The Real History and Mythologies of the Soviet Space Industry

The article represents the extended review of the book by Slava Gerovich Soviet Space Mythologies: Public Images, Private Memories, and the Making of a Cultural Identity (2015). Slava Gerovich is a historian of science and technology, the author of books and articles on the history of Soviet cybernetics, cosmonautics, mathematics and computer technology, and the head of a research project on the oral history of Soviet mathematics. He is a lecturer in the history of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The presented book was shortlisted for the Historia Nova Prize for the best book in the fields of Russian Intellectual and Cultural History and won the AIAA Gardner-Lasser Literature Award for best book on the history of aeronautics and astronautics. The book was translated and published by the New Literary Review publishing house under the title The Mythologies of Soviet Space (2024).