Soviet Space Dogs

Please join us for a talk with Olesya Turkina, Senior Research Fellow at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, about her book Soviet Space Dogs (FUEL Design & Publishing, 2014).

Soviet Space dogs were part of Soviet propaganda, perhaps even one of its most demonstrative forms. Unlike Yuri Gagarin, the first human to orbit the Earth, Laika, Belka and Strelka (the most famous dogs) as well as Zvezdochka, Otvazhny, Chernyshka and many other members of the order of four-legged cosmonauts, have no past, no background in the traditional sense of the word. The story of their lives began at the Institute of Aviation Medicine, and ended there. The scientific biography of a Soviet space dog is a life described solely in biological parameters. It was left to the ideology of the Soviet system itself to proclaim the story of their epic feats.

Space dogs were respected for doing extremelly dangerous job for the good of the country, and humanity as a whole. The dogs were simultaneously real and fantastical beings. One day these unknown strays were living on the street, the next they were shown on television, and their portraits published in newspapers. They also became characters in children’s books. Space dogs are the characters in a fairy tale that was created in the USSR: they are the martyrs and saints of communism.

From the Harriman Institute.