page_title: Soviet space program
section_title: Program secrecy
hierarchical_section_title: Soviet space program / Program secrecy
caption_attribution_description: English: USSR miniature sheet of 1964, glossy version, Communists blaze the trail to stars. Русский: Путь к звёздам прокладывают коммунисты. Почтовый блок СССР 1964 года. Глянцевый вариант. Естественные цвета.
context_page_description: The Space program of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, commonly known as the Soviet space program, was the national space program of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, active from the 1930s until the state's collapse in 1991.
  The Soviet Union's space program was mainly based on the cosmonautic exploration of space and the development of the expendable launch vehicles, which had been split between many design bureaus competing against each other. Over its 60-years of history, the Soviet program was responsible for a number of pioneering feats and accomplishments in human spaceflight, including the first intercontinental ballistic missile, first satellite, first animal in Earth orbit, first human in space and Earth orbit, first woman in space and Earth orbit, first spacewalk, first Moon impact, first image of the far side of the Moon and uncrewed lunar soft landing, first space rover, first sample of lunar soil automatically extracted and brought to Earth, and first space station.
context_section_description: The Soviet space program had withheld information on its projects predating the success of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. In fact, when the Sputnik project was first approved, one of the most immediate courses of action the Politburo took was to consider what to announce to the world regarding their event. The Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) established precedents for all official announcements on the Soviet space program. The information eventually released did not offer details on who built and launched the satellite or why it was launched. However, the public release is illuminating in what it does reveal: "there is an abundance of arcane scientific and technical data... as if to overwhelm the reader with mathematics in the absence of even a picture of the object". What remains of the release is the pride for Soviet cosmonautics and the vague hinting of future possibilities then available after Sputnik's success.
  The Soviet space program's use of secrecy served as both a tool to prevent the leaking of classified information between countries and also to create a mysterious barrier between the space program and the Soviet populace. The program's nature embodied ambiguous messages concerning its goals, successes, and values. The program itself was so secret that a regular Soviet citizen could never achieve a concrete image of it, but rather a superficial picture of its history, present activities, or future endeavors. Launchings were not announced until they took place. Cosmonaut names were not released until they flew. Mission details were sparse. Outside observers did not know the size or shape of their rockets or cabins or most of their spaceships, except for the first Sputniks, lunar probes and Venus probe.
  However, because of its nature, the Soviet space program suffered a paradox. On one hand, officials attempted to promote the space program by frequently connecting its successes to the strength of socialism. On the other hand, the same officials understood the importance of secrecy in the context of the Cold War. This stress on secrecy in the USSR can be understood as a measure to protect its strengths and weaknesses.
  However, the military influence over the Soviet space program may be the best explanation for this secrecy. The OKB-1 was subordinated under the Ministry of General Machine Building, tasked with the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and continued to give its assets random identifiers into the 1960s: "For example, the Vostok spacecraft was referred to as 'object IIF63' while its launch rocket was 'object 8K72K'". Soviet defense factories had been assigned numbers rather than names since 1927. Even these internal codes were obfuscated: in public, employees used a separate code, a set of special post-office numbers, to refer to the factories, institutes, and departments.
  The program's public pronouncements were uniformly positive: as far as the people knew, the Soviet space program had never experienced failure. According to historian James Andrews, "With almost no exceptions, coverage of Soviet space exploits, especially in the case of human space missions, omitted reports of failure or trouble".
  "The USSR was famously described by Winston Churchill as 'a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma' and nothing signified this more than the search for the truth behind its space program during the Cold War. Although the Space Race was literally played out above our heads, it was often obscured by a figurative 'space curtain' that took much effort to see through" says Dominic Phelan in the book Cold War Space Sleuths (Springer-Praxis 2013).
caption: Communists pave the way to the stars. The Soviet miniature sheet of 1964 displaying six historical firsts of the Soviet space program.
exif: {}