Music and the Soviet Space Project

April 12, 2018 is 57th Cosmonautics Day celebrated in Russia to commemorate the first manned space flight on 12 April 1961 by the 27-year-old Russian Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Celebrate with the Faculty of Economic Sciences and musicologist, Gabrielle Cornish, PhD student from University of Rochester and HSE Doctoral School of History! 

Paper abstract: 
On April 12, 1963, a special episode of the variety television show, Goluboi Ogonek, aired on Soviet television. Subtitled “Star Relay,” the episode commemorated Cosmonautics Day and the two-year anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s successful flight as well as another coming Soviet victory in the Space Race: the impending launch of the first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova. In the episode, Tereshkova was showered with gifts, congratulations, and, most prominently, several performances of Estrada – popular variety songs. While a growing body of scholarship has focused on the ways in which art, literature, and film related to the cosmonauts contributed to domestic mythmaking in the Soviet Union, little attention has been paid to the position of music in this project.
Given music’s latent participatory potential, however, this oversight fails to acknowledge the unique role popular song played in perpetuating Khrushchev-era myths of the cosmonaut as “Soviet everyman” – an especially important project in the shadow of Stalin’s Cult of Personality. In this paper, I consider the ways social and gender politics of the Soviet space program broadly manifested in Estrada. By using the aforementioned television episode as a case study, I demonstrate how Gagarin and Tereshkova were promoted through music not as untouchable idols, but as approachable and attainable ideals of Communism with whom millions of ordinary Soviets with access to television could identify – as powerful symbols in the Space Age that composers and lyricists exploited to more broadly reimagine the New Soviet Man and Woman at the end of the Khrushchev era.