubleday,
1971), 9192.

Note.indd 114 5/18/2009 3:01:30 PM

 notes to pages 1519 115

2. V. N. Sokolsky, The Life and Work of Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii,

in K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Izbranny trudy, 3056 (Moscow, 1968).
3. Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk (hereafter cited as ARAN), fond
555, opis 2, delo 10, ll. 12.
4. Ibid., ll. 12.
5. Ibid., ll. 23.
6. See A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of
Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, trans. and ed. Reginald E. Zelnik, 78
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986).
7. ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 10, ll. 47.
8. For an account of Tsiolkovskiis early Moscow years and studies,
see O. Kechedzhiants, Tsiolkovskii, zhizn i tvorcheskaia deiatelnost
(Moscow, 1940), 78.
9. Peter Wiles, On Physical Immortality, Survey 5657 (1965): 13234.
See also Svetlana Semenova, Nikolai Fedorov (Moscow, 1990).
According to N. P. Peterson, a Russian historian of philosophy, as
early as the 1860s Fedorov had already incorporated the idea of
space travel into his bizarre philosophies of resurrection. See
Pismo N. Petersona k N. A. Chaevu o N. F. Fedorove, Russki arkhiv,
no. 5, (Moscow, 1915): 7881. Also see N. F. Fedorov, Filosofia obsh-
chego dela, ed. V. A. Kozhevnikov and N. P. Peterson (Moscow, 1913).
10. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experi-
mental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1989).
11. See Wiles, On Physical Immortality, 133.
12. George M. Young Jr., Nikolai F. Fedorov: An Introduction (Belmont,
Mass., 1979), 3132.
13. For an understanding of these informal science study circles and
their adaption and transformation in Soviet Russia, see Daniel
A. Alexandrov, The Politics of Scientific Kruzhok: Study Circles
in Russian Science and their Transformation in the 1920s, in Na
perelom, sovetskaia biologia v 20-x-30-x godakh, ed. E. I. Kolchinskii
(St. Petersburg, 1997).
14. V. Lvov, Priamoe voskhozhdenie, Neva, no. 2 (1966): 130.
15. Viktor Shklovskii, Kosmonavtika ot A do Ia, Literaturnaia gazeta,
April 7, 1971, 13.
16. For an analysis of the Bolshevik governments interest in some of
the practical ideas of the Biocosmists (such as the melting of the
polar caps to provide needed water for drought-stricken areas in
Soviet Russia), see S. V. Utechin, The Bolsheviks and Their Allies

Note.indd 115 5/18/2009 3:01:30 PM

 116 notes to pages 1925

after 1917: The Ideological Pattern, Soviet Studies 10 (195859):

11335.
17. K. E. Tsiolkovskii: Dokumenty i materialy, 18791966 gg. (Kaluga, 1968),
57.
18. Ibid., 7.
19. For an excellent analysis of the dynamic nature of Russian
provincial and rural schoolteaching as a profession, see Scott
J. Seregny, Russian Schoolteachers and Peasant Revolution: The Politics
of Education in 1905 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
20. Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and
Popular Pedagogy, 18611914 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986), 12628.
21. Iz otcheta statnogo smotritelia Borovskogo uezdnogo uchilishcha
za 1889g. o pabote K. E. Tsiolkovskogo, 20 Dekabria, 1889, Gosu-
darstvennyi Arkhiv Kaluzhskoi Oblasti (hearafter cited as GAKO),
f. 165, op. 2, d. 1527, ll. 5455.
22. Iz otcheta direktsii narodnykh uchilishch, 1 January 1893, GAKO,
f. 165, op. 2, d. 1599, l. 51.
23. Ibid., ll. 5253.
24. ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 10, l. 3.
25. M. K. Tsiolkovskaia-Kostina, Moi roditeli, in Tsiolkovskii: V Vospo-
minaniiakh sovremeninkov, 22930 (Tula, 1971).
26. Ibid., 231. Marias younger sister, Anna, was born on December 7,
1897. According to Maria, at least, Anna also concurred with
Marias depiction of the familys economic situation and her
fathers frugal nature. Ibid., 228.
27. V. E. Tsiolkovskaia, Nasha zhizn, in Tsiolkovskii: V Vospominani-
iakh sovremeninkov, 196 (Tula, 1971).
28. Tsiolkovskii: Dokumenty i materialy, 18791966 gg., 1314.
29. GAKO, f. 57, op. 2, d. 13, ll. 1045.
30. See Thoughts of A. I. Spasskaia, in Tsiolkovskii: V Vospominaniiakh
sovremeninkov, 14647 (Tula, 1971).
31. See Thoughts of A. A. Kubriavtseva, in Tsiolkovskii: V Vospomina-
niiakh sovremeninkov, 14647 (Tula, 1971).
32. GAKO, f. 57, op. 2, d. 13, ll. 107.
33. GAKO, f. 165, op. 2, d. 2421, l. 8.
34. For an analysis of the spread of evolutionary theory in the second-
ary schools in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, see James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik

Note.indd 116 5/18/2009 3:01:30 PM

 notes to pages 2740 117

State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia,

19171934 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003),
99105.
35. Tsiolkovskii: Dokumenty i materialy, 18791966 gg., 1718.
36. Ibid., 1819.
37. See ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 14, l. 29.
38. Tsiolkovskii: Dokumenty i materialy, 18791966 gg., 18.
39. Ibid.

CHAPTER 2
1. See Pages from a Young Mans Notebook, 187879 (Riazan), found
in Arkhiv Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (hereafter cited as ARAN),
fond 555, opis 2, delo 8.
2. ARAN, fond 555, opis 2, delo 14, ll. 2223.
3. K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Svobodnoe prostranstvo, in Izbrannye trudy,
2740 (Moscow, 1968).
4. S. P. Korolev, On the Practical Significance of the Scientific and
Engineering Propositions of Tsiolkovskii in Rocketry (speech
given on September 17, 1957), in K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Collected Works,
(Moscow, 1968), 1516.
5. Ibid.
6. K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Davlenie vozdukha na poverkhnosti, vvedennye
v uskusstvennyi vozdushnyi potok, in Vestnik opytnoi fiziki i ele-
mentarnoi matematiki (1898).
7. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Soprotivlenie vozdukha i vozdukhopla-
vanie, in Nauchnoe obozrenie (1902), 32.
8. ARAN, fond 555, opis 2, delo 14, ll. 2528.
9. Roald Z. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in
Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars (New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1994), 17.
10. See Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, A Short
History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25758.
11. Sergei Korolev, On the Practical Significance, 1718.
12. Ibid., 17.
13. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reak-
tivnymi priborami, Nauchnoe obozrenie, no. 5 (1903).
14. Ibid., 5556.
15. Autobiographical notes found in ARAN, fond 555, opis 2, delo 10,
ll. 39.

Note.indd 117 5/18/2009 3:01:30 PM

 118 notes to pages 4149

16. ARAN, fond 555, opis 2, delo 14, ll. 2528.

17. See K. E. Tsiokovskii, Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reak-
tivnymi priborami, in Vestnik vozdukhoplavaniia, no. 9 (1912).
18. K. E. Tsiokovskii, Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi
priborami, in Izbrannye trudy, 12123 (Moscow, 1968).
19. Ibid., 123.
20. Ibid., 8384, 11618, 12527.
21. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Vtoroe nachalo termodinamiki (Kaluga,
1914).
22. Ibid., 23.
23. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reak-
tivnymi priborami (supplement to first and second parts, 1914),
in Izbrannye trudy (Moscow, 1968).
24. Ibid., 128.
25. ARAN, fond 555, opis 2, delo 14, ll. 2528.
26. K. E. Tsiokovskii, Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi
priborami, in Izbrannye trudy, 8384 (Moscow, 1968).

CHAPTER 3
1. See L. K. Tsiolkovskaia, Around Father, in Tsiolkovskii: V vospomi-
naniiakh sovremennikov, 22223 (Tula, 1971).
2. See Joel Shapiro, A History of the Communist Academy, 1918
1936, PhD diss., Columbia University, 1976. For a more contempo-
rary look at the new Communist academies and academic
institutions, see Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher
Learning Among the Bolsheviks, 19181929 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1997).
3. ARAN, fond 555, op. 3, d. 129, l. 3. Letter dated August 1, 1918. In
a series of handwritten diary letters (written after the Bolshevik
Revolution), housed in the Russian Academy of Sciences archives,
Tsiolkovskii hinted that the Russian scientific community during
the tsarist era in Moscow and St. Petersburg was a clique, not
easily impressed with a self-taught scientist and inventor from
the Russian provinces. As mentioned earlier in his diary, he
bemoaned the fact that if a more famous person in Imperial
Russia, such as Dmitrii Mendeleev, had published these ideas on
rocketry, they might have been transferred abroad and translated
into French and German much earlier. This is a clear indication
of Tsiolkovskiis frustration with the tsarist scientific establish-
ment. Furthermore, he believed provincial scientists were ostra-

Note.indd 118 5/18/2009 3:01:30 PM

 notes to pages 5051 119

cized from the central institutions and major publications. See

ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 14, ll. 2528.
4. ARAN, fond 555, op. 3, d. 129, ll. 34.
5. For an analysis of individual self-fashioning in the Soviet period
and the writing of autobiographies, see Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the
Masks: Identity and Imposture in Twentieth Century Russia (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1618.
6. For an overview of Erving Goffmans work on the presentation of
the self, see Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday
Life (New York, 1959), 25456. Jochen Hellbeck, however, sees
this self-fashioning in a different light than Fitzpatrick, or
Goffman for that matter. Hellbeck derives his notion of subjectiv-
ity and identity from Michel Foucaults work thus focusing on
shared forms of self-expression and ideals of self-realization.
See Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under
Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 810.
7. ARAN, fond 555, op. 3, d. 129, ll. 912. There were several corre-
spondences between the presidium of the new academy and
Tsiolkovskii in the last week of August 1918 regarding the terms
of his membership and various stipends they issued him for his
research or to pay for him to come work in Moscow for short
research stays (komandirovki).
8. Natalia Kozlova, The Diary as Initiation and Rebirth: Reading
Everyday Documents of the Early Soviet Era, in Everyday Life in
Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, ed. Christina Kiaer
and Eric Naiman, 28298 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006).
9. For an analysis of the popularity of astronomy and cosmonautics
in the 1920s and 1930s in Soviet Russia, see James T. Andrews,
Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the
Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 19171934 (College Station,
2003).
10. See K. Tsiolkovskii, Atlas dirizhablia iz volnistoi stali (Kaluga, 1931)
11. See I. I. Perelman, Mezhplanetnoe puteshestvie (Leningrad, 1923).
12. See his article K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Is this mere fantasy, Komsomol-
skaia Pravda, July 1935. In the article written the year of his death,
he delineated his theory that one could embed within popular
works (such as science fiction novels) real analysis of scientific
and technical problems that could engender in the reader a
greater vision of future possibilities. He particularly hoped this

Note.indd 119 5/18/2009 3:01:30 PM

 120 notes to pages 5256

could catch the imagination of young scientists to further his

vision in reality.
13. For an analysis of provincial scientific societies and public culture,
see James T. Andrews, Local Science and Public Enlightenment:
Iaroslavl Naturalists and the Soviet State, 191731, in Provincial
Landscapes: The Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 19171953, 10525
(Pittsburgh, 2001).
14. Leningradskoe otdelenie Arkhiva Akademii nauk SSR (renamed
after 1991, Sanktpeterburgskii filial Arkhiva RAN) [hereafter SF
ARAN], f. 796, op. 1, d. 85, ll. 110b. Even workers in Leningrad and
Moscow sent Perelman letters, some of which found his Physics
for Entertainment very useful as a basic scientific source.
15. See I. I. Perelman, Za predely atmosfery, V masterskoi prirody, nos.
56 (1919): 32.
16. See I. I. Perelman, Editors Introduction, Priroda i liudi, nos. 12
(1918).
17. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 482, l. 9.
18. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 482, ll. 1617.
19. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 482, l. 23.
20. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 482, ll. 2633.
21. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 482, l. 40.
22. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 482, l. 36.
23. See Ia. I. Perelman, Mezhplanetnoe puteshestvie (1923).
24. SF ARAN, f. 796, op. 2, d. 2, ll. 11, 2324.
25. SF ARAN, f. 796, op. 2, d. 2, ll. 60.
26. For example, see O vozmozhnosti poletov v mezhplaanetnoe
prostranstvo, Chto chitat 1937, no. 1: 8081.
27. See N. A. Rynin, Mechty, legendy, i pervye fantasii (Leningrad, 1930).
28. See N. A. Rynin, Interplanetary Flight and Communication (A multi-
volume encyclodedia) (Jerusalem: Israeli Program of Scientific Trans-
lation, published for NASA, 1970). For an overview of the life of
N. A. Rynin, see Frank H. Winter, Nikolai Alexeyevich Rynin (1877
1942), Soviet Astronautical Pioneer: An American Appreciation,
Earth-Oriented Applied Space Technology 2, no. 1 (1982): 6980.
29. See Otchet T. Roga, Komandirovannogo dlia obsledovaniia
chitatelskikh interesov, in GARF, f. 395, op. 9, d. 310, ll. 2930. Also
see TsK RKP Agit-Prop sector, 791923, otchet t. Levina, in GARF,
f. 395, op. 9, d. 310, l. 25.
30. See RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 60, d. 438, l. 35. Also see Protokok
zasedanii komissii TsK RKP po voprosu ob anti-religioznoi pro-

Note.indd 120 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 notes to pages 5761 121

pagandy za iiulia mesiats 1923g. in RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 60, d. 4,

ll. 4043.
31. N. A. Rynin, Professor N. A. Rynin, Life and Work, in Manner deer
Rakete, ed. Werner Brugel, 7885 (Leipzig, 1933).
32. N. A. Rynin, Interplanetary Flight, vol. 1, 1820.
33. See N. A. Rynin, Interplanetary Flight, vol. 7.
34. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 548, l. 1.
35. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 548, l. 6.
36. Ibid.
37. See A. L. Chizhevskii, Na beregu vselennoi: gody druzhby s Tsiolkovs-
kim, vospominaniia (Moscow, 1995).
38. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 548, ll. 1416.
39. N. A. Rynin, Interplanetary Flight, vol. 7, 7.
40. Otchet M.O.L.A. na pervoe polugodie 1921 goda, Gosudarstven-
nyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, hereafter cited as GARF, f. 2307,
op. 2, d. 371, l. 69.
41. For a superb and detailed overview of the early rocket and space
societies comparatively in the United States and Europe, see Frank
H. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age, The Rocket Societies, 192440
(Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983). For an
overview of a variety of public exhibitions and lectures in Lenin-
grad and Moscow in the 1920s on popular science in the early
Soviet period, see Andrews, Science for the Masses.
42. Gosudarstvennyi muzei kosmonavtiki im. K. E. Tsiolkovskogo,
Kaluga, Russia, hereafter cited as GMKT, f. 1, op. 1, d. 40, ll. 412.
43. GMKT, f. 1, op. 1, d. 38, ll. 12.
44. GMKT, f. 1, op. 1, ed. khr. 15, l. 1.
45. Vladimir Maykovskii, Letter from Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the
Nature of Love, in V. Mayakovskii, The Bedbug and Selected Poetry,
ed. Patricia Blake, 215 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1975).
46. GMKT, f. 1, op. 1, d. 38, ll. 1518.
47. See Anatoly Glebov, Na shturm stratosferi, Tekhnika, no. 31
(March 1932).
48. For an analysis of Protazanovs work in the 1920s, especially on
Aelita, see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 19171953 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4647. For Soviet criti-
cisms of the film, see a Pravda editorial dated October 1, 1924.
49. See Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star, The First Bolshevik Utopia, trans.
Charles Rougle (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

Note.indd 121 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 122 notes to pages 6266

50. See K. E. Tsilkovskii, unpublished manuscripts, The Rocket, and

The Spread of Man in Outer Space, as found in ARAN, fond 555,
op. 3, d. 129.
51. Ibid.
52. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Novyi aeroplan, in Izbrannye trudy, 21936
(Moscow, 1968).
53. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, The Spaceship, in Izbrannye trudy, 14163
(Moscow, 1968).
54. Ibid., 148.
55. Ibid., 149.
56. Ibid., 14850.

CHAPTER 4
1. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Is This Mere Fantasy, in Komsomolskaia
Pravda, July 23, 1935.
2. For an overview of German culture and rocketry in this period, see
Willy Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel (New York: Viking Press,
1961).
3. Ibid.
4. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Autobiographical Notes, 1874 (Moscow), in
ARAN, f. 555, op. 2, d. 10, ll. 39.
5. See H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (New York, 1897). Percy
Greggs Across the Zodiac (London, 1880) describes astronauts
discovering on Mars huge canals and advanced humans. In a
different narrative vein, Kurd Lasswitzs Anf Zwei Planeten
(Berlin, 1897) brought large-eyed Martians to Earth. Stories such
as these may have had a great impact on Tsiolkovskiis scientific
imagination.
6. See A. Britikov, Russkii-Sovetskii Nauchno-Fantasticheskii Roman
(Leningrad, 1970).
7. The engineer V. N. Chikolev wrote science fiction tales in Russian
in the 1890s, such as his tale about a world transformed by
technology and electricity. See V. N. Chikolev, Ne byl, no i ne
vydumka elektricheskii raskaz (St. Petersburg, 1895).
8. See Richard Stites, Fantasy and Revolution: Alexander Bogdanov
and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction, in Alexander Bog-
danov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, ed. Loren R. Graham and
Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
9. See Darko Suvin, The Utopian Tradition in Russian Science
Fiction, Modern Language Review 66, no. 1 (1971): 13959. Also see

Note.indd 122 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 notes to pages 6672 123

Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, Conn.:

Yale University Press, 1979).
10. Stites argues that Western science fiction of the 1920s era was
highly technological, yet deeply pessimistic about the future.
While on the other hand, Soviet science fiction stands out for its
towering optimism. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams:
Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
11. Anthony Vanchu, Technology as Esoteric Cosmology in Early
Soviet Literature, in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, ed.
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, 2035 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1997). Vanchu argues further that science and technology,
in a sense, became a new type of wizardry (as shown in Platonovs
works) with engineers and craftsmen its new prophets and priests.
12. See Andrei Platonov, Lugovye mastera (Moscow, 1927). For a
further analysis of Platonovs notions of demystifying religion and
science, see Thomas Seifrid, Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
13. See Michael Holquist, Tsiolkovskii as a Moment in the Prehistory
of the Avant-Garde, in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-
Garde and Cultural Experiment, ed. John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich,
1018 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
14. Ibid., 11117.
15. Stites, Fantasy and Revolution, 56.
16. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Issledovanie mirovykh prostranstv reaktivnymi
priborami (Kaluga, 1926), 2.
17. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Is This Mere Fantasy, in Komsomolskaia
Pravda, July 23, 1935.
18. For an analysis of these journals and their message, see Andrews,
Science for the Masses, 8991. For an example of the type of articles
published in Vokrug sveta, see the article on an expedition in 1864
across the Caucasus mountain range by an anthropological team
from Russia: Pereezd cherez kavkaz, Vokrug sveta (1864): 7077.
19. See his volume of collected science fiction works, K. E. Tsiolkovskii,
On the Moon, in Put k zvezdam (Moscow, 1954).
20. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Changes in Relative Weight, Parts I and II
in Put k zvezdam (Moscow, 1954).
21. See K. E. Tsiokovskii, Dreams of Earth and Sky, in Put k zvezdam
(Moscow, 1954).
22. Ibid.

Note.indd 123 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 124 notes to pages 7281

23. For a synopsis of Sputnik III, and a superbly detailed overview of

Soviet rocketry in the early Cold War era, see Asif A. Siddiqi, Chal-
lenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 19451974 (NASA
History Publications: Washington D.C., 2000), 176, 191, 421.
24. For a record and authors own personal commentary on the twenty
years of trials and tribulations of the publishing of Beyond the
Earth, see K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Autobiographical Notes (Kaluga
Years), in ARAN, f. 555, op. 2, d. 10.
25. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Beyond the Earth, in Put k zvezdam (Moscow,
1954).
26. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, 5.
27. For an analysis of popular science journals and their educational
and editorial methods in early Soviet Russia, see Andrews, Science
for the Masses.
28. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Beyond the Earth, in Put k zvezdam (Moscow,
1954).
29. Ibid.
30. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Aims of Astronautics, in Put k zvezdam
(Moscow, 1954).
31. See Ia. I. Frenkel, Na zare novoi fiziki (Leningrad, 1970).
32. See Alexander Vucinich, Einstein and Soviet Ideology (Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 52. Also see Albert Einstein,
Sidelights on Relativity (New York, 1983).
33. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Biology of Dwarfs and Giants and Living
Beings in Outer Space, in Put k zvezdam (Moscow, 1954).
34. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Island of Ether, in Put k zvezdam (Moscow,
1954).
35. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5
1. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Space Rocket Trains, in Izbrannyi trudy,
187218 (Moscow, 1968).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. See K. E. Tsiokovskii, The Aims of Astronautics, in Izbrannyi trudy
(Moscow, 1968).
5. See K. E. Tsiolkovsii, Reaching the Stratosphere, in Izbrannyi
trudy, 27375 (Moscow, 1968).
6. See K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Rocket Squadron, Izbrannyi trudy (Moscow,
1968).

Note.indd 124 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 notes to pages 8285 125

7. See V. P. Glushko, The Leningrad Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL)

Contribution to the Development of Rocketry, in Proceedings of
the Thirteenth Congress of the History of Science Section XII The
History of Aircraft, Rocket and Technology, 3040 (Moscow, 1974).
8. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 178, ll. 12.
9. ARAN, fond 555, op. 4, d. 178, ll. 34.
10. See I. Golovanov, Sergei Korolev: The Apprenticeship of a Space Pioneer
(Moscow, 1975).
11. Ibid.
12. Frank H. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age: The Rocket Societies: 1924
1940 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 61.
Also see, Golovanov, Sergei Korolev, 26568.
13. ARAN, fond 555, op. 3, d. 457, l. 4.
14. ARAN, fond 555, op. 3, d. 457, l. 10.
15. ARAN, fond 555, op. 3, d. 106, l. 1.
16. ARAN, fond 555, op. 3, d. 108, l. 12.
17. ARAN, fond 555, op. 3, d. 108, l. 14.
18. For an analysis of the political and ideological importance of the
construction of founding father myths in Stalinist scientific dis-
ciplines, see Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1997).
19. For an example of one of his science fiction novels where there
are international characters cooperating in outer space, see
Beyond the Earth, in K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Put k svezdam (Moskva,
1960). In this novella, six scientists of different nationalities
(bearing the name of famous scientists of the past) have come
together to conduct space exploratory investigations in a castle in
the Himalayas.
20. I. Golovanov, Sergei Korolev, (Moscow, 1975), 25758. Also see S. A.
Shlykova, K. E. Tsiolkovskii Correspondence with the Jet Scientific
Research Institute, in Soviet Rocketry: Some Contributions to its
History, ed. A. A. Blagonravov, 12728 (Jerusalem: Israel Program for
Scientific Translations, NASA Publications).
21. Protocol No. 46, Meeting of the Presidium of the Kaluga City
Soviet, on the 75th Jubilee of K. E. Tsiolkovskiis Birth, in Gosu-
darstvennyi Arkhiv Moskovskii Oblast (hereafter cited as GAMO),
f. 2157, op. 2, d. 303, 1. 190.
22. See Biulletin Narkomprosa RSFSR, No. 6263, 1932g., 7.
23. Recommendation of the Presidium of the Moscow Oblast Soviet,
in GAMO, f. 2157, op. 2, d. 303, l. 185.

Note.indd 125 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 126 notes to pages 8695

24. Protocol No. 51, Meeting of the Presidium of the Central Commit-
tee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Gosudarstven-
nyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter cited as GARF), f. 3316,
op. 25, d. 372, l. 9.
25. ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 79, ll. 711 ob.
26. See Osushchestvliaetsia mechta chelovechestva, (May 1, 1935,
greetings of Tsiolkovskii on tape), in K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Sbornik Doku-
mentov (Kaluga, 1935), 4243.
27. See Pismo K. Tsiolkovskogo I. Stalinu, in Arkhiv Presidenta
Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hearafter cited as APRF), f. 45, op. 1, ll.
22220b. Note: these were photocopies of originals (in preparation
for publishing documents) shown to me by Academy of Science
staff.
28. See Zapiska B. Talia L. Kaganovichy, in APRF, f. 45, op. 1, l. 19. Note:
these were photocopies of originals (in preparation for publishing
documents) shown to me by Academy of Science staff.
29. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks (Princeton, N.J., 2005).
30. See speeches by Kiselev and Treivas in Poslednii put in K. E.
Tsiolkovskii: Sbornik, posviashchennyi pamiati znamenitogo deiatelia
nauki (Kaluga, 1935), 9396. A. S. Kiselev was an old Bolshevik who
had been a candidate member of the Communist Partys Central
Committee back in Lenins times and even attended the famous
April 1922 Plenum which introduced the post of general secretary
and elected Stalin. See Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and
Tragedy (New York, 1991), 6869.
31. Konstantin Tsiolkovskii, Pravda, September 20, 1935, 1.
32. For an analysis of Brookss approach to state patronage, public
culture, and what he terms the economy of the gift, see Jeffrey
P. Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolu-
tion to Cold War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000),
83104.
33. For an analysis of individual and political agency as the motive
and moving force in daily life, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self:
The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1989).
34. See Paul R. Josephson, Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture, in
Science and the Soviet Social Order, ed. Loren R. Graham, 18085
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
35. See Ilia Ehrenburg, O lune, o zemle, o serdtse Literaturnaia gazeta,
January 1, 1960, 34.

Note.indd 126 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 notes to pages 9599 127

36. See S. Ostrovskii, Pesenka o sputnike, Kulturno-prosvetitelnaia

rabota, 1 (1958): 3033. These children chastushki were two- or four-
line folk verses to be sung in an upbeat tempo with fervor. See
G. Liando, Nebesnye chastushki, Kulturno-prosvetitelnaia rabota,
1 (1958): 34. Paul Josephson argues that these mass rallies and
songs sung by children at festivals were part of the display value
of Soviet science in numerous arenas, such as nuclear, architec-
tural, and rocket technology. See Josephson, Rocket, Reactors.
37. Loren Graham believes most of these claims were abandoned later
in the Brezhnev era in the 1960s and 1970s. However, he rightfully
asserts that a few of those disciplinary claims (particularly revolv-
ing around certain scientific figures) should be investigated more
seriously, and need to be further analyzed in isolation of the
general nationalistic assertions. See Loren R. Graham, Science in
Russia and the Soviet Union (New York, 1993), 14243.
38. See S. P. Korolev, On the Practical Significance of the Scientific and
Engineering Propositions of Tsiolkovskii in Rocketry (lecture given
on September 17, 1957, based on the Centennial Celebrations of
the Birth of Tsiolkovskii held in Moscow), in K. E. Tsiolkovskii,
Izbrannyie trudy, 1618 (Moscow, 1963).
39. Roald Z. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in
Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars (New York, 1994),
46.

EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION

1. See Pravda, June 2, 1958, 4.
2. See published letter printed in the newspaper Literatura i zhizn,
April 8, 1959.
3. See the newspaper Znamia, November 20, 1957, 4, for an analysis
of films and books on Tsiolkovskiis life.
4. See screenplay excerpts in Iskutstvo kina, no. 3, 1958.
5. See ARAN, fond 555, op. 2, d. 103b, l. 13.
6. See Znamia, September 18, 1960, 2.
7. As found in GAKO, magnetic tape reproduction, uncatalogued
archive collection of radio and taped speeches on Tsiokovksii and
his legacy.
8. See uncatalogued taped speech in GAKO tape archives by
G. Danilov of the Kaluga Soviet when the museum was dedicated
in 1967.
9. See GMKT, f. 1, op. 2, d. 32, l. 1, and GMKT, f. 1, op. 2, d. 18, ll. 12.

Note.indd 127 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 128 notes to pages 99103

10. See Life, Man in Space, an Illustrated History from Sputnik to

Columbia, March 17, 2003.
11. Ibid., 16.
12. See Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under
Stalin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
13. Ibid., 13.
14. See Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
15. See Jeffrey P. Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture
from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
16. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks (Princeton, N.J.,
2005).
17. Ibid., 9.
18. See David Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Popula-
tions in the Near Abroad (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998),
1617.
19. See Rom Harre, Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 2628. Also see
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York,
1959), 25456.
20. For an analysis of the practice or relationship between the collec-
tive (including the political regime) and the individual, one can
also refer to Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in
Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: The University of California
Press, 1999).
21. See Natalia Kozlova, The Diary as Initiation and Rebirth, in Every-
day Life, ed. Kiaer and Naiman, 296. In a review of Jochen Hellbecks
work, Ronald Suny suggests that a Foucaultian interpretation of
self and subjectivity should imply that both Soviet citizens and
those of Western democracies must operate within the constraints
of an ideological and discursive medium or space that is not full
of alternatives. See Ronald Grigor Sunys review of Hellbecks book,
Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 108. For further analysis of the
new subjectivity debates and literature in Russian studies, also
see Eric Naiman, On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make
Them, Russian Review 60, no. 3 (2001): 30759.
22. See Valentin Glushkos reminiscences in his grandiose history of
the Soviet space program, The Soviet Encyclopedia of the Cosmos
(Moscow, 1974).
23. See Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist, 36, 18182.

Note.indd 128 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM

 notes to pages 103104 129

24. Boris Chertok seems to concur with Sagdeev and Korolev that
Tsiolkovskii should be remembered (in a narrow, technical myopic
sense) for the importance of his velocity equation and not neces-
sarily for all of his inchoate ideas on rocketry. While Chertok
admitted that the regime exaggerated these iconic figures, such
as Tsiolkovskii, real rocket scientists, those such as Korolev, tried
to focus on scientific contributions generally overshadowed by
the regime. With that said, ironically, it was Chertok himself
who admitted vicariously that myth and reality are nebulous
concepts and those lines were sometimes blurred historically.
Furthermore, in his memoirs, Chertok echoed Sagdeev and gave
the reader a clear impression of how mythic and inspirational
Tsiolkovskii actually was to an entire generation of physicists and
rocket scientists. See Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, Creating a
Rocket Industry, vol. 2, NASA History Series, NASA Sp-20064110
(Washington, D.C., 2006), 168.
25. See Sagdeev, The Making, 6.
26. See Loren R. Graham, Moscow Stories (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2006), 1819.
27. For the best overview of Fedorovs life and writings see, George
M. Young Jr., Nikolai F. Fedorov: An Introduction (Belmont, Mass.,
1979) and also Svetlana Semenmova, Nikolai Fedorov: Tvorchestvo
zhizni (Moscow, 1990). For Fedorov, the resurrection of the dead in
outer space was both a scientific possibility and a moral duty. See
George M. Young Jr., Fedorovs Transformations of the Occult, in
The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosen-
thal, 17172 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). For an
understanding of Fedorovs impact on other Russian writers of the
twentieth century, such as Tsiolkovskii, see Irene Masing-Delic,
Abolishing Death: A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Lit-
erature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992).
28. See Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (New
York, 1993), 14243.

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Note.indd 130 5/18/2009 3:01:31 PM
 NOTE ON SOURCES

The literature on Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii in English is sparse, and

there has been no extensive biographical study on his life and its
resonance in the English language. While some short Russian bio-
graphies exist (as listed in the bibliography), they tend to be more
narrowly focused on Tsiolkovskiis technical achievements (as in the
case of the Soviet-era short biography by A. A. Kosmodemianskii).
English- or German-language studies of Russian philosophy and
cosmism mention Tsiolkovskii, but more peripherally, as part of
broader mystical, cosmic thinking in Russian intellectual life in the
late imperial era (as in the work listed in the bibliography by Michael
Hagemeister on cosmism or by George M. Young on N. Fedorovs life
and philosophy).
This study has tended to contextualize Tsiolkovskiis life within a
variety of aspects of Russian and Soviet history, and thus the source
base is varied in terms of primary archival holdings. The author used
local archival sources, especially the Kaluga regional archival hold-
ings, because of their extensive documentation of Tsiolkovskiis edu-
cational activities and evaluations of his classes. These archives were
invaluable as a source to help understand his involvement with a
variety of prerevolutionary schools. They contain secondary school
inspectors notes as well as the notes of local societies involved in
popularizing science. This study has tended to place Tsiolkovskiis life
in both a local and a national context, and thus constructing the
relationship of science teachers to the locale was essential. Local
sources include the catalogued and noncatalogued archival collec-
tions of the National Museum of Cosmonautics, named after
Tsiolkovskii, in Kaluga. These archives have letters, museum notes,
and a variety of editorial notes from local newspapers written during
Tsiolkovskiis life.
Central archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg were also essential
to this study. As noted in the text, Tsiolkovskii had donated the major-
ity of his papers, diary notes, and rough drafts of manuscripts to the
Communist Party in dedication of their monetary support of his work.
Eventually high-standing party officials had these papers transferred
to the Russian Academy of Sciences archive in Moscow. Thus the
academy archive has one of the most extensive collections of

Note on Sources.indd 131 5/18/2009 3:01:27 PM

 132 note on sources

Tsiolkovskiis papers. The Moscow archive also contains an extensive

collection of vintage photographs used in this book. Furthermore, that
archive holds a fascinating array of early sketches and drawings from
Tsiolkovskiis youth when he began to conceive of rockets and jet
propulsion. This visual element adds an important component to an
analysis of Tsiolkovskiis conceptualization of rocketry as well as the
regimes propagation of his image in Soviet political culture.
A variety of Communist political and state archives noted in the
bibliography (particularly Russian state archives), and local Moscow
regional archives, were also essential to this study. Since Tsiolkovskii
became a poster-boy, so to speak, for the Stalin and Khrushchev
regimes, understanding his resonance or meaning within the history
of Soviet propaganda both before and during the Cold War is essential.
Those archives were thus invaluable in deciphering the meaning of
Tsiolkovskii in the space race and competition with the West. They
include a variety of Communist Party archival holdings mentioned in
the bibliography.
While primary archival documentation played an essential role in
this study, the author also used extensive document collections and
other published material, as well as an array of newspapers and jour-
nals from the late imperial and early Soviet era. Of course, secondary
literature was also extensively consulted for contextual background,
as well as for the theoretical and comparative implications of the
study. The bibliography is thus segmented into primary archival hold-
ings in Russia: Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kaluga. This is followed by
published document collections from the period and collections of
papers or writings of Tsiolkovskii. Newspapers and journals are listed
in alphabetical order in the bibliography and then followed sequen-
tially by secondary sources (books and articles) in both Russian and
English.

Note on Sources.indd 132 5/18/2009 3:01:27 PM

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES
Archival Sources
Russian Federal Republic (Formerly USSR)
Moscow:
Soviet Communist Party Archives:
Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei
istorii (RTSKhIDNI)
Arkhiv Presidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF) (note: letters
of material photocopied from the Presidential archive and
housed in Academy of Sciences Institute for the History
of the Natural Sciences and Technology, Moscow, Russia)

Soviet Central State, Russian Federation, and Regional

Archives:
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rosssiiskoi Federatsii (GARF)
Tsentralny gosudarstvennyi arkhiv RSFSR (TsGA RSFSR) (housed
under the jurisdiction of GARF)
Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Moskovskii Oblast (GAMO)

Soviet/Russian Academy of Sciences Archives:

Arkhiv Rossiiskoi akademii nauk (ARAN)

St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad in Soviet Period,

19241991):
Soviet/Russian Academy of Sciences Archives:
Sankpeterburgskii filial Arkhiva Rossiiskoi akademii nauk
(SpARAN)

Kaluga:
Russian Federation Regional Archives:
Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Kaluzhskoi Oblasti (GAKO)

State Museum Archives and Manuscript Repositories:

Gosudarstvennyi muzei kosmonavtiki im. K. E. Tsiolkovskogo
(GMKT)

Bibliography.indd 133 5/18/2009 3:01:12 PM

 134 bibliography

Selected Published Document Collections, Published Source Books,

and Collected Volumes
K. E. Tsiolkovskii: Dokumenty i materialy, 18791966 gg. (Kaluga, 1968)
K. E. Tsiolkovskii: Izbranny trudy (Moskva, 1968)
K. E. Tsiolkovskii: Sbornik posviashchennyi pamiati znamenitogo deiatelia
nauki (Kaluga, 1935)
Russkii biograficheskii slovar (St. Petersburg, 1914)
Tsiolkovskii: V vospominaniiakh sovremeninkov (Tula, 1971)

Selected Published, Journals, and Newspapers

Artilleriiskii zhurnal
Chto chitat
Inzhener
Komsomolskaia pravda
Literaturnaia gazeta
Nauchnoe obozrenie
Nauka i tekhnika
Neva
Nikolaevskii vestnik
Pravda
Priroda i liudi
Russki arkhiv
Tekhnika
V masterskoi prirody
Vest Gazeta Kaluzhskoi Oblasti
Vestnik opytnoi fiziki i elementarnoi matematiki
Vestnik vozdukhoplavaniia
Vokrug sveta

Selected Secondary Sources (Books and Articles in English

and Russian)
Alexandrov, Daniel. The Politics of Scientific Kruzhok: Study
Circles in Russian Science and their Transformation in the 1920s.
In Na perelom, sovetskaia biologia v 20-x-30-x godakh, edited by E. I.
Kolchinskii. St. Petersburg, 1997.
Andrews, James T. Local Science and Public Enlightenment:
Iaroslavl Naturalists and the Soviet State, 191731. In Provincial
Landscapes: The Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 191753, edited by
Donald J. Raleigh. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.

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 bibliography 135

. Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science and the
Popular Imagination, 19171934. College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2003.
Blagonravov, A. A. Soviet Rocketry: Some Contributions to Its History.
Moscow, 1964.
Bogdanov, Alexander. Red Star, The First Bolshevik Utopia, translated by
Charles Rougle. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Britikov, A. Russkii-Sovetskii nauchno-fantasticheskii roman. Leningrad,
1970.
Chertok, Boris. Rockets and People, Creating a Rocket Industry. v01.2,
NASA History Series, NASA Sp-20064110. Washington, D.C., 2006.
Chikolev, V. N. Ne byl, no i ne vydumkaelektricheskii raskaz. St.
Petersburg, 1895.
Chizhevskii, A. L. Na beregu vselennoi: gody druzhby s Tsiolkovskim,
vospominaniia. Moscow, 1995.
David-Fox, Michael. Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the
Bolsheviks, 19181929. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Einstein, Albert. Sidelights on Relativity. New York, 1983.
Eklof, Ben. Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and
Popular Pedagogy, 18611914. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1986.
Etkin, Alexander. Soviet Subjectivity: Torture for the Sake of
Salvation? Kritika 6, no. 1 (Winter 2005).
Fedorov, N. F. Filosofia obshchego dela. Moscow, 1913.
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Tear Off the Masks: Identity and Imposture in
Twentieth-Century Russia. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2005.
Frenkel, Ia. I. Na zare novoi fiziki. Leningrad, 1970.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York,
1959.
Graham, Loren R. Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, A Short
History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Hagemeister, Michael. Russian Cosmism in the 1920s and Today.
In The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice
Glatzer Rosenthal. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.
Hellbeck, Jochem. Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Holquist, Michael. Tsiolkovskii as a Moment in the Prehistory of
the Avant-Garde. In Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde

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and Cultural Experiment, edited by John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich.

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Kanatchikov, Semen. A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The
Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, translated and edited
by Reginald E. Zelnik. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1986.
Kechedzhiants, O. Tsiolkovskii, zhizn i tvorcheskaia deiatelnost.
Moskva, 1940.
Kenez, Peter. Cinema and Soviet Society, 19171953. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Khramoi, A. V. Konstantin Ivanovich Konstantinov. Moscow, 1951.
Kirpichev, L., and A. Platov. Istoricheskii ocherk obrazovaniia i razvitiia
artilleriiskogo uchilitsa, 18201870 gg. St. Petersburg, 1870.
Konstantinov, K. I. O boevykh raketakh. St. Petersburg, 1864.
. Boevykh rakety v Rossii v 1867. Artilleriiskii zhurnal, no. 5,
1867.
Korolev, S. P. On the Practical Significance of the Scientific and
Engineering Propositions of Tsiolkovskii in Rocketry, Speech
Given on September 17, 1957, in K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Collected Works.
Moscow, 1968.
Kosmodemianskii, A. A. Konstantin E. Tsiolkovskii, 18571935. Moscow,
1987.
Kozlova, Natalia. The Diary as Initiation and Rebirth: Reading
Everyday Documents of the Early Soviet Era. In Everyday Life in
Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside, edited by Christina
Kiaer and Eric Naiman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2006.
Ley, Willy. Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel. New York: Viking Press,
1961.
Mayakovskii, V. The Bedbug and Selected Poetry, edited by Patricia
Blake. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975.
Meshchersky, I. V. Dinamika tochki peremennoi massy. St. Petersburg:
Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1897.
Perelman, Ia. I. Mezhplanetnoe puteshestvie. Leningrad, 1923.
Pomortsev, M. M. Priviaznoi, svobodnyi i upravliaemyi aerostaty. St.
Petersburg, 1895.
Riabchikov, Evgeny. Russians in Space. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Rynin, N.A. Interplanetary Flight and Communication: Dreams, Legends,
and Fantasies. Vol. 1, no. 1. Leningrad, 1928.
. Mechty, legendy, i pervye fantasii. Leningrad, 1930.

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Sagdeev, Roald Z. The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in

Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars. New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1994.
Seifrid, Thomas. Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Semenova, Svetlana. Nikolai Fedorov. Moscow, 1990.
Seregny, Scott J. Russian Schoolteachers and Peasant Revolution: The
Politics of Education in 1905. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989.
Siddiqi, Asif A. Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race,
19451974. NASA History Publications: Washington, D.C., 2000.
Slukhai, I. A. Russian Rocketry, A Historical Survey. Moscow, 1965.
Sokolsky, V. N. Russian Solid-Fuel Rockets. Moscow, 1961.
Stites, Richard. Fantasy and Revolution: Alexander Bogdanov
and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction. In Alexander
Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, edited by Loren
R. Graham and Richard Stites. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984.
. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the
Russian Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Stoiko, Michael. Soviet Rocketry: Past, Present, and Future. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1979.
. The Utopian Tradition in Russian Science Fiction. Modern
Language Review 66, no. 1 (1971).
Tokaty, G. A. Soviet Rocket Technology. In The History of Rocket
Technology: Essays on Research, Development, and Utility. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1964.
Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003.
Utechin, S. V. The Bolsheviks and Their Allies after 1917: The
Ideological Pattern, Soviet Studies 10 (195859).
Vanchu, Anthony. Technology as Esoteric Cosmology in Early Soviet
Literature. In The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, edited by
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1997.
Vucinich, Alexander. Einstein and Soviet Ideology. Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2001.
Wiles, Peter. On Physical Immortality. Survey 5657 (1965).

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Winter, Frank H. Nikolai Alexeyevich Rynin (18771942), Soviet

Astronautical Pioneer: An American Appreciation. In Earth-
Oriented Applied Space Technology, Vol. 2, no. 1 (1982)
. Prelude to the Space Age, The Rocket Societies, 192440.
Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983.
Young, George M., Jr. Nikolai F. Fedorov: An Introduction. Belmont,
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Bibliography.indd 138 5/18/2009 3:01:13 PM

 INDEX
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations or photographs.
aerodynamics in early Russian
rocketry, 4
aeronautical uses for rockets,
early development of, 56. See
also space flight
aerostats, 16, 29, 43, 45, 51
Agitational Propaganda (Agit-
Prop), 56
Aims of Astronautics
(Tsiolkovskii), 7576, 8081
air flight: jet engines for, 6, 33,
62, 72; popularization of,
2728
Air Pressure on Surfaces
Introduced into an Artificial
Air Flow (Tsiolkovskii), 37
air resistance research, 4, 32, 37,
38
airships, 16, 29, 43, 45, 51
Alexander II, Tsar of Russia, 5
Ankudovich, V. A., 3
artistic productions, 6061,
6465, 9798
astrophysics, Tsiolkovskiis
incomplete understanding of,
6768
autobiography and identity
shaping, 5051
autodidact, Tsiolkovskii as, 17,
48, 49
Beyond the Earth (Tsiolkovskii),
70, 7275
Biocosmists, 1718
Index.indd 139
The Biology of Dwarfs and
Giants (Tsiolkovskii), 7677
Bogdanov, Alexander, 66, 6768
Bolshevism, Tsiolkovskiis
ambivalence toward, 13
Borovsk District School, 1921
Britikov, A., 66
brochure method for
popularizing science and
space flight, 25, 27
Brooks, Jeffrey, 9091, 100
Central Imperial Russian
Technical Society, 4
Changes in Relative Weight
(Tsiolkovskii), 70
Chertok, Boris, 1213, 129n 24
Chizhevskii, A. L., 58
client-patron relationship, 47,
4849, 90, 91, 100, 1012
colonization of space: and
Biocosmism, 1718;
Tsiolkovskiis vision of, 12, 41,
43, 7576, 8081
Communist Academy, 49
Communist Party, 56, 90. See also
Soviet Russia
Cosmic Journey (film), 64, 65
Cosmic Rocket Trains
(Tsiolkovskii), 63
cosmism, Russian, 1718, 114n 6
cosmonautics, Soviet mythology
of, 914. See also interplanetary
travel; space flight
5/18/2009 3:01:25 PM
 140 index
Crimean War (18531856), 3
cultural production and identity
in Soviet Russia, 100. See also
mythology, Soviet state
deafness issue and education,
15
diary, 1314, 44, 65
didactic narratives, Tsiolkovskiis
science fiction as, 67, 68,
7475, 7778, 102
Diocesan church school for girls,
2325, 26, 2728
dirigibles, 16, 29, 43, 45, 51
discursive medium,
Tsiolkovskiis alternative, 44
Dreams of Earth and Sky & the
Effects of Universal
Gravitation (Tsiolkovskii),
7172
educational inspectorate, tsarist
era, 2021
education system, 3, 1519. See
also teaching career
Egorov, A. A., 97
Ehrenburg, Ilia, 95
Einstein, Albert, 76
Eklof, Ben, 21
encyclopedia of space fantasy,
rocketry, and visionary
thought, 57
entropy, 43
escape velocity issue, 40, 6163,
7172, 7374, 81
Esnault-Pelterie, Robert, 6
ether medium, 6768, 76
eulogies, Soviet propaganda use
of, 9091
Index.indd 140
experimentation, science fiction
as speculative support for,
6869
The Exploration of Space by
Reactive-Propelled Devices
(Tsiolkovskii), 68
Fedorov, A. P., 5
Fedorov, N. F., 12, 17, 18, 19, 67
films, 6061, 6465, 9798
financial issues for Tsiolkovskii,
23, 28, 37, 43, 48, 86
fireworks, rockets for, 2
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 50, 90, 100, 101
Free Space (Tsiolkovskii), 32
French Aeronautic Society, 9899
Frenkel, Iakov, 76
funeral, Tsiolkovskiis, 9091,
9294
futurist, Tsiolkovskii as, 10, 12,
6478, 8081, 104
Gagarin, Yuri, 1, 98
Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL),
8182
Germany, knowledge of
Tsiolkovskiis ideas, 58
GIRD (Group for the Study of
Reactive Motion), 57, 8284
Glebov, Anatoly, 60
Glushko, V. P., 82, 103
Goddard, Robert, 44, 59, 63, 80,
99
Goffman, Erving, 50, 101
Graham, Loren, 39, 103, 127n 37
Graphical Depictions of
Sensations (Tsiolkovskii), 32
gravitational reversibility of
energy, 43
5/18/2009 3:01:25 PM

gravity: escape velocity issue, 40,
6163, 7172, 7374, 81;
Tsiolkovskiis early research
on, 3132, 3436
Great Foreknowledge (film), 98
Gregg, Percy, 65
Grief and Genius (Tsiolkovskii),
27
Group for the Study of Reactive
Motion (GIRD), 57, 8284
gyroscope for stability, 5, 32
Hare, Rom, 101
Hellbeck, Jochen, 99100, 114n 8
Herald of Experimental Physics and
Elementary Mathematics
(journal), 37
Holquist, Michael, 67, 113n 2
humans in space: early ideas of
rocket travel, 5; physical
effects of no gravity, 3132, 76;
and relative gravity, 36;
science fiction representations,
69; transformation of
humanity through, 67, 7677,
8081, 104. See also
colonization of space
identity: autobiographys role in,
5051; personal vs. social, 100;
self-fashioning of, 4852,
8485, 1012, 119n 6; in Soviet
context, 10, 40, 4852, 91,
99104, 107, 128n 21; and
Soviet state mythology, 91;
Tsiolkovskiis influence on
scientists, 1314, 7984;
Tsiolkovskiis multiple
identities, 10, 14, 8485, 99100
Index.indd 141
index 141
ideologys role in identity
formation, 99100
immortality through space
travel, 80, 114n 6
imperial Russia. See tsarist era
inspection of teacher
performance, tsarist era,
2021, 25
inspiration, scientific: and
informal study groups in late
tsarist era, 18; Russian
influence on the West, 4, 54,
58; science fiction as, 65, 68;
teaching as tool for, 20;
Tsiolkovskii as, 1213, 46,
5152, 7984, 96, 1023,
11920n 12. See also
popularization of science and
space flight
International Aerospace Hall of
Fame, 99
international cooperation in
space travel, 73, 85
interplanetary travel: and
Biocosmists, 1718; public
fascination with, 53, 59;
Rynins popularization role, 57;
Tsiolkovskiis speculations on,
9, 7072
inventor, Tsiolkovskii as, 17, 31,
39
Investigation of World Spaces
by Reactive Vehicles
(Tsiolkovskii), 3941, 4344
Island of Ether (Tsiolkovskii),
6768, 7778
Is This Mere Fantasy?
(Tsiolkovskii), 64, 85, 11920n
12
5/18/2009 3:01:25 PM
 142 index
jet engines for flying, 6, 33, 62,
72, 7374
Josephson, Paul, 91, 95
Kalinin, M. I., 85
Kaluga, Russia, 19, 22, 23
Kaluga Society for the Study of
Nature and Local History, 27
Kanatchikov, Semen I., 1617
Kazanskii, Aleksei, 25
Khrushchev, Nikita, 1
Khrushchev regime, 91, 95, 9798
Kiaer, Christina, 102
Kibalchich, N., 56
kinetic theory of gases, 32
Kiselev, A. S., 90, 126n 30
Kleimenov, I. T., 83
Komsomolskaia pravda
(newspaper), 64
Konstantinov, Konstantin I., 34
Korolev, Sergei P., 32, 39, 82, 83,
9596, 129n 24
Kotkin, Stephen, 100
Kozlova, Natalia, 5051, 101
kraeved (regional studies)
societies, 52
Krasin, Leonid, 17, 19
Kubriavtseva, A. A., 24
Ladozhin, I. M., 21
Laitin, David, 100101
Lang, Fritz, 6465
Lasswitz, Kurd, 6566
Leningrad Group for the Study of
Reactive Motion (LenGIRD), 57
Life (magazine), 99
liquid fuel propellant, 40, 42, 63,
80, 81
literary elite, fascination with
Tsiolkovskiis visions, 6061
Index.indd 142
Literaturnaia gazeta (journal), 18
Liubimov, I. A., 21
Living Beings in Space
(Tsiolkovskii), 76
lunar vehicles, 75
Lvov, V., 18
Man on the Planet Earth (film), 97
materialist doctrine, importance
of scientific mindset for, 56
May Day speech (1935), 9, 86
Mechanics and Biology
(Tsiolkovskii), 77
media: films, 6061, 6465, 9798;
and popularization of science
and space travel, 18, 53, 54, 64,
69, 72, 99; use of futuristic
themes, 6061
memorialization of Tsiolkovskii,
11, 86, 88, 9091, 9294, 9798
Meshchersky, I. V., 5
Mezhplanetnoe puteshestvie
(Perelman), 54
Mikhailov, A. A., 59
Mikhailov, Onisim, 12
Mikhailovskii Artillery Academy,
3
military uses for rockets, 24
millenarians, Biocosmists as,
1719
modeling work on airships, 16,
29, 43, 45
Moscow, 1617, 5860
Moscow Society for the Study of
Interplanetary
Communication, 59
Moscow Society of Amateur
Astronomers, 59
multistage rockets, 39, 80
Muraviev, Valerian, 17, 19
5/18/2009 3:01:25 PM

Museum of Cosmonautics in
Kaluga, 97, 98, 113n 3
The Mystique of World Ether
(Frenkel), 76
mythology, Soviet state: and
cosmonautics, 914;
deconstruction of Tsiolkovskii
myth, 10, 104, 113n 3; and
international elevation of
Tsiolkovskiis legacy, 9899;
national/local tension on
Tsiolkovskiis story, 9798; and
Soviet technological
superiority claims, 85, 95, 103;
and Tsiolkovskiis rise to hero
status, 4852, 8499
Naiman, Eric, 102
National Museum of
Cosmonautics in Kaluga, 97,
98, 113n 3
Nauchnoe obozrenie (journal),
41
Nechaev, Stepan I., 3
The New Aeroplane
(Tsiolkovskii), 62
New Economic Policy (NEP)
period (19211927), 4763
Nikolaev, Russia, 4
Oberth, Hermann: as father of
space travel, 99; film project,
6465; in Moscow inventors
exhibition (1927), 59; rocketry
innovations, 44, 80; and
Tsiolkovskii, 63, 83
obituary, Tsiolkovskii, 90
Oka River, 23
On the Moon (Tsiolkovskii),
6970
Index.indd 143
index 143
On the Theoretical Mechanics
of the Living Organism
(Tsiolkovskii), 3132
optimistic perspective of Soviet
science fiction, 66, 123n 10
orbital spacecraft, 70, 73, 76, 82
Order of the Red Banner of
Labor, 8586
Outside the Earth
(Tsiolkovskii), 64
ozone as rocket engine oxidizer,
41
Pages from a Young Mans
Notebook (Tsiolkovskii), 31
Path to the Stars (film), 97
patron-client relationship, 47,
4849, 91, 100, 1012
pedagogy, Tsiolkovskiis, 20, 21,
23, 24, 25, 27
Perelman, Iakov I., 51, 5255
personal vs. social identity, 100
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, 2
philosophy, Tsiolkovskiis, 12,
1718, 41, 43, 7576, 8081
politics, Tsiolkovskiis
ambivalent, 13, 44, 50
Pomortsev, M. M., 4
popularization of science and
space flight: Perelmans role in,
5255; Rynins work on, 5758;
science fiction, 13, 6478, 123n
10; through teaching, 20, 25,
2728, 30; Tsiolkovskiis role in,
7, 10, 18, 3941, 43, 4748, 51,
5261, 81, 85
Priroda i liudi (science magazine),
53, 72
propellant, rocket, 40, 41, 42, 63,
80, 81
5/18/2009 3:01:25 PM
 144 index
Protazanov, Iakov, 6061
Protopopov, Ioann, 25
provincial areas as scientific
centers, 4, 67
public: fascination with rocketry
and space flight, 4748, 51,
5255, 56, 5861; Soviet
manipulation through mass
rallies, 95. See also
popularization of science and
space flight
public educational discourse,
7475. See also popularization
of science and space flight
public lectures, 2728, 48, 52
Pyrotechnic Laboratory in
St. Petersburg, 2
radioactive particles as sources
of rocket propellant, 41
Reaching the Stratosphere
(Tsiolkovskii), 81
reactive motion, 32
Red Star (Bogdanov), 67
resurrection theme, Fedorovs, 67
revolutionary period (1917), 28,
61, 67
Riabchikov, Evgeny, 64
RNII (Scientific Research
Institute of Reactive Motion),
83, 84
Rocket (Tsiolkovskii), 6162
Rocket Institute in St.
Petersburg, 23
rocket-powered aircraft, 56
rocketry: escape velocity issue,
40, 6163, 7172, 7374, 81;
fireworks application, 2;
military uses, 24; multistage
rockets, 39, 80; popularization
Index.indd 144
of, 5256; propellants, 40, 41,
42, 63, 80, 81; public
fascination with, 4748, 51,
5255, 5861; Russian
contributions to, 17; signal
rockets, 3; Tsiolkovskiis
technical contributions, 10,
3146, 6163, 80, 81, 96, 129n 24
Rocket Squadron (Tsiolkovskii),
81
rotary machine and gravity
experiments, 31
RPCS (Russian Physical-Chemical
Society), 3132
Russia. See Soviet Russia; tsarist
era
Russian Academy of Sciences, 37
Russian civil war period (1918
1920), 4851
Russian Orthodox Church,
school system of, 2325, 26,
2728
Russian Physical-Chemical
Society (RPCS), 3132
Russian Technical Society, 4
Russkii goloc (journal), 54
Russo-Turkish War (18281829),
3, 4
Rykachev, M. A., 37
Rynin, N. A., 6, 5556, 5758
Sagdeev, Roald Z., 39, 73, 96, 103
Sasyadko, Aleksandr, 23
satellites, 76, 82
scarlet fever episode in
childhood, 15
science fiction, 13, 6478, 123n 10
Scientific Research Institute of
Reactive Motion (RNII), 83, 84
scientists: elites treatment of
5/18/2009 3:01:26 PM

provincial scientists, 12, 4041,
44; science fiction as
inspiration for, 65, 68;
Tsiolkovskiis influence on,
1214, 46, 5152, 7984, 96,
1023, 11920n 12
Sechenov, I. M., 3132
Second Law of
Thermodynamics
(Tsiolkovskii), 43
self-educated man, Tsiolkovskii
as, 17, 48, 49
self-fashioning of identity, 4852,
8485, 1012, 119n 6
Shklovskii, Victor, 18
signal rockets, 3
social identity, Russian
construction of, 40, 4852, 91,
99104, 107, 128n 21
Socialist Academy, 50
Society of Inventors, 59
Sokolova, Varvara Yevgrafovna
(wife), 17
solar batteries, 72
Soloveva, V., 97
Soviet Russia: identity formation
in, 40, 4852, 91, 99104, 107,
128n 21; Khrushchev regime,
91, 95, 9798; NEP period,
4763; optimistic perspective
of science fiction in, 66, 123n
10; subjectivity in, 99100,
114n 8, 119n 6, 128n 21;
support for Tsiolkovskiis
work, 4849, 51; technological
superiority claims, 85, 95, 103;
and transformation of
humans, 8081; Tsiolkovskii as
propaganda tool for, 67, 9, 10,
1213, 9091, 103; Tsiolkovskiis
Index.indd 145
index 145
ambiguous relationship to, 28,
44, 1012. See also mythology,
Soviet state
space flight: colonization of
space, 12, 1718, 41, 43, 7576,
8081; orbital spacecraft, 70,
73, 76, 82; philosophical basis
for, 1718, 67, 7677, 8081, 104,
114n 6; public fascination with,
4748, 51, 5255, 56, 5861;
and rocketry development,
3941, 43; Tsiolkovskiis vision
of, 7, 9, 6970, 73, 9899. See
also humans in space;
interplanetary travel;
popularization of science and
space flight
Space Rocket Trains
(Tsiolkovskii), 80
The Spaceship (Tsiolkovskii),
6263
space station, envisioning of, 70,
73
Spasskaia, A. I., 24
The Spread of Man in Outer
Space (Tsiolkovskii), 6162
Sputnik launch, 91, 95
Stalin, Josef, 9, 86, 90
Stalinist era. See Soviet Russia
Stites, Richard, 66
subjectivity, Soviet Russian,
99100, 114n 8, 119n 6, 128n
21
Suvin, Darko, 66
teaching career: Borovsk District
School, 1921; Diocesan
church school for girls, 2325,
26, 2728; as popularization
of space flight tool, 7, 30;
5/18/2009 3:01:26 PM
 146 index
teaching career (cont.)
post-revolutionary Soviet
secondary school, 28
technology, Russian:
contributions of, 1; Soviet
superiority claims, 85, 95, 103;
Soviet use of Tsiolkovskii to
promote, 9, 10, 12, 85;
Tsiolkovskiis concrete
contributions to, 10, 3146,
6163, 80, 81, 96, 129n 24
Theory of Gas (Tsiolkovskii),
32
Third All-Russian Aeronautics
Congress, 43
Tolstoy, Alexei, 60
transformation of humanity
through space travel, 67,
7677, 8081, 104, 114n 6. See
also colonization of space
tsarist era (imperial Russia):
early rocketry work, 17;
popularizing of science during,
18, 20, 25, 2728, 30;
Tsiolkovskiis childhood in,
1519; Tsiolkovskiis
complaints about, 1314, 49,
50, 11819n 3; Tsiolkovskiis
science fiction writing, 6975;
Tsiolkovskiis teaching career,
1921, 2325, 26, 27;
Tsiolkovskiis technical
contributions during, 3146
Tsiolkovskaia, Anna (daughter),
116n 26
Tsiolkovskaia, Liubov K.
(daughter), 48
Tsiolkovskaia, Maria (daughter),
23
Tsiolkovskii, Eduard (father), 15
Index.indd 146
Tsiolkovskii, Konstantin E.:
birth of, 15; childhood of,
1519; deconstruction of
myths about, 19, 104, 113n 3;
education of, 1519; family
life, 23, 48; and Fedorov, 17,
18, 19, 67; financial issues,
23, 28, 37, 43, 48, 86; identity
formation, 10, 14, 4950,
8485, 99102; influence on
scientists, 1214, 46, 5152,
7984, 96, 1023, 11920n 12;
legacy of, 44, 46, 9899;
marriage of, 17;
memorialization of, 11, 86, 88,
9091, 9294, 9798; museum
exhibit in Moscow, 5960;
mythologizing of, 4852, 8499;
and Oberth, 83; overview, 67;
and Perelman, 51, 5255;
philosophy of space travel, 12,
1718, 41, 43, 7576, 8081;
photos, 22, 26, 45, 8789, 92,
1056; public lectures, 2728,
48, 52; relationship to Soviet
government, 67, 9, 10, 1213,
28, 44, 9091, 1012, 103; and
Rynin, 5758; scarlet fever, 15;
science fiction outlet, 6478,
102; space travel vision of, 7, 9,
6972, 73, 9899; Sputnik-era
commemoration of, 91, 95,
9798; and Stalin, 86, 90;
teaching career, 7, 1921,
2325, 26, 2728, 30; technical
contributions of, 10, 3146,
6163, 80, 81, 96, 129n 24. See
also gravity; popularization of
science and space flight
Tukachevsky, M. N., 81
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utopian science fiction, 6568
utopian visions in Russia, 12,
1719, 114n 6
Vanchu, Anthony, 66
velocity: early tsarist-era testing,
4; escape from Earths
atmosphere, 40, 6163, 7172,
7374, 81; Tsiolkovskiis tsarist-
era work, 37
Vernadskii, V. I., 12, 17, 19
Verne, Jules, 65
Vestnik vozdukhoplavaniia
(journal), 41
V masterskoi prirody (journal), 53
Vokrug sveta (journal), 69
Volkoye Field, 2
Vucinich, Alexander, 76
War of the Worlds (Wells), 65
Wells, H. G., 65
Index.indd 147
index 147
Western society: fascination
with rocketry and space flight,
56; Russian scientific
inspiration for, 4, 54, 58;
science fiction perspective,
6566, 123n 10; Tsiolkovskiis
scientific influence on, 58, 83,
9899
wind resistance testing, 4, 32, 37,
38
Women on the Moon (film),
6465
workshop and laboratory,
Tsiolkovskiis, 38
World War I, 25, 27
Yumasheva, Maria Ivanova
(mother), 15
Zhukovsky, N. E., 5
Zhuravlyev, V. N., 65
5/18/2009 3:01:26 PM
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