April 12 is the International Day of Aviation and Cosmonautics, also known as the International Day of Human Space Flight. It was on this day 55 years ago that the first manned spacecraft with Yuri Gagarin on board made it to the Earth orbit, and it is this event which today’s Russia tries to present as a purely Russian achievement. Meanwhile, of the five most prominent, according to the Western experts, chief rocket designers in the space race-era USSR, four were Ukrainian, and the fifth was Georgian: Sergei Korolev, Valentin Glushko, Mikhail Yangel, Vladimir Chelomei, and Alexander Nadiradze...
However, is there truth that would not be stomped upon by the Kremlin’s propagandists? Of course not. Also, these propagandists supplement their ideological arsenal almost yearly, developing more and more new methods of “de-Ukrainizing” Soviet-era cosmonautics. Among the main weapons in this arsenal, we find biopics that have great appeal to mass audience and are almost taken for historical documents by it.
For example, the 2007 film Korolev, written and directed by Yuri Kara, which deals with hard times which the future chief designer lived through in the 1930s, is guilty of many distortions impermissible in a biopic. Among them, we see an attempt to conceal the important fact of Korolev’s Ukrainian identity. It is a well known fact in modern Ukraine, but...
One of his colleagues recalled a characteristic episode which happened precisely in the 1930s: “In a conversation with him, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky made a remark in French: ‘Rira bien, que rira le dernier...’ Korolev smiled and immediately replied with a strong Little Russian accent: ‘Je crois, nous ne serons pas d’humeur a rire, tous les deux...’” [He laughs best who laughs last. – I think that both of us will have no laughing time. – Author.]
This “strong Little Russian accent” stayed with Korolev till his dying day, no matter what language he spoke. The film, meanwhile, shows him as a typical young Russian intellectual (Korolev was as young as 31 at the time of his arrest in 1938), sounding like a true Muscovite...
RUSSIAN SO-CALLED BIOPICS TAKE PAINS TO FALSIFY BIOGRAPHIES OF THEIR CHARACTERS, INCLUDING SERGEI KOROLEV
The 2013 film Gagarin. First in Space, directed by Pavel Parkhomenko, keeps to this way of presenting Korolev. The artistic level of the film is significantly higher, Gagarin’s story is shown correctly enough and according to the laws of the art, but Korolev is shown as Russian once again. Meanwhile, the real Korolev was, for instance, willing to communicate with compatriots in Ukrainian, and even insisted that they did not forget the language. The film includes quite a few scenes with the actor playing cosmonaut No.4 Pavlo Popovych, who was one of Korolev’s Ukrainian interlocutors who joined him in singing Ukrainian songs, but... there is no sign of Ukrainian identity in the film Popovych either...
However, let us keep in mind that Korolev was not the only ethnic Ukrainian chief designer. The second most important Soviet space engineer was Glushko whose powerful engines brought into the space the first satellite, space dogs Belka and Strelka, and Gagarin himself. However, the film does not show Glushko at all.
Finally, Kara made another film, called The Chief Designer and released in 2015. This is a kind of continuation of his first film about Korolev, but done with even less talent and more lies. Truth be told, Kara did find an ethnic Ukrainian actor for the lead role who does not sound like a Muscovite, and even utters a few Ukrainian words. However, the film suffers from fantastic dissimilarity, both portrait and behavioral, between all the main characters and their historical prototypes (while Gagarin had most actors closely resembling their prototypes). It is the actor playing Glushko (probably for the first time in Russian cinema) who is most unlike his prototype, and all differences are purely negative. The chief designer is shown as a hysterical and cynical demagogue and run-of-the-mill womanizer... Surely such a person could not successfully manage tens of thousands of employees, enjoy considerable prestige with them, build engines and missile systems one after another, and develop the most powerful ever, still unsurpassed, engines RD-170 at the end of his life in the 1980s?
However, it is also a propaganda trick: the film shows “good” Ukrainian Korolev, who cares about building up the USSR’s nuclear and missile strength, and “bad” Glushko, caring primarily about his popularity. In fact, the famous R-7 carrier rocket, which in its various versions was to get into the space the first artificial satellite, and the first interplanetary probe, and the first cosmonauts, was unsuitable for use as a nuclear weapons delivery vehicle from the very start of its development, since its launch preparations took first two days, then a day, shortened to six hours in the early 1960s. Korolev and Glushko were both well aware of this, but they both dreamed of space, of manned flights to the Moon and Mars, and thus the two chief designers who were once GULAG prisoners managed to cheat the Party’s Central Committee and marshals of the Soviet Army. Incidentally, the carrier rocket Soyuz, which is still used by Russia, is a family of thoroughly modified versions of Korolev’s R-7 Semyorka...
These stories, related to Cosmonautics Day, are just a few examples of the Kremlin’s tools used in its “hybrid warfare” against Ukraine. Well, they will win this war in the space “section of the front” as long as Ukrainian TV reporters and filmmakers fail to show the Soviet-era cosmonautics truthfully and in a highly artistic form, so that not only Ukrainians, but Russians themselves were able to reject such historical falsehoods.
