ABSTRACT
“A man is half of what he is, and half of what he wants to be,” said Oscar Wilde. If that is the case, then Soviet children of the sixties and seventies were all half-cosmonauts …. At that time all of us, young and old, lived with one foot in the cosmos. The cosmos was everywhere: in school books, on the walls of houses and on the mosaics in the Moscow Metro. A snub-nosed cosmonaut, behind the glass of his helmet-aquarium, was always everywhere …. Under the windows of five-storied khrushchevkas [public housing projects that went up during Nikita Khrushchev's regime] stood models of satellites. In the tear-off calendars, one spaceship was followed by another.
