Soviet Space Mythologies

Soviet Space Mythologies PDF Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822980967
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity. These practices shaped the evolving cultural image of the space age in popular Soviet imagination. Soviet Space Mythologies provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of space history, history of technology, and Soviet (and post-Soviet) history.

Soviet Space Mythologies

Soviet Space Mythologies PDF Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822980967
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity. These practices shaped the evolving cultural image of the space age in popular Soviet imagination. Soviet Space Mythologies provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of space history, history of technology, and Soviet (and post-Soviet) history.

Soviet Space Mythologies

Soviet Space Mythologies PDF Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822963639
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From the start, the Soviet human space program had an identity crisis. Were cosmonauts heroic pilots steering their craft through the dangers of space, or were they mere passengers riding safely aboard fully automated machines? Tensions between Soviet cosmonauts and space engineers were reflected not only in the internal development of the space program but also in Soviet propaganda that wavered between praising daring heroes and flawless technologies. Soviet Space Mythologies explores the history of the Soviet human space program within a political and cultural context, giving particular attention to the two professional groups—space engineers and cosmonauts—who secretly built and publicly represented the program. Drawing on recent scholarship on memory and identity formation, this book shows how both the myths of Soviet official history and privately circulating counter-myths have served as instruments of collective memory and professional identity. These practices shaped the evolving cultural image of the space age in popular Soviet imagination. Soviet Space Mythologies provides a valuable resource for scholars and students of space history, history of technology, and Soviet (and post-Soviet) history.

From Newspeak to Cyberspeak

From Newspeak to Cyberspeak PDF Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262572255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science. The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."

Common Places

Common Places PDF Author: Svetlana BOYM
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674028643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Boym provides a view of Russia that is historically informed, replete with unexpected detail, and stamped with authority. Alternating analysis with personal accounts of Russian life, she conveys the foreignness of Russia and examines its peculiar conceptions of private life and common good, of Culture and Trash, of sincerity and banality.

The Soviet Sixties

The Soviet Sixties PDF Author: Robert Hornsby
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300275064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
The story of a remarkable era of reform, controversy, optimism, and Cold War confrontation in the Soviet Union Beginning with the death of Stalin in 1953, the “sixties” era in the Soviet Union was just as vibrant and transformative as in the West. The ideological romanticism of the revolutionary years was revived, with renewed emphasis on egalitarianism, equality, and the building of a communist utopia. Mass terror was reined in, great victories were won in the space race, Stalinist cultural dogmas were challenged, and young people danced to jazz and rock and roll. Robert Hornsby examines this remarkable and surprising period, showing that, even as living standards rose, aspects of earlier days endured. Censorship and policing remained tight, and massacres during protests in Tbilisi and Novocherkassk, alongside invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, showed the limits of reform. The rivalry with the United States reached perhaps its most volatile point, friendship with China turned to bitter enmity, and global decolonization opened up new horizons for the USSR in the developing world. These tumultuous years transformed the lives of Soviet citizens and helped reshape the wider world.

Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age

Soviet Science Fiction Cinema and the Space Age PDF Author: Natalija Majsova
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793609322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book interrogates the relations between nostalgias of today and past utopias in the context of the space age of the 20th century and its cinematic representations in the USSR and in post-Soviet Russia. Once an enthusiastic projection, then a promising and uncanny present, and eventually an assemblage of nostalgic signifiers, in the history of world cinema, this space age has been linked primarily to the genre of science fiction. Here, aspects of the space age such as humanity’s imminent expansion to space, interplanetary travel, contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, and intergalactic governance and economy were both celebrated and critically interrogated as cosmopolitan ideals and nation-branding strategies. This book presents the contemporary relevance of this genre as heritage and legacy, archive and canon, and a nest of forgotten ideals and warnings, as well as nostalgic anchoring points. The author analyzes over 30 Soviet science fiction films, foregrounding their structures of utopia and their evolution over time, in order to trace both their transnational positionalities, transmedial resonance, and impact on post-Soviet Russian films about the space age. Concepts, crucial to the understanding of space futures of the past, such as utopianism, otherness, liminality, and no(w)stalgia are activated to draw out the fictional tenants of the memory of the Soviet space age, and to establish the limits and potentialities of Soviet (exra)terraformative ambitions.

Gods from Outer Space

Gods from Outer Space PDF Author: Erich von Daniken
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description


Post-Imperium

Post-Imperium PDF Author: Dmitri V. Trenin
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 087003345X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The war in Georgia. Tensions with Ukraine and other nearby countries. Moscow's bid to consolidate its "zone of privileged interests" among the Commonwealth of Independent States. These volatile situations all raise questions about the nature of and prospects for Russia's relations with its neighbors. In this book, Carnegie scholar Dmitri Trenin argues that Moscow needs to drop the notion of creating an exclusive power center out of the post-Soviet space. Like other former European empires, Russia will need to reinvent itself as a global player and as part of a wider community. Trenin's vision of Russia is an open Euro-Pacific country that is savvy in its use of soft power and fully reconciled with its former borderlands and dependents. He acknowledges that this scenario may sound too optimistic but warns that the alternative is not a new version of the historic empire but instead is the ultimate marginalization of Russia.

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty

A Sacred Space Is Never Empty PDF Author: Victoria Smolkin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691197237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Challenge to Apollo

Challenge to Apollo PDF Author: Asif A. Siddiqi
Publisher: www.Militarybookshop.CompanyUK
ISBN: 9781780393018
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1030

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Book Description
Taking advantage of the Soviet archives, which were opened in the 1990s, Siddiqi has written a groundbreaking work that examines why the Soviet Union fell behind in the space race of the 1960s after changing the course of human history with the first artificial satellite launch, Sputnik, in 1957.