My highlight: Cosmonauts at the Science Museum by Francis Spufford
The Science Museum's new exhibition Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age moves from the actual events, spacecraft and personalities of the USSR's post-Sputnik decade of triumph, into cosmonaut culture more widely - cosmonauts as the political heroes of Khrushchev's renewed communism, as embodiments of both science and mystical philosophy; in art and film; and as a design cue for a vast amount of Soviet kitsch, from table lamps to cigarette cases to cocktail cabinets. Cosmonauts, too, as the centre of their own tiny, insular world of privilege and test-pilot superstition: because Gagarin had stopped on the way out to the launchpad and urinated on the right-back wheel of the bus, every cosmonaut on their way aloft did so ever after, and watched the same lucky film the night before, and listened to the same songs.
Related: Red plenty: lessons from the Soviet dream
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