This is a video with the panels put in front of the Economic Studies Academy, Piata Romana, Bucharest.
I was really surprised to finally see some Cosmonauts and even Russian words in a public space, since these are rare sights in mid-center Bucharest where usually just churches and historical monuments from the inter-war period get celebrated (especially around the Shutzu Palace fence at the other end of Magheru Blvd).
Today everybody rightfully celebrates Yuri Gagarin, the first man in outer space. There are lots of parties and movies celebrating mankind's space hero, and rightfully so. Romania is also finally celebrating(in Brasov, Hunedoara, Sibiu, Bucharest, Cluj etc) a non-Western astronautic tradition (notice the terminological dichotomy btw the Russian/Eastern Cosmonauts and the American/Western Astronauts). Since the cozzzmonautica alternate-edu program I became aware of the slow displacements of Russian/Eastern space gizmo's, dioramas, and informative panels in the regional natural history Museums of Romania. It seemed to me that the desert-like, camel ridden landscapes of Russian Baikonur got slowly displaced by the Cape Canaveral NASA grill party launches. Gigantic astronomical outbursts of Freudian proportions were transformed into a family pastime on a sunny day.
And still the only particular place where the internationalist nexus lived on was the techno-euphoric Space Adventure, which was still cherished inspite of rampant Romanian rusophobia and revanchist politics. Specifically, it is hard to forget that Prunariu is a Romanian space hero because and with the help of his Eastern colleagues. Those die-hard Romanian astrofilatelists and space-enthusiasts (even UFOlogists!) maintained a strong connection with the thousands of Soyuz missions, myths and anecdotes. Postal stamps with Sputniks were still published.
It makes me happy to see that those ill-fated natural science and polytechnic schools and lyceums keep on launching their handmade rockets and celebrating Sputnik and Gagarin parties. On the other side, before 1989, "COSMOS" was both a term and a matrix where one could swap informations about space-achievements from the other side, about NASA and its list of missions, space-probes and iconic sources. The visual impact seems muffled today, with Hubble screen-savers in the background of the desktop and indifferent galactic slide(side)-shows. Even when full of blotchy nova's and huge star nurseries stretching thousands of light-years they cannot capture our attention-deficit disorders.
"Cosmos" was a topic connected to the very real threat of nuclear destruction and the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative supported by Reagan and his minions. Probably it is no accident that the American astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan and his COSMOS series and bestselling books crossed the iron curtain in the 80s, in part because of his materialist skepticism, internationalism, and unswerving support of disarmament.
Maybe we should also celebrate Gagarin as a proto-transhumanist hero of the space age. The Russian cosmist line of thinkers (Fyodorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovski) was full of immortalist and prosthetic visions of continuous em-betterment, where Earth is just ground zero. Gagarin is not dead, just today i heard an apocryphal story about him being in perpetual orbit around the earth!
Progressive science fiction literature was always a hot bed for future revolutions, RED STAR is a 1908 communist utopian space opera set on Mars by Alexander Bogdanov where a critical ideological and technological interchange takes place between two planets and societies on their road to communism. The main character LEONID could be regarded(?!) as a prototype for Gagarin and later young cosmoproletarians having a sound scientific, activist and revolutionary background. Nevertheless the very particular "machist" brand of empirio-monist philosophy elaborated by Alexander Bogdanov was labeled as extremely dangerous and heretical, and a direct threat to dialectical materialism by Lenin and later by Stalin. It survived the scathing attacks as a groundbreaking predecessor to Wiener's cybernetics.
Bogdanov(who founded btw 1925-1926 the Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions) was also an avid believer in blood transfusion as leading to eternal youth (another cosmist theme with 60s ramifications) and rejuvenation, these special clinics for blood transfusion being already part of the Martian revolution.
But the revolutionary impetus kept on creeping up with later Sci-Fi writers, because we know Mars as a particularly RED planet of the solar system.
I have found a few years back a poster of a Gagarin party in Chisinau, Moldavia. It connects two key iconic figures in one character. They both with a very important place in the pop pantheon of the West and the East, but the way these two different figures coalesce i think says talks about possible interactions. When cosmonauts and astronauts met in space it was a moment of freedom.
It is basically a picture of Superman as an undercover Gagarin. I really enjoy the switch, instead of Superman being the bland American reporter Clark Kent of the 40s, under his costume lies the very human and familiar space icon. Not to forget Superman is THE MAN OF STEEL - steel being the primary mover of a larger cult for heavy industrial production during most of the 30s, 40s and 50s. Stalin (Steel namesake) bears this same metallurgic appellative.
In the original Superman animated and OTR series everybody asks what was the unidentified object they were seeing: "...is it a bird, is it a plane?". The answer is much more mundane, since humanity had its own flying men and women.
Please read (in Romanian) about "GAGARIN and the Sputnik generation" about the anti-gravitational forces launched by this singular event in an article and interviews written by Igor Mocanu in Contra-Atac Magazine.
This is another clear case of Z A C A M A N T!
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