ABSTRACT
Introduction In this chapter, I examine the conceptual legacy of Russian and Soviet Cosmism in the work of the Moscow artist Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt (b. 1965), who over the course of many years has been working consistently to resurrect the Soviet “imperial sublime,” which is directly linked, both aesthetically and ideologically, to the mythology surrounding aviation and space exploration. In the early post-Soviet period, the heroism of aviation and space exploration in the Soviet era lent itself to deconstruction as material for the study of totalitarian propaganda, or it was transformed into a commodity-one of the most marketable elements of “Soviet retro” (Goralik 2007).1 At the beginning of the 1990s space became an icon within youth club sub-culture.2 In Russian culture today, however, an opposing tendency has emerged, namely nostalgia for the heroic ‘common cause,’ for the lost synthesis of the individual and society. As a result, the notion of space as a ‘national idea’ finds support among conservative intellectuals, writers, and artists. In the mythology of contemporary Russian conservatism, a new imperial utopia is directly related to the philosophy of Russian and Soviet Cosmism. The best-known advocates for the Soviet modernization project today are Aleksandr Prokhanov (b. 1938), the writer and political figure Maksim Kalashnikov (b. 1960), and the actor and Orthodox priest Ivan Okhlobystin (b. 1966), who in his provocative manifesto ‘Doctrine 77’ (Doktrina 77: 2001) singled out space as the foundation of Russian identity. The increasing interest in the theme of space in Russia during recent years is not coincidental; it fits in with the government’s rhetoric concerning the development of advanced technologies, which is evident, for example, in the extensive media coverage of the Mars-500 project and in a string of events marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet space program.3 Even remnants of the Communist Party are advocating the symbolic inheritance of that program. Consider, for example, the popularity in the Russian blogosphere of the congratulatory message posted on national Cosmonauts’ Day, which fell on the anniversary of the founding of the organization Communists of Petersburg and the Leningrad Region:
There will come a time when the first delegation of interplanetary aliens, who were discovered as a result of Gagarin’s distant flight in 1961, will bow their quaint green heads and place wreaths at Lenin’s tomb.
