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Sergei Korolev, the engineer imprisoned by Stalin who would lead and inspire the Soviet space effort, is rightly honoured. It is that aesthetic which we see in the stirring posters with which the USSR proclaimed its early space achievements (and which saw supreme expression in Moscow's sublime, sweeping, 110m-high Monument to the Conquerors of Space (1964) by Faidysh-Krandievsky, Kolchin and Barshch). Designer Mike Hayes suggests that Sputnik 'looks like a constructivist object', but Stalin, of course, preferred 'socialist realism'. The exhibition designers Real Studios (whose portfolio includes David Bowie Is) makes the connection between the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde and Soviet space culture, not just through the early semi-mystical Russian 'cosmism' movement, but even in the look of the spacecraft. The LK-3 lunar lander (engineering model, 1969) in the Cosmonauts exhibition. Its row of parallel rectangles overlaid on a long strip could, at a stretch, evoke the solar-panel arrays on space stations like the Eighties' Soviet Mir. But surprisingly, the first object on show is Ilya Chashnik's 1923 painting Suprematism, clearly referring to Malevich's artistic concept.
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At the exhibition's start, we see his rare, prophetic Thirties' drawings of people in zero gravity and an interior for a manned rocketship, made for Vasilii Zhuravlev's film 1935 Cosmic Journey, and clips from the film. Russia's dreams of space began with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who by 1911 had published the basic ideas for space launches, such as the required escape velocity and multistage rockets. The show also reveals a Soviet space aesthetic that may sometimes seem Dan Dare-ish, but ultimately traces back to the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century. London's Science Museum now hosts an exhibition that includes objects that have never before left Russia (except, in some cases, to orbit), and tells an extraordinary story that extends beyond the Space Race. World-firsts just kept coming - a dog in space, a photo from the far side of the Moon, a man in space, a woman, a spacewalk, machines soft-landed on the Moon, probes to the planets. The USSR had endured Stalin and existential war, but from the launch of Sputnik in 1957 the feats of the Soviet space programme did not just make the vast nation stand proud, the entire world was bedazzled too. They were the best days of the Soviet Union. Despite a few gaps, Herbert Wright finds this Science Museum showstopper of Russian spacecraft and artefacts to be the epic show it promises to be