Technocracy and Statecraft in the Space Age 1015 



The First World War never ended in Russia. There alone the methods of state 

 mobilization of scientific and technical talent pioneered in the first total war 

 became a centerpiece of peacetime policy. Research and development, central- 

 ized and liberally funded, amounted to a virtual "second party program," as 

 Lenin said upon inaugurating the Gospian in 1920. Technological research was 

 the major tool in the drive to industrialize, to overtake the West, and to prove the 

 superiority of socialism. Spaceflight itself, aside from its military uses, appealed 

 to Lenin" and, after 1933, to the Politburo, which began to organize and fund 

 rocket research about the same time the German army absorbed its native 

 rocketeers. The nature of the Bolshevik seizure of power and its Communist 

 ideology inevitably placed a premium on the rapid creation of advanced 

 technology as a symbol of the regime's legitimacy. While ignoring the purges of 

 the 1930s Soviet media exalted the feats of record-breaking aviators — Stalin's 

 Eagles — as indicative of the "New Soviet Man " and his soaring technology. As 

 late as 1941, meanwhile, Soviet rocketeers were still the theoretical equals of 

 their German counterparts at Peenemiinde. But, while the war accelerated 

 German rocketry, it diverted Soviet efforts for the duration. The capture of V-2 

 production facilities in 1945 afforded Soviet engineers the rapid practical 

 experience they had been denied, but it by no means created their rocket 

 program. An assault on the heavens remained uniquely suited to the Communist 

 scientific conception of the purposeful, self-confident conquest of nature. When 

 wedded to their military requirements after the war, the inherent Soviet interest 

 in spaceflight made Sputnik only a matter of time.'' 



Certain other characteristics of the Soviet regime undoubtedly impeded the 

 advance of rocket technology. The brilliant chief designer of Soviet spacecraft, 

 Sergei Korolev, and the leading expert on fuels and gas dynamics, Valentin 

 Glushko, spent up to eight years in sharagas, prison design bureaus, during the 

 purges after 1937. Countless other technicians had their careers diverted or cut 

 short by Stalinist terror. But the familiar defects of Soviet science — political 

 interference, terror, incompetence in high places, and secrecy — affected high- 

 priority, military-related research far less than that in civilian spheres. Kendall E. 

 Bailes's excellent study of Soviet technology before 1941 lists the salient features 

 of research and development: tension between borrowing abroad and pushing 

 native creativity; lack of internal competitive stimuli; inhibition caused by state 

 terror; resistance to creation of a privileged class resulting from professionaliza- 

 tion of research; shortage of skilled workers; traditional Russian preference for 

 pure over applied science; isolation of research and development from produc- 

 tion; and the tendency to place technical considerations over economic efficiency. '^ 

 Added to the inherited backwardness of the Russian economy, these features of 

 the Communist system suggest that the precocious leap into space was an 

 anomaly. But military technology was a special case in every respect. It enjoyed a 



" DanilofT, The Kremlin and iht Cn^mos. 22. 



'^ This thesis is discussed in more detail in Chapter I, "TheCienesisof Sputnik. "of mv book in preparalron.a 

 political history of the first decade of space technology. 



" Bailes. Technolo^ and Sonely under Lenin and Stalin: Ongins of Iht Soinet Technical Intelligentsia. 1917-1 f 41 

 (Princeton, 1978), 341-42. 



