- 13/05/2025
If the space race was about being the first country to put a gleaming satellite into orbit high above the Earth, the Soviets won that race in October 1957. Discover why historians call Sputnik’s success the high-water mark of the prestige and confidence of international communism. What made the communists so sure they alone had the keys to the future of human destiny?
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00:00Your expert is Vyas Gabriel Lulevichis, a professor of history at the University of
00:18Tennessee, Knoxville. He won the top two teaching awards at the University of Tennessee and was
00:26awarded a prestigious Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
00:31On October 4th, 1957, humans reached beyond the Earth for the first time, sending a mechanical
01:00emissary into outer space orbit named Sputnik, or fellow traveler in Russian. First, a primitive
01:08computer at Moscow State University, which is the size of an entire room, has been deployed to
01:15number crunch an exact orbit trajectory for the object. The launch has been moved up for fear
01:21that the Americans might be on the verge of launching first. Then, at the launch pad on the starkly empty
01:29steppes of Kazakhstan, in what later would come to be called the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the engines of
01:36the mighty R-7 rocket roar and it lifts off, then dipping to aim for Earth's orbit and streaking along
01:45at 17,400 miles per hour. What follows then is tense waiting, as radios listen for the distinctive
01:55signal of Sputnik once it reaches orbit 142 miles above the Earth. And then, an hour and a half after
02:03launch, it is heard. Orbiting high above the Earth, Sputnik is a small shiny sphere designed to be seen by the
02:13rest of humanity and designed to be beautiful and minimalist. It's small and basic looking. It weighs 184
02:21pounds and is about the size of a beach ball, a 23-inch diameter silver sphere with four antennas. Inside
02:30is a radio and batteries. As it courses high overhead, its steady signal haunts the opponents it has left in the dust.
02:39Back at the launch pad, the Soviet scientists cheer, breathe a sigh of relief, and announce,
02:48the conquest of space has begun. The Soviet superpower rival, the United States,
02:55is left in stunned dismay. As throughout the Cold War, this will demand a response. In this course,
03:04we'll be tracking the decline of communism, both as a revolutionary ideology and as a form of
03:11government. But to understand the decline, we need to ask first when the peak was. What was the height
03:19from which the decline then commenced? I want to propose that the stunning worldwide news in 1957
03:28of the launch of the Sputnik satellite. The first human object propelled into outer space was that peak.
03:37This was the high-water mark of the prestige and confidence of international communism and its claim
03:43to embody the future of humanity. It was a moment of triumphalism, which is inseparable from claiming to
03:51own the future and having the key to a scientific understanding of all of history and human destiny.
04:00Before moving to explore the momentum that the Soviets achieved, and then their further successes
04:06in space, this would be the ideal moment to ask about the prior context. How had the world reached this
04:14point? How had communism changed from a political ideology into a governing program, embodied in huge
04:22states like the Soviet Union or China? At the outset, it's indispensable to define communism.
04:31Communism, as articulated by Karl Marx, is defined as the abolition of private property and the
04:37replacement of a profit-driven market with a new system of collective control of the means of
04:44production and resources. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Friedrich Engels announced that
04:52communism could be summed up in a single sentence, abolition of private property. A later formulation of
05:01Marx's was that communism would be the stage when all of society was organized along the lines of
05:08from each according to his ability to each according to his need. Associated with this were promises of
05:17total social equality and sharing in a new kind of stage of human societal evolution. In fact, Marx's
05:26scheme promised a liberation from history, that entire record of struggle and exploitation and suffering to
05:34date. Full, perfected communism was to be the final goal. In two previous series with the Great Courses,
05:43The Rise of Communism from Marx to Lenin and Communism in Power from Stalin to Mao, I've already sketched the
05:51developments that the developments that transformed this ideology into a total political program. You may
05:57find those courses of interest, but this present course stands alone. Briefly, however, what began as
06:05world historical theory in the works of Marx and Engels was then institutionalized in Lenin's Bolshevik state
06:13from 1917, the experimental and unprecedented project of the Soviet Union. Upon Lenin's death in 1924,
06:23Joseph Stalin presided over its transformation into a personal dictatorship, his own. Mass arrests,
06:32purges, and the creation of a gulag prison camp empire, among other draconian measures, brought the
06:40state into alignment with Stalin's personal vision. Overnight, the country was to be industrialized by hero
06:49workers and five-year plans. In 1939, Stalin's pact with Hitler to divide Eastern Europe almost spelled
06:58as a brutal disaster as a Nazi invasion followed, pushing the Soviet Union to the very brink of collapse.
07:05And yet, at great cost, Stalin prevailed and ended the Second World War in a strengthened geopolitical
07:13position, occupying much of Eastern Europe and Eastern Germany and establishing client states in those regions.
07:20After Stalin's death in 1953, one of his own subordinates, Nikita Khrushchev, announced
07:29de-Stalinization and a return to Lenin's founding principles to revitalize and accelerate development.
07:38At the same time, communism was spreading beyond Europe. In China, Mao's Communist Party imitated Stalin's
07:46crash course of modernization in industry and agriculture and in society itself in the Cultural
07:53Revolution. North Korea and Vietnam likewise saw the establishment of communist states. Shortly after
08:00the Second World War, when communist regimes were at their peak, it's estimated that they ruled over a
08:06third of the world. As some observed at the time, it seemed the world was going their way.
08:12Mao certainly declared it to be so in 1957. China had just completed its first five-year plan as a
08:22milestone towards socialism. Then, in November, while attending the Conference of Communists and
08:29Workers' Parties in Moscow, Mao declared in a speech that 1957 was, quote,
08:36a time of a new turning point. Two winds are blowing now, the east wind and the west wind. China has a
08:45saying. Either the east wind prevails over the west wind, or the west wind prevails over the east wind.
08:53Who defeats whom? Our skies are brightly lit. The western skies are full of black clouds. We are able to
09:02sleep more or less peacefully. But they are in a panic. The launch of two Sputniks does not give
09:09them the opportunity to sleep peacefully. We have left the western world far behind. The western world
09:17has forever been left behind. Our side has taken the advantage, end quote. This was the peak moment of
09:25pride when the world seemed to be going their way. And by 1957, not just the world, but space as well.
09:35During World War II, the Soviet rocket program was fed massive resources as the leadership saw its
09:42military potential. Captured designs from the Nazis' V-2 rocket program for superweapons sped progress even
09:51further to advance a vital technological project and a source of immense prestige.
09:58The rocket program was led by a scientist who had earlier been one of Stalin's gulag prisoners.
10:05Once Khrushchev sought to de-Stalinize the Soviet Union, the gulag system was officially shut down,
10:12but repression remained a persistent reality in a host of other forms. The chief rocket scientist was former
10:20prisoner Sergei Karolyov. Originally, Karolyov had been an aeronautical engineer. He had been arrested
10:28in 1938 on false charges of being a counter-revolutionary by the Soviet secret police in Stalin's purges.
10:37He spent time in the notorious Kolima gulag camps. During the war, Karolyov was put to work in a prison
10:44laboratory called a Sharashka, staffed by prisoner scientists. Afterwards, he became a driving force of
10:52the Soviet space effort. But because of intense Soviet secrecy, he always remained hidden in total obscurity
11:01until his very death. He proposed the satellite project in 1954 and brought it to completion. It was he
11:10who, after the successful 1957 launch, announced that the conquest of space had begun. His beloved
11:17Sputnik orbited for three months. Radio amateurs around the world could actually hear its trademark
11:24beeping. Finally, its batteries ran out. And as it lost power, the tone of its famous beeping changed.
11:31This was a pre-planned indicator of the nearing end. After 1,440 orbits, it then fell back into Earth's
11:41atmosphere and burned up on re-entry in January of 1958. The triumphal mood of the Soviets contrasted
11:50with what in the United States felt like a Sputnik crisis and being left in the dust. That beep,
11:58beep, beep, beep overhead showed the power of rocketry and a new sense of vulnerability. The U.S. was
12:06judged to be a year behind the Soviets. Hundreds of American newspaper articles spread the alarm. In
12:13Moscow, American visitors in the streets would encounter smiling Russians who would approach them,
12:19say, beep, beep, and walk away. The American media spread a mood of alarm, depicting this as sinister
12:27proof of a Soviet technological leap which the U.S. could not yet match. It was called a veritable
12:35repeat of Pearl Harbor. The U.S. scrambled to respond. Money poured into scientific research
12:43and science education. Indeed, it's a good bet that some listeners to this course had their own
12:49educations shaped by this infusion of resources. One outcome was the founding in 1958 of the National
12:57Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA. It soon grew to huge proportions, and the space race
13:05was on. In the aftermath of Sputnik's debut, it enjoyed a craze in communist countries. A new brand of
13:14Soviet cigarettes appeared, named Sputnik. The Chinese leadership and activists admired this success from
13:21afar as well and gave that name, Sputnik, to collective farms and industries as the very sincerest form of
13:29flattery. Pride in Sputnik continues in Russia down to the present day, as the COVID vaccine which was
13:36promoted there bore that storied name. But even greater triumphs were to follow. In November of that
13:44same year, rocket scientists were ordered to rush the next satellite into action as a celebration of
13:51the anniversary of Lenin's seizure of power back in November 1917. This was Sputnik 2, which carried a
13:59dog named Laika on board. In reality, this was a suicide mission that Laika did not volunteer for.
14:07In spite of this, other much-heralded successes kept coming. In 1959, a probe named Lunik was launched
14:17toward the moon, an unmanned vehicle. Lunik 2, also launched in 1959, crashed into the moon's surface
14:25and just beforehand released two spheres, which in turn popped open to scatter titanium pentagons with a
14:33hammer and sickle on them so that the Soviet Union might be able to claim it had planted the flag of
14:40revolution on the moon's surface. Later, Khrushchev kindly gave Eisenhower a replica of one of those
14:47spheres. Lunik 3 took the first pictures from the dark side of the moon. The strategic rocket forces
14:54were established as a new branch of the Soviet military, showing the military character of these
15:00efforts. In August of 1960, two Cosmodogs this time were returned safely to the Earth.
15:09Not revealed at the time were accidents that could have dented this splendid aura of success.
15:16These included a horrific 1960 launch pad explosion in which over a hundred died, including the very
15:24commander of the rocket forces. But these were obscured by official secrecy. In what would become a
15:30trademark reflex for the Soviets, successes were trumpeted, but failures and setbacks were hidden.
15:38The greatest following success and historic first was the launching of humans, male and female
15:45cosmonauts into space. They would be hailed by communists as truly the first new man and new woman.
15:55On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut number one, Yuri Gagarin, inaugurated the age of space travel by orbiting the
16:05Earth, a human version of Sputnik, a mere four years after that first triumph. Thus, the Soviet Union had
16:13stolen a march yet again, seeming to widen its lead. It put the first human into space with a launch from
16:21the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Gagarin was lifted into orbital flight on the Vostok 1, the new
16:30orbital spacecraft. After 108 minutes, he returned to the Earth. This first human space flight was full of
16:39perils and the unknown. How would weightlessness affect humans? Would human psychology perhaps
16:47crumple before the sheer isolation and vastness of space? Could the dangers of reentry into the Earth's
16:56atmosphere be managed? In spite of all perils, this flight proved a great success, and Gagarin's smiling
17:04face became famous globally. The 27-year-old seemed to represent the ordinary Soviet citizen. He was a
17:14telegenic pilot who had grown up near Smolensk and could flash a beaming smile. He now became a world
17:22celebrity, the first to embody the space traveler as hero. The Soviet authorities were apparently quite
17:31surprised by his sudden popularity as the first Soviet world celebrity, but they quickly leapt to construct
17:39a new cult of personality around him. He was hailed as the Columbus of the cosmos, or the Red Columbus, the
17:48ideal man. So great was enthusiasm for him that contemporaries even started to speak of being proud of belonging to a
17:57special Sputnik generation or a Gagarin generation. Because Soviet authorities feared losing this new
18:05hero to an accident, Gagarin was now relegated to a more ceremonial or representational role instead of
18:13going on new space missions. He was hugely frustrated. Official media presented cosmonauts, especially that first
18:22humanist space, Yuri Gagarin, as embodiments of the new communist man under construction. Meanwhile,
18:30the fact that the cosmonauts had not encountered any angels strumming harps, nor a bearded god up in the
18:36heavens, was presented as crushing proof of the state's official atheism. Then, in 1963, the first woman in space
18:46was Valentina Tereshkova on the Vostok 6. She was born in 1937 in a village on the Volga. After laboring
18:55as a factory worker, she joined the Air Force after falling in love with amateur skydiving. She was the
19:03first and youngest woman in space. Tereshkova's famed solo flight on Vostok 6 took off on June 16, 1963.
19:14She orbited Earth 48 times, spending nearly three days in space. Her record still stands as the only
19:22woman on a solo space flight. Back on Earth, her fame soared. The deed of this woman nicknamed Valya
19:30was hailed as a new triumph of communism in space. In November 1963, Tereshkova married a fellow cosmonaut,
19:41Andriyan Nikolaev, in a highly publicized wedding, with Gagarin in attendance. Tereshkova was appointed
19:49to post in the party afterwards, and eventually retired with the rank of Major General. So here's
19:56the heart of the matter. While Americans remember above all the moon landing in 1969, Soviet memory
20:04celebrated the time when they were in the lead in the space race, seeming to own the future.
20:11In 1964, they built the Moscow Monument to the Conquerors of Space. It's a huge titanium arc that
20:20reaches into the sky, representing in abstract form an exhaust plume topped by a soaring rocket.
20:27I remember it well from my trip to Moscow in 1989 for a summer of intensive language study. It was built
20:35right outside the bombastic exhibition grounds called Vedencha, or Exhibition of Achievements of National
20:43Economy, a pantheon of celebrated achievements. Yet why then did the Soviet space program lose its initial
20:53lead and fall behind that of the U.S.? At first, there had been such confidence. Soviets even joked that
21:00if Americans ever got to the moon, they would be met there by a short man who would want to show them
21:06how to grow corn on the moon. That was Khrushchev, who was obsessed with growing corn as a food of the future.
21:12But that master engineer, Korolev, who in total anonymity directed the Soviet effort, died in 1966,
21:21essentially from overwork. This proved a huge setback, as his successors were nowhere near as effective as
21:29he had been. Gagarin, who seemed to grow tired of his purely representational ceremonial role, returned to
21:37flying, but was killed in a training accident while flying in 1968, the causes of which are still
21:44mysterious. The pace of advance slowed. The Americans in 1961 specifically defined getting to the moon as
21:53their goal. And by 1969, astronauts stepped out onto the lunar surface.
22:01That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
22:10Soviet engineers cheered this too, as an achievement for humanity at large. But their initial lead was lost.
22:17In the communist bloc, jokes poked fun at the ever-bustling leader, Khrushchev. One joke went
22:24that Khrushchev had reacted to the American moon landing by ordering a Soviet landing on the sun.
22:31When scientists protested that this would be disastrous, he replied it was no problem. The
22:37cosmonauts would make their safe landing on the dark side of the sun. Other jokes about the Soviet space
22:43program hinted at ethnic tensions even within the USSR, which claimed to have overcome national
22:50differences in an exemplary way. I remember visiting Lithuania as part of the Soviet Union in the 1970s
22:58and hearing a joke about a Lithuanian farmer's wife who runs out of the house to tell her husband the
23:04news. And the husband is perched atop the roof of the house, fixing it. She shouts,
23:10Yone, Yone, the radio just announced the Russians have flown to outer space.
23:16He thinks a while, and then he asks, all of them?
23:20Even after losing the lead, the Soviets continued to celebrate the ideological meaning of their space
23:26exploration. Inviting cosmonauts from non-Soviet countries underlined the key internationalist
23:33character of communism. Thus, in 1978, to great fanfare, Vladimir Remek, from the Soviet ally
23:41Czechoslovakia, became the first non-US and non-Soviet man in space. The media hailed this
23:49as a proof of the ideal of socialist brotherhood. Remek had in part been chosen for his personal
23:56background because he was half Czech and half Slovak. Remek afterwards complained that his role,
24:02in fact, had been very limited. He even had his hands slapped away from controls by his Russian
24:08colleague. Back in Remek's homeland, jokers claimed that the Soviets deliberately had not sent two
24:15Czechoslovaks up there, as after their flight they would surely have accidentally touched down in the
24:20west and then defected. A whole genre of science fiction arose in communist countries, which underlined
24:28the importance assigned to being first in space and the communist future imagined for mankind. In fact,
24:35Russian thinking about space had much earlier antecedents, especially literary ones, in particular
24:41the prophetic intuitions of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an early Russian rocket scientist and theorist of space
24:48travel. Whether celebrated or theorized, Soviet firsts in space were linked to promises of the nearing
24:56achievement of full communism, which was said to be a historical certainty according to Marxist theory.
25:03Khrushchev was over the moon with confidence at the leap forward in the space race. When the 22nd
25:11Party Congress was held in 1961, precisely in that famous year of Gagarin, Khrushchev linked that success
25:19to the larger program of communism as such. He presented a new party program that announced
25:26that the Soviet Union had now moved into a higher level of development. Khrushchev likened this to a
25:33three-stage rocket. The original 1903 Party program had roared to life to lift Russia out of feudal
25:42backwardness and the start of capitalism. Then, in 1917, it had lifted society into socialism, and now
25:52the party was to finally move society into the orbit of communism. Smiling, Khrushchev declared,
26:01this is a remarkable rocket, comrades. It is the greatest energy of all, the energy of the builders of
26:08communism, end quote. In this exalted mood, the Party Congress declared, quote, that the stage of
26:16building socialism was complete. The final stage of pure communism, of wealth and plenty, would be
26:24reached within 20 years, end quote. That statement meant that full, perfected communism would be reached by 1981.
26:33Khrushchev carefully and emphatically read out the promise, quote,
26:39the cup of communism is the cup of plenty. It must always be full to the brim. Each of us must pour in
26:48our own contribution and each drink from it. We are guided by strictly scientific calculation,
26:55and our calculations show that in 20 years' time, we shall essentially have built the communist society,
27:02end quote. The implication was vast. The present generation of Soviet people will live under
27:10communism. In fact, such very specific predictions made by leaders forecasting exactly when full
27:19communism would be achieved, when the promised future would arrive, would turn out to be hostages
27:25to fortune. Such highly specific and verifiable promises proved a double-edged sword. On the one
27:34hand, by the logic of the ideology, such promises were needed to give confidence, to show empirically that
27:41the promised endpoint would be achieved. But, as for all millenarian movements, there then arose the
27:49threatening question. What if the goal were not met? What then? Specificity had its uses, and its dangers,
27:57as we shall see. In this course, we'll continue the exploration of the trajectory of communism as an
28:04idea, a motivating faith, a form of government, in the final analysis, an experiment in creating a new
28:12civilization. But something happened on the way, in the very process of seeking power to fulfill these
28:19ideological projections, and aiming to transform economies, societies, and human nature itself.
28:27In these lectures, we'll track the decline from the high point of Sputnik in 1957. We'll look at global
28:34expansion and momentum for communist growth in the 1950s and 1960s, including in Cuba, Italy, and France.
28:43And then how that very expansion provoked problems in the 1970s and 1980s, with crises in Ethiopia,
28:51Peru, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The breakdown of Soviet-Chinese relations threatened
28:57a civil war within an internationalist movement. We'll ask how communist ideas shaped art and culture
29:05and everyday life, especially in Eastern Europe. We will investigate the repressive strategies
29:11of secret police forces and growing dissent and challenges to central authority. How could individuals
29:19confront the state? Then we turn to the endgame. With the reformist and Leninist ideas of Gorbachev,
29:27the last Soviet leader. Those reform initiatives paradoxically led to the fall of the Berlin Wall
29:34in 1989, and then the implosion of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. In China's case, crisis at Tiananmen
29:43in 1989 led in other directions, towards a still ongoing transmutation of that system, now under the command
29:51of Chairman Xi. We'll conclude by asking about the long-term meanings of this epic story extending over
29:59nearly two centuries. How is communism as a project remembered, memorialized, and understood today?
30:08Throughout these lectures, we'll argue that the reasons for the decline of communism were both internal to
30:14the ideology and external. Internally, fervor waned, and tensions pulled the project apart. These included
30:23wanting to be monolithic and internationalist at the same time, both diverse and united. Claiming one
30:30communism, but of necessity, the reality was there were communisms in the plural, not least in tension
30:37between the movement and its future goal of perfected communism. The external causes of decline were
30:44resistance, protest, and repeated preference cascades, whereby a society is suddenly mobilized in
30:51opposition to official orthodoxies and slogans. Amid the clashes of theory versus practice, aspiration
31:01versus control and command, promises of perfection versus lived realities, the human drama of the trajectory
31:10of communism offers us the full range of historical experience. I want to invite you to explore it together.
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