Elon Musk wants to create an inhabited city on Mars. However, the idea is not new and his dreams are similar to those of the Kremlin’s “cosmist” utopians. As in the Soviet era, this is an ideological and political project: to assert the supremacy of a system, a regime. And as in the Soviet era, this pharaonic project will probably encounter insurmountable difficulties.
When, during his inauguration address, President Trump endearingly endorsed Elon Musk’s utopian (or dystopian, depending on one’s perspective) project to create a backup for humanity and declared, “We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars,” I experienced a profound sense of déjà vu.
I was born in 1960 in the Soviet Union, three years after the Sputnik moment and one year before Gagarin’s historic flight, during the halcyon days of the Soviet space program. The sense of limitless possibilities in space exploration became an integral part of my childhood. Every Soviet boy – and, after Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 journey into orbit, every girl – dreamed of becoming a cosmonaut. Even if such a vocation was not your personal dream, it was the correct answer to please the grownups when they asked what you wanted to be in the future.
Of course, I was distressed and saddened by the fate of the brave dogs Laika, Belka, and Strelka, who flew to space never to return. Yet their martyrdom was not in vain. Thanks to them, Gagarin could journey into space and prove, as the popular atheistic thesis of the time claimed, that God does not exist – because Gagarin did not find Him there. This assertion of de facto atheism adorned countless posters depicting the heroic cosmonaut soaring through space. But Gagarin’s flight was just the beginning.
As a child, I was involved in various collecting activities. Beyond postage stamps and autumn leaves dried between the pages of notebooks to form herbariums, Soviet children had another collecting passion. We did not have baseball cards (as baseball itself was absent), but a fitting replacement was matchboxes with colorful labels. Many of these labels depicted space exploration, both real and imagined. One such label featured an image of a spaceship bearing the abbreviation “USSR,” speeding toward a bright red planet, accompanied by the bold motto: “To Mars!”
Covers of children magazines depicted Soviet colonization of the far away planet. In 1965, Ogoniok, the most popular magazine in the country, published a science fiction story “We are on Mars!” The fantastic description of exploits of the heroic cosmonauts predicted that a Soviet space mission would land on Mars in 1995.
This fascination with the distant planet was not merely a result of the successful early achievements of the Soviet space program but was rooted in a fundamental element of Bolshevik ideology. In 1908, Alexander Bogdanov, a socialist, philosopher, and future Bolshevik, published a utopian novel titled The Red Star, which depicted the journey to Mars of a revolutionary named Leonid, where he discovered a communist society.
In his detailed depiction of Martian civilization, Bogdanov envisioned numerous futuristic inventions, including computers, television, space travel, and jet engines. However, his most ambitious prediction – about the “probable forms of the social system of future society” – proved to be far less realistic. The imagined export of communism from a fictional Mars to the real Earth ultimately failed to materialize as Bogdanov had envisioned.
In 1923 writer Aleksei Tolstoy, who was in emigration in Berlin, before returning to the USSR, and becoming one of the Stalin’s favorite writers, lovingly named the “Red Count” published in Petrograd a fantastic novel, Aelita, about an engineer, Mstislav Los, and a soldier called Aleksei Gusev traveling to Mars. While the engineer falls in love with Aelita, the daughter of the ruler of Mars, the soldier is preparing a revolution hoping to turn a planet into a part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. After the revolution is oppressed by the Martian rulers the protagonists of the novel escape to the Earth. Tolstoy’s creation was extremely popular and inspired numerous unauthorized sequels as well as a 1924 film, Aelita: Queen of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov and vaguely based on the novel. It was famous in many ways because of the constructivist set and costume designs by avant-garde artist Alexandra Exter.
The Soviet passion for Mars was not confined to the utopian novels of the turn of the century or the propaganda slogans of the 1960s. As early as 1959, Sergei Korolev, the leading Soviet rocket engineer, convinced the Soviet government of the need to send a mission to Mars. To achieve this, the Heavy Interplanetary Vessel was designed. Weighing 1,600 tons, it was to be assembled in orbit from more than 20 components launched separately.
By 1960, the plan had evolved to include a crew of three astronauts landing on Mars and spending a year researching the Red Planet. However, attempts to launch spacecraft capable of reaching Mars and Venus in 1961 and 1962 ended in failure. Despite this, Soviet engineers continued to develop competing proposals for a Mars expedition well into the early 1970s. The mission was projected to last three years.
Chlorella algae was identified as a source for oxygen production, and fresh food for the crew was to be grown in an onboard hydroponic greenhouse. By the mid-1960s, a model of the spaceship’s living quarters had been constructed, and three cosmonauts spent a year in it, surviving on vegetables and oxygen produced by Chlorella algae.
The final Soviet Mars expedition project, named “Aelita,” was envisioned as a response to the American moon landing. However, by 1974, the project was terminated. The dream’s demise was attributed to the astronomical cost and its lack of utility for the Soviet military program. Konstantin Feoktistov, one of the mission’s developers, later reflected:
“Mars is clearly unsuitable for human life. Temperatures on its surface in the mid-latitudes during summer range from 25°C (daytime) to -70°C (night time), and in winter from -10°C (daytime) to -90°C (night time). The atmosphere is composed of carbon dioxide, with no oxygen, and the atmospheric pressure at the surface is sixteen times lower than on Earth. It is conceivable that one day we might be tempted to establish a research base on Mars, but the necessity and feasibility of colonizing Mars with humans are hard to imagine.”
The Soviet Union failed. It never reached Mars, let alone organized a successful Bolshevik revolution on the Red Planet. In fact, it could not even create a communist society on Earth. Perhaps Elon Musk will fare better. However, it is worth bearing in mind that grand ideas do not always culminate in their realization.
Art historian, exhibition curator, investigative journalist. Lives in Kyiv.
