ABSTRACT
Introduction The contemporaneous technological developments that precipitated the Soviet Union’s unprecedented achievements in space flight, and the political developments of The Thaw, prompted Soviet artists to explore the possibilities of visual representations of life everywhere, from the terrestrial USSR to the bounds of the known universe. In keeping with the orthodoxies of official culture, the majority of these artistic treatments were serious, conveying the significance of the technological achievements and optimistic certainty about the material and spiritual satisfaction that space exploration would bring. This chapter considers a different type of visual language: humorous, satirical visual responses to spaceflight in The Crocodile magazine during The Thaw era.1 Rather than foregrounding the connection between Soviet ideology and technological feats, as other studies have done,2 I shall explain how numerous topical discourses were combined in the space imagery of this popular humor magazine, and how Krokodil’s visual language allowed the magazine’s images to communicate nuanced and skeptical visions of Soviet modernity that betrayed the coincidence of a political-social crisis at a time of technological triumph. My contribution to the discussion of the impact of flight on visual language will be to consider the popular representations of space exploration in Krokodil magazine.
