This article repositions the space race as a sonic phenomenon by analyzing music and sounds related to the Soviet space program. Early triumphs such as the orbit of Sputnik I in 1957, Yuri Gagarin’s groundbreaking orbital flight in 1961, and Valentina Tereshkova’s success as the first woman in space in 1963 epitomized the complexities of the cultural Cold War and the utopian underpinnings of the Thaw. Space, the ultimate nonaligned sphere, was a new world for the planting of real and ideological flags. At the same time, these successes were key to reimagining the ideals of Soviet citizenship and national identity in the post-Stalin era. Heating up at a moment of great change and consequence, the space race provides an inroad to examine how music, media, and sound helped spread these emerging values. Drawing on the popular press, radio broadcasts, and variety television performances, this article demonstrates how music was used to humanize the cosmonauts and promote a new personal ethics—one that prized approachability and humility alongside heroism and bravery. The divergent ways that composers and performers celebrated Gagarin and Tereshkova reveal a complex politics of gender during the Thaw. Gagarin, the conqueror, was revered in marches extolling his colonizing feats; Tereshkova, the homemaker, was celebrated with romances and tales of domesticity. By demonstrating the prevalence of new media and the power of participatory practices in the sonic space race, this article contributes to our understanding of the cultural Cold War as a lived and performed experience.

The title of this article is borrowed from anthropologist Katherine Verdery's 1996 study What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? In her book Verdery surveyed the recent changes in Eastern Europe, and specifically Romania, from her vantage point in the uncertain period following the momentous events from 1989 to 1991 in the former Soviet bloc. Similarly, this article explores how Shostakovich, widely perceived in 1975 as the musical representative of socialism, influenced what came after him. It details how Soviet composers from the younger generations, including Edison Denisov, Mieczysłław Weinberg, Boris Tishchenko, Alfred Schnittke, and Valentin Sil'vestrov, dealt with Shostakovich's legacy in their compositions written in his memory, including Denisov's DSCH , Weinberg's Symphony no.12, Tishchenko's Symphony no. 5, Schnittke's Prelude In Memoriam Dmitri Shostakovich and Third String Quartet, and Sil'vestrov's Postludium DSCH . In their memorial works, as they wrestled with the legacy of Shostakovich and his overwhelming influence, these composers also grappled with the shifting nature of the Soviet state, changing musical styles both foreign and domestic, and fundamental issues of aesthetic representation and identity associated with the move from modernism to postmodernism then affecting all composers in the Western art music tradition. The 1970s came at the heels of a decade of remarkable change in Soviet music and society, but at the time of Shostakovich's death, change in Soviet life began to seem increasingly unlikely. Despite recent interpretations by scholars such as anthropologist Alexei Yurchak that emphasize the fundamental immutability of the 1970s, however, these memorial compositions show that audible and significant developments were indeed occurring in the musical styles of the 1970s and early 1980s. Examining Shostakovich's legacy therefore also reveals the larger changes of the Soviet 1970s and early 1980s, both musical and otherwise.