The Promise of Sputnik

Sputnik was one of the major milestones in the long history of the human race. Hovering 560 miles over the planet and moving 18000 miles an hour, this first man-made "moon" was described in the American press as the single most important story of the century, something akin to Christopher Columbus' discovery of the Americas. American ham radio operators everywhere followed the satellite's progress. Americans eagerly watched as the network anchors tracked the geographical progress of the famous satellite. Some went outside to observe the Soviets' handiwork with their own eyes.

But if Sputnik seemed to represent an unprecedented progress for humankind, it also marked the height of Soviet international prestige. It seemed that the future itself belonged to the USSR and communism in general. Soviet propaganda put the matter this way: while American scientists busily improved the aesthetic designs of automobiles according to caprice of bourgeois consumers, Soviet engineers were focused on loftier goals such as space travel. Indeed, the world admired the Soviet Union's scientific prowess even as it wondered why white Americans seemed to be mired in the pre-modern racial strife of Southern integration controversy. And what did it say about the difference between the two countries when, as the Soviets soon cheerfully announced, Sputnik was flying directly over Central High in Little Rock?

The Soviet Union's scientific achievement caught America by surprise, as the History Channel film, Sputnik Mania explains. In the midst of a consumer revolution and the dramatic expansion of suburbia, the Soviet Union had made a spectacular gesture of high adventure and scientific progress. Within days, and in the middle of the general atmosphere of awe and wonder, Americans began to feel a deep sense of anxiety over the impact of this scientific breakthrough on the Cold War. As Johnson recalled, as he looked up over the Texas sky, he felt that "the sky itself had become alien." How would the Russians exploit their innovation? Would they begin to drop bombs from the sky? And what did it say about Russia's ICBM capability if a satellite that apparently weighed 180 pounds had been launched into outer space? This was a second Pearl Harbor in the making.

While Lyndon B. Johnson called for a congressional investigation into America's competitiveness in the looming space race, Eisenhower, concerned as ever to dampen America's growing Cold War hysteria, failed initially to recognize the historical importance of Sputnik. Americans were concerned. For the first time, as the documentary film Sputnik Mania explains, the president's impressive military credentials seemed irrelevant if not obsolete. In an age of potential space battle, space travel, and powerful ICBMs, D-Day seemed like a distant memory.

The American people had been told repeatedly that the leader of the free world maintained a clear lead in science, technology, and advanced weaponry. To make matters worse, the Soviet Union followed up Sputnik with the successful testing of a new generation of hydrogen bomb. What to do? At first, Eisenhower put the problem of America's response into the hands of civilian leaders, but when our first satellite-rocket launch failed spectacularly, military leaders (and the Nazi scientist who had created the V2 rockets during World War II) took matters in hand.

A year after Sputnik, however far behind we were, America was fully engaged in the space race. Although Eisenhower would warn against the rise of the military industrial complex, and attempted to limit military spending in general, he launched America on the path that would soon overtake the Soviet Union's early successes in space. Soon he was broadcasting around the world via the world's first communications satellite.

Under J.F.K. America landed a man on the moon and, unlike the Soviets who allowed a dog to perish in outer space for lack of oxygen, they got him back safely. In Russia, according to Soviet children author Chukowsky's Diary, the Kremlin quickly changed course in its official communications on the subject of space. In addition to increasing military expenditures, they now declared that space travel was not something that represented the triumph of the human species in general. Rather, it was an instrument of American colonialism or military aggression. In fact, they now said America was demonstrating its callous disregard for humanity by risking human life in an endeavor that simply did not require the direct participation of men.

It's impossible to exaggerate the import of Sputnik which symbolized both the greatest hope and fear of the post-war years. Although the achievement allowed people to see the Earth holistically for the first time through photographs from outer space, it came at a time when, according to the film, Americans believed that war with Russia likely and might actually kill seven in ten of us.

Kennedy and Nixon on Communism

This blog generally analyzes internal Russian affairs in the Soviet, and especially early Soviet, period. However, as this blog's opinions necessarily reflect the American biases of its principle author, from time to time we shall endeavor to interrogate the historical perceptions of Americans toward the USSR. The fiftieth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, celebrated by a variety of special programs on Comcast's "on demand" offerings, is a perfect opportunity for such an exploration.

What, for instance, do the first two Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates reveal about America's relationship to the Soviet Union in 1960? In the first place, the two men agreed that Communist Russia represented a clear and present danger to the United States. While not specifically referencing Russia's nuclear arsenal, Nixon and Kennedy each explained to their potential audience of 180 million Americans, that Communism was a tyrannical, fanatical philosophy of un-freedom espoused by a determined enemy of the United States. Khrushchev, the leader of this morally bankrupt regime, had just threatened to "bury" his capitalist opponents and banged on the table at the United Nations. Nixon, unimpressed, called the man a "butcher of thousands," in a gross understatement of the historical record, and said that he would raise taxes "without hesitation" to combat the international threat of Communism. Kennedy, eager to show his own impeccable credentials as a leader in the fight against the encroachments of the Soviet Union, said that he and other Democratic leaders in the Congress had tried to spend more than Eisenhower had put forth in his military budget.

The two men also agreed that the domestic situation in the United States was directly related to the international contest with Russia and its allies. If African-Americans were disenfranchised, or the economy stagnated, Russia would be the direct beneficiary, both in terms of its relative power and its reputation abroad.

The two men disagreed on one essential aspect of the Cold War: which side was winning? Nixon, understandably, claimed that the Eisenhower administration had stabilized the situation after Truman had lost China. The economy of the USSR, he said, represented only forty-four percent of the United States' GNP.

Kennedy demurred with Nixon's optimistic assessment, arguing that the tide of history threatened to change course and that Eisenhower had failed to keep the Communist menace at bay. Why hadn't the previous administration done more to win hearts and minds in Africa, Asia, and, most importantly, Latin America? Why hadn't Eisenhower sent more students and specialists overseas? Why had Nixon failed to criticize the dictator, Batista, in order to avert a radical as opposed to a democratic revolution in the country? Why had America been forced to lie about the downing of its U2 spy plane in Russian air space?

Kennedy asserted that the country had great cause to be dissatisfied with the government's "vigor." Even if the USSR's economy lagged behind that of America's, it was gaining ground quickly. It was educating more scientists and engineers than America. It was discovering and exploiting new natural resources faster than we were.

Who was right? Was America winning or losing the Cold War in 1960? In hide-sight, it's hard to credit Kennedy's assertion that America was on the verge of losing out to Khrushchev's Russia, which would soon enter into a long period of stagnation before eventually collapsing under the weight of its own military spending and economic inefficiency. After all, many Russians were already noticing very real flaws in their country's economic and intellectual life. On the the other hand, the world was in flux. In the last few years, Americans had watched as China became communist and gained diplomatic recognition, the Russians invaded Hungary, Khrushchev behaved more and more erratically by cancelling summits and issuing threats, the Soviet Union scored important scientific victories in the space race, Berlin grew more vulnerable, and a complex and ever-shifting post-colonial landscape emerged in three different continents.

Who won the first two presidential debates? Historians tells us that audience members who heard the debates on the radio thought that Nixon had carried the day. Certainly he appeared to be a moderate, civilized, experienced, and thoughtful champion of conservative values such as limited government and entrepreneurialism. But historians also say that people who saw the debates on television believed that the charismatic Kennedy had triumphed.

In the end, the relatively inexperienced Kennedy has to be seen as the victor. He stood toe-to-toe with a much more experienced man, and managed to present himself as more opposed to communism than a man with much better established anti-communist bona fides. The rhetorical strength of Kennedy's approach to change and reform was to link his ideas about Civil Rights progress, education, and anti-poverty, to an overall concern for America's competitiveness in the Cold War.

A Detente Deferred

With the signing of the new START treaty I think we should all be paying more attention to the legacy of Leonid Brezhnev. It was Brezhnev, after all, who tried to improve relations with the US after the ignominy of the Cuban Missile Crisis, an effort that led to detente during the 70s and, meanderingly, to the resolution of the Cold War in the 80s. I just read recently for the first time of Brezhnev's heavy drug use, which probably accounts for the catatonic aura of his last years.

Brezhnev was one of the most incompetent leaders in history. His reliance on oil profits to create a temporary and baseless sense of prosperity, his effort to freeze the borders of Europe at the Helsinki Conference (which unintentionally legitimized human rights throughout the Soviet Empire), and above all his invasion of Afghanistan were the actions of a total bumbler. But we should be grateful to this incompetence because in retrospect the 70s and early 80s were among the most dangerous moments in all the Cold War. Western economic growth was sluggish but technological advance was rapid. That combination could have bred serious instability. Yet Brezhnev simply had no clue how to exploit his relative advantage, and it was soon squandered.

Reagan pushed back at the Soviets, bringing the world dangerously close to catastrophe (particularly during the Able Archer wargames of 1983). But Reagan was able to moderate his rhetoric and step back from the brink and once Gorbachev came to power, things worked out fine. But it was Brezhnev's obsession with pointlessly counting warheads and his strategic oblivion that started the whole process off. Unlike Langston Hughes' dream, a detente deferred fortunately does not explode.

The Soviet Symphony

One of the great paradoxes of Soviet history is that this most unmusical of regimes could have produced so many great musicians. Russians dominate 20th century music like Germans did the 19th. Many of them drew sustenance, as Orlando Figes showed in Natasha's Dance, from peasant traditions and much of the beauty of the music stems from the tension between rural tradition and the lure of the modern.

Modernism in all the arts was an attack against the decadence and complacency of the West and its deep-rooted hypocricies. The Soviet composers were primed to exploit these opportunities because they could hook their cultural-aesthetic critique to the regime's socio-political critique. Or in many cases it was hooked on for them. Shostakovich's bitter, gray-hued memoir, Testimony mostly communicates the long-suppressed fury of an artist who survived terror, but was permanently crippled by it. He never misses a chance, though, to emphasize his Russianess and to ridicule artists as great as Stravinsky and Prokofiev for betraying their patrimony. American productions of his work were deemed superficial, and his visits abroad were invariably uncomfortable. Yet in 1942 there was Shostakovich on the cover of Time magazine, wearing an absurd fireman's helmet, leading, in American eyes, the united socialist-capitalist charge against fascism. Throngs of admirers greeted him in New York and elsewhere and he grudgingly put up with their adulation.

I think it did us a lot of good, during the Cold War, to listen to Shostakovich, to read Solzhenitsyn, and to sense the double negation of our own culture. First as Russians, then as modernists, they had little use for what they saw as a depthless, self-regarding, atrophied civilization. Today such a negation does not exist. Sure there are radical Muslims who renounce everything western. But they don't embody that renunciation in shared artistic, musical, or literary forms; their scorn, unlike that of the Soviets, descends to those forms themselves. As a result there can be no dialogue and no self-criticism. Maybe that is why we feel so adrift in the war on terror.

Red Men

I was talking to a friend the other day about Mad Men (which I watch on DVD because I don't have cable) and I started thinking how cool a parallel series set in the Soviet Union would be. Some of the themes would be the same: the burgeoning of a consumer society (more imagined than real in the USSR), oppressive if thawing gender relations, Cold War threats of annihilation. Instead of advertisers you'd have apparatchiks, instead of the civil rights movement you'd have poet-dissidents, instead of flashbacks to Korea and the Depression you'd have even darker memories of relatives who disappeared in the night.

I wonder how interested Russians are in the 1950s and 60s and if they engage in Cold War nostalgia the way we do. Do they detect subtle changes in greatcoat and fur hat fashions the way we do in suits and ties? And do they link those minor details of dress and furniture to big reified cultural traits, then press them into artificial ten-year chunks that appear to explain everything about everyone of a certain age?

End of the World

Whether this book is right or wrong about the fact that Russian soldiers might well have accidentally set off a nuclear war, we know that the Khrushchev brought the world to the brink of nuclear extermination too. So perhaps we do live in a much, much safer world than we did at any point in the Cold War. It's odd that it doesn't feel that way.

We feel as if we live in the scariest world imaginable, with Islamic terrorists and killer flu germs, and global warming, etc. I remember somebody recently noticed a commercial on t.v. that said what has now become a commonplace: "we live in the most stressful age in history." Her response was appropriate: Really? Really??!! This is the most stressful age ever? More stressful than an age that, for example, saw the invasion of the Huns, the bubonic plague, the collapse of the Roman Empire, etc.

It seems obvious that every generation, or at least many generations, have felt that they lived on the brink, almost at the end of the world. In fact, Christian theology seems almost dependent on the notion that the end of the world is at hand, and its interesting to note that the many Christians pointed to the collapse of the Soviet Union as a clear signal that the apocalypse was right around the corner.

The real tragedy of the post-Cold War world is that it seems to have revealed the fact that, psychologically, humans seem to have a basic need to feel as if the world were fragile, whether or not this is indeed the case. For 9-11, that unprecedented American disaster, was indeed nothing in comparison with what the Soviets threatened to do to American for decades at a time.

Yet we're actually in two wars now, each lasting for many years, and we're even apparently at war on the home front, even to the extent that civil liberties are being scaled back (and some of the restrictions made semi-permanent apparently by the Obama administration--see NYRB article on the subject).