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.

In 1925, when Soviet composer Iurii Shaporin began writing his first opera, Polina Gebl’ , about the Decembrist Ivan Annenkov and the French emigrée shopgirl who followed him into exile, he had no idea how tumultuous its journey would be. It took twenty-eight years and countless revisions for the opera to gain official approval. When it finally premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in 1953, with the title The Decembrists , the love story had been backgrounded and the historical plot line vastly expanded; scenes, characters, and arias had been added, dropped, or altered; and Polina herself had been written out entirely. The negotiated process by which Polina became The Decembrists reveals much about the evolving relationship between music and power in the Soviet Union, especially in the high-stakes realm of Socialist Realist opera, in which a suitable exemplar had yet to be produced. Amidst the pressures of the late-Stalinist state’s assault on the creative intelligentsia, and in the wake of major opera scandals in the 1930s and 1940s, the Bolshoi Theater saw in Shaporin’s work an ideal candidate to fill this void: a historical opera with an unimpeachable subject, the Decembrist Revolution, understood as the foundation point of the revolutionary legacy to which the Bolsheviks laid claim. This article analyzes the intense negotiations among Shaporin, the Bolshoi and its consultants, and official censors to ensure The Decembrists ’ historical accuracy, which they believed would guarantee its acceptance. Yet, as the article demonstrates, while Soviet musical authorities upheld “historical truth” as their standard, in the end the Socialist Realist ideal of “artistic truth” was far more important for The Decembrists’ success.