‘Soviets in Space’ provides a rather unique perspective on the space race with its focus on the USSR and its contributions to space exploration during the Cold War period. I found this a fascinating read and learned some new information that I had been previously unaware of, despite having read many titles about the space race and the Cold War more generally. The narrative is engaging, but at times I would have liked a little more detail. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in either the Cold War period, Russian/Soviet history or space exploration.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the Cold War is the fact that we learned so little about the personalities behind the Soviet Space program. While the USA used Nazi technology and Werner van Braun to spark their space program, the USSR struggled to provide their people with the basics. With Stalin dead and Kruschev desperate to make a mark for the USSR, the Space Race was on.

Soviets in Space highlights the people of the USSR who turned the struggle of the post-war world into a communist dream and sense of pride . I am absolutely thrilled to see the Space Race from an alternate perspective and to get a closer look at those who sacrificed their live and health to make their country the first to reach the heavens.

The title "Soviets in Space" is a little bit toned down, as this is far more than just a potted history of the Soviet side of the "Space Race". This book covers the politics and culture that were an integral part of the Soviet Union's desire (need?) to push boundaries. The accompanying photos gave an added depth to the text and I very much appreciated them. Fascinating and enjoyable.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

This is a very unusual book in that it is a history of the early Soviet space program within the context of the Soviet culture and society. A significant portion of the beginning of the book is focused solely on Soviet culture. It's also unusual in that the book describes other major Soviet industrial projects and highlights the similar approach taken with these projects compared to the space program.

An insightful study covering cultural, social, and political details of living in the Soviet Union.

Social psychology states that education is the information we believe in; propaganda is the information we distrust. The difference lies not in the factual material but our approach to it. When a researcher writes a book, he/she subconsciously chooses the material with the same set of values as his/her own and transmits them to the audience. The pile of books whose authors have never tried to walk in other's shoes - to think from a perspective of another ideology without judging it from the start - grows exponentially on the wrongful basis.

Colin Turbett, in his book 'Soviets in Space: The People of the USSR and the Race to the Moon,' lifts a veil behind the Iron Curtain to give a closer look at what the Cold War and space race meant to the Soviet citizens. Using sources both in English and Russian, the author provides exciting details concerning everyday mundane life in the USSR: favorite Soviet movies, hobbies, difficulties in finding common consumer goods. Moreover, the book dissects the thinking of ordinary Soviet people to explain the differences between the communist and capitalist worldviews. The author puts the space race into the broader context of the Cold War and the war of ideologies to define why the USSR failed to catch up with the US after initial triumphs.

Along with the captivating story, the book contains a great set of pictures: posters, photographs, and drawings.

While I am delighted to see the precise depictions of my historical motherland's past (I was born in the USSR), I also witness minor inaccuracies in the author's analysis. The text, especially the introduction, demonstrates a blind faith in the Soviet viewpoint contradicting, naturally, the official US/UK's. This leaves me with the impression that the book would look better with more focus on the space race and less attention on the general description of the era.

I'd recommend the book to people ready to accept different opinions about the Cold War.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

NB: free copy received for honest review

Very readable and interesting account of the Soviet space program, its strategic and technical goals and achievements, personalities and outcomes, and role within the wider Cold War rivalry. Plenty of intriguing details and prompts for 'what ifs' to be found here. Recommended for anyone with an interest in space exploration or the Cold War period in general.

This certainly filled a niche in my knowledge and understanding of the space race, although speaking as a layman I cannot prove it to be a hundred per cent correct. I don't think it's a book that does itself many favours, at least initially – the academic gets no notes or reference points while going through the text, while the general browser here comes to an opening chapter that looks at the kind of people that were looking up to Heroes of the Soviet Union such as Gagarin, Leonov, Tereshkova and the like – the population responding to the fact people reached space, long before we get to the people who got the tech anywhere near there.

Another early chapter might be a further hurdle for my non-specialised views, as it really seems counter to any looking-at-the-milieu-of-the-Cold-War narrative I've read previously. But it's when the story hits the key launches this really takes off (pun intended). From realising I never knew what Vostok even meant, to finding out Gagarin was first as he wasn't as good as the pilot reserved for the more involved second flight, this is spectacular stuff for the non-specialist. With that you can forgive later looks at Big Soviet Projects (such as farming in the Kazakh desert, and train tracks in Siberia linking nobody with hardly anyone).

So not all of this will seem essential reading to everybody on the stereotypical commuter bus, but the approach is actually quite an intriguing one. It is a look at what having a space programme meant – to the rulers, to the plebs, to the world who welcomed Gagarin with open arms on his propaganda tours, etc. Looking back, the delights of the programme for the Soviets weren't that common, with many a blow-up on launch and a failed exercise (and many more successful trips nearly went fatally awry, too, apparently). The book then matches the programme perfectly – some of it you might easily question, but when it's a sterling success, why, it's a sterling success.

This is solid coverage of the post-WWII events leading up to the Soviet space program. The author is knowledgeable and thorough, providing sympathetic coverage of the people and their country at the time. American readers may not be used to that approach, given the decades of propaganda about the USSR and Russia. The author doesn't accept all of their propaganda either, but does a good job placing it in context and showing how and why Soviet citizens were proud and excited about their accomplishments despite some of the political failings of their leaders. This may be written for a niche demographic but if that's you, I recommend reading the book.

In 1959, Soviet Russia shocked the world, and especially its rival the United States, by launching an artificial satellite into orbit. Sputnik-I’s monotone beeping was the starting gun of the space race, a competition the United States would begin to take far more seriously – as it would the threat of its rival across the oceans. But while the powers in DC viewed the Soviet Union’s space program as an obvious military threat, Turbett argues that the Soviet Union longed for peace and pursued the space program to demonstrate what men united under a common ideal, working together, could accomplish. Although Turbett gives the Soviet Union in general, and both Stalin and Kruschev in particular, more pacific intentions than their records suggest, Soviets in Space is a rare look into the Russian space program that offers extensive cultural background info which connects the drive to the cosmos with Soviet aspirations closer to Earth.

The book begins by attempting to channel the mindset of the average Russian, molded by a generation of Soviet culture – their exhaustion by war, their pride in having beaten back the Wehrmacht, their optimism in creating a new society despite its bloody flaws. (The author does not dismiss the gulags, the purges, etc – but they aren’t dwelt upon, and the best of intentions is often assumed, even when acknowledging Stalin’s effective annexation of eastern Europe.) Following a history of the entire Cold War, which Turbett posits owed entirely to western inflation of the Soviet threat, forcing Stalin and his successors to focus on defensive & counter-offensive capabilities, we shift back to the fifties, and the efforts of Soviet and American authorities to put German rocketery to work. The Russians had more experience with weaponizing rocketry during World War, having tinkered with rocket-propelled explosives and exploring the possibilities of rocket-driven aircraft. Despite this, Turbett argues that the Russians saw the space rivalry not as a military competition, but a cultural one – one that could prove the peaceful aims and superior methods of the Soviet command economy. Turbett connects the public promotion of the drive for the Moon with similarly grand programs that unfolded in the fifties and sixties, the Virgin Lands attempt to double Soviet agricultural production and the Baikal-Amur Mainline, a transcontinental railroad running across permafrost and near the Chinese border. (The BAM would not be completed and fully open until…..1991, just in time for the Communist party to be declared illegal and the Soviet Union dissolve into history.) Although these projects were all financially problematic given their massive scope and marginal returns, the three together tell a story, Turbett writes: the Russian people honestly believed they were building the future.

I’ve only encountered the Russian program in bits and pieces (Two Sides of the Moon, Alexei Leonov’s memoir co-written with David Scott, being the only substantial Soviet account I’ve tried), so this is my first time encountering a lot of this content. I suspect, however, that even if I read other volumes focused on the Soviet space program, this one will stand out for its tone, which is as charitable but not blind to faults, and its welcome study of how the space program shaped Soviet culture, from consumer collectibles to music. My meeting the figures in the Soviet program — not just Gagarin and Koralev, but those who died, like Komarov — was long overdue, and I’m grateful to Turbetts for having provided this tribute to their memory.

In the introduction to his book, author Colin Turbett stresses that it is not a technical manual, rather an attempt to describe the political and social background to the space race and the part it played in the fall of the Soviet Union. It fulfils this aim admirably.
Turbett examines Russian culture and society from the start of the postwar era, on to the space program itself with detailed biographies of the leading players such as Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, through to the agricultural plan and right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Soviets in Space” is meticulously researched and is one of the best books I have read on the subject.
Many contemporary images and photographs of cosmonauts and space memorabilia enhance the text. Fact-filled yet readable, this is a timely, much-needed book that celebrates the Russian space programme, and the Russian people, without bias.