The Radical Humanism of the Soviet Planetarium
In the skies over Moscow, in the decades before the collapse of the socialist state, stood three symbols of the space program: the rocket, the cosmonaut, and the red star. The rocket is still atop the 1964 Monument to the Conquerors of Space, a 110-meter-high titanium sculpture beside Prospekt Mira with the Alley of Cosmonauts leading to its base. The cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin stands on a 30-meter-high column on Leninsky Prospekt, his arms pulled back in the style of a classic Marvel superhero, as though about to leap upward toward the stratosphere. These two monuments look at once back to the period of Soviet space exploration and forward to the time of planetary probes and space stations. The red star, symbol both of astronomy and of communism, preceded the epic period of space flights and once crowned the dome of the Moscow planetarium located on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya street.
This planetarium stands at the intersection of influences created by politics, engineering, style, theater, astronomy, space exploration, and religion, each of which affects the others. It was one of the last buildings to be put up in the style known as Constructivism, and thus looks both back to the original fervor of new Soviet society, and forward to the difficult decades of state socialism.
Constructing a planetarium in Moscow was never going to be merely about an educational display of the movements of the planets and the stars, however inventively demonstrated by the Bauersfeld projector. Russia had a longstanding and diverse attitude to the cosmos, mixing science, esotericism, Gnosticism, a belief in a world beyond the purely physical, and a feeling that the nation was specially destined to explore the planets and beyond. The 19th-century writer Nikolai Fyodorov, founder of what is known, where the dead reappear on a spaceship above an aquatic planet. However, Fyodorov also inspired early Russian ideas on planetary travel. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the first Russian rocket designer—who in Tsarist times had already worked out the basic formulas for the thrust required by engines intending to escape the Earth’s atmosphere—had been a follower of Fyodorov. Tsiolkovsky constructed the first models of rockets and dirigibles, indulged in complex and semi-mystical theories as to the makeup of the universe, and wrote science-fiction novels about Russian space explorers encountering aliens on other planets. He was deeply eccentric—photos show him with long, flowing locks, surrounded by his rockets and airships as he holds up his ear trumpet as though to detect distant sounds.
