THE SOVIETS

Given the commanding strengths of Soviet ideology and the comprehensive character of its organs of state propaganda during the 1960s, one would assume that the people of the USSR and Eastern Bloc countries learned very little about the space achievements of the United States, their bitter Cold War rival. When the ambition of Kremlin leadership—and for that matter of the chief designer of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolev (1906–1966)—was to beat the Americans to space “firsts” at all costs, sharing anything with Soviet citizens about U.S. efforts, other than America’s corrupt capitalistic objectives and its failures