Brothers of the Cosmos
V. M. Baturin Russian
Not on view
This personal album, assembled by a cinematographer hired to document cosmonaut training, offers an intimate view of the triumphant visual culture surrounding the Soviet space program of the 1960s. Under the direction of the pioneering rocket engineer Sergei Korolev, the Soviet program achieved a string of headline-making “firsts” in early years of the space race. They were the first to send into orbit an earthborn creature (the canine cosmonaut Laika in 1957), a man (Yuri Gagarin in 1961), and a woman (Valentina Tereshkova in 1963). These and other Soviet space pioneers appear in the pages of this meticulously assembled album, accompanied by handwritten inscriptions on each page identifying the subjects and dates of the images.
