A Cog in a Political Machine: The Career of Svetlana Savitskaya (1)
By Ben Evans, on February 10th, 2012
Savitskaya's July 1984 EVA has been described as the last of the Soviet Union's politically motivated space stunts. Had circumstances been different, Savitskaya would have secured another stunt in 1985-86, by becoming the first woman to command a space mission. Photo Credit: Roscosmos.Late last year, Internet chatter hinted that a female Russian engineer – Yelena Serova, selected for cosmonaut training in October 2006 – might be in the running for a long-duration position on a future International Space Station crew. This speculation has since been confirmed and Serova is scheduled to form part of Expedition 41 and will launch towards the station in September 2014, shoulder to shoulder with crewmates Dmitri Kondratyev and Barry Wilmore. In doing so, she will become the fourth female Russian spacefarer and only the second to attempt a long mission. However, there remains speculation in some areas that Serova’s assignment is just the latest in a long history of cynical propaganda used by Russia to score political points over the United States. Some observers even convinced themselves that she would be launched in 2013, for no other reason than to be in orbit for the 50th anniversary of Valentina Tereshkova’s pioneering flight. Although that has proven not to be the case, it nevertheless spotlights the reality that the Soviet Union and today’s Russia still seem to apply disproportionate levels of political importance on their female cosmonauts.
Of course, in the second decade of the 21st century, it is easy to convince ourselves that such propagandist tricks no longer apply and the determination of the early Soviet space programme to secure a string of ‘firsts’ – the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first EVA – has faded into history. Still, others continue to wonder at the convenient timing of each female flight. Valentina Tereshkova flew for three days in June 1963, demonstrating that an ‘ordinary’ factory worker could not only travel into space, but stay there for more than twice as long as all of her degree-educated Mercury Seven counterparts, combined. Yelena Kondakova flew a five-month mission to the Mir space station between October 1994 and March 1995, immediately before Norm Thagard became the first American astronaut in two decades to participate in a long-duration flight. It is unsurprising that much scepticism was expressed at the news of Yelena Serova’s assignment.
Nowhere are the political machinations of the Soviet space hierarchy more clearly evident than in the career of another Soviet female cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya, much of whose star-studded career was used as little more than a pawn in a game of political point-scoring at the height of the Cold War. NASA’s selection of six women astronauts and the technological abilities of the shuttle – together with a steady decline in East-West relations in the early 1980s – prompted the need for ‘something’ to be done to restore the sense that the Soviets were ahead in space. When Sally Ride was named to a Shuttle flight in April 1982, Savitskaya appeared, as if by magic, on the crew roster for Soyuz T-7, a mission scheduled for August of that same year. As circumstances transpired, Savitskaya’s career would accomplish two space firsts – and come close to a third: in July 1984, she was the first woman to perform a spacewalk and the first to undertake two space missions and, but for a quirk of fate, might have commanded the first all-female crew in the autumn of 1986. For each mission, she would be rightly praised, but each mission was dominated by a single maxim: to be first.
Savitskaya was no Tereshkova. She had not been chosen as a cosmonaut on the whim of a boorish General Secretary, like Nikita Khrushchev. She was not a factory worker, nor was she uneducated or inexperienced. Rather, she was a veteran test pilot, an accomplished parachutist, a former member of the Soviet Union’s National Aerobatics Team – becoming World Champion in 1970 – and had established records in supersonic and turboprop aircraft. (Doubtless it also did not hurt that she was a staunch, unbending and steely member of the Communist Party and currently serves in the Russian State Duma.) At the time of her most recent election in 2007, one Western journalist who met Savitskaya referred to her as exhibiting a “deadly serious, cosmetically unretouched image…what one political analyst calls an ‘imitation of a monument to the peasant worker’.”
She was born in Moscow on 8 August 1948, the daughter of Yevgeni Savitsky, a veteran flying ace from the Great Patriotic War, twice decorated as a Hero of the Soviet Union and one-time commanding general of aviation for the Soviet Union’s Air Defence Forces. In her late teens, Savitskaya entered the Moscow Aviation Institute and later attracted international renown at the Sixth FAI World Aerobatic Championship, held in the United Kingdom, as a member of the Soviet National Aerobatics Team. She won first place and was nicknamed ‘Miss Sensation’ in the British press. After graduation from the aviation institute in 1972, she pursued a career as pilot, flying 20 different types of aircraft, including a record as the first women to attain 2,683 km/h in a MiG-21.
Her fascination with aviation also extended to parachuting and, as a girl, she had hidden these activities from her father and was only discovered when he found a parachute knife in her school bag. By the age of 17, she had already logged 450 jumps and in 1965 she jumped from 14,252 m, opening her chute a mere 500 m above the ground. In 1968, she soloed in a Yak-18 training aircraft. With such impressive credentials, it is perhaps little surprising that Savitskaya made the cut in the July 1980 selection of nine female cosmonauts. She was the only test pilot in the group; her group also included four physicians, three engineers and a physicist. Seven of the women, including Savitskaya, completed training in February 1982, whilst the others graduated in July 1984.Svetlana Savitskaya, the first woman to fly into space twice and the first woman to perform an EVA. Photo Credit: Roscosmos.When she was named as a member of the Soyuz T-7 crew, Savitskaya was under no illusion as to the importance of her role…as a woman and as as a competent cosmonaut. “Americans were preparing to send women into space,” she told an interviewer, years later. “I was called to our Ministry. The question was: What about us? Would we be able to do it? Was there enough time? I said ‘Why not?’ We had to keep our priority positions, where possible.” Still, even within the all-male cosmonaut corps, there was discrimination. In early 1984, whilst preparing for an EVA on her second mission, Savitskaya was asked why women needed to perform welding and other tasks in orbit – surely, they might burn each other’s suits or even the exterior of the space station, it was argued – but she remained confident in her own capabilities: “After my space flight, everyone had to shut up!”
Her steely resolve was matched by an uncompromising stance. In an 2009 interview, she was asked about a recent EVA by American astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper, who had lost a bag of tools whilst working outside the International Space Station. In Savitskaya’s mind, watching Stefanyshyn-Piper did little to help the cause of women in space. “Well, they should be thankful that it was just a closed bag,” she laughed. “It could have been worse if she scattered instruments! But, of course, we would consider it as a disadvantage and a work-performance defect. It’s just not professional…no matter the sex.”
Her work ethic clearly originated from her father and mother, as did her staunch support for the Communist Party…and ingrained distrust of the motives of the West. Even years later, when talking to Baltimore Sun journalist Clara Germani, she insisted on being interviewed in a darkened room, in overcoats and boots, and recorded on two tape recorders, “so she can be certain that her words are not twisted”. Germani described Savitskaya as exuding a strong, patriotic image of the old regime and she certainly spoke for many Russians in her desire to abandon the failed free market economy of the post-Soviet era and return to the predictable stability of the past, with its ‘decent’ salaries and pensions and social welfare mechanisms. She told Germani that her parents (her mother was a Moscow Communist Party leader) would suffer “a second death” if they had lived long enough to see modern Russia.
To Savitskaya, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc was perhaps the greatest calamity to befall the state – and the most unforgivable – and she saw it as a betrayal of her parents’ generation, who had fought and bled in the Great Patriotic War, endured unimaginable hardship, had been first into work and first into battle and had sidelined their personal lives to take on responsibilities to the party and to the nation. (Left to one side were the violent purges of Stalin, catastrophic economic policies of Khrushchev and Brezhnev and a string of failed Five-Year Plans.) On the other hand, her words are understandable, for the Russians had endured perhaps more than any other nation the brutality and wholesale destruction of their country at the hands of Nazi Germany. “It’s difficult for Americans to understand,” she told Germani, “because no other country saw such ruin as this one after the war. And Communists managed to build the country to conquer the virgin lands and we were the first to reach outer space.”
Her words are true enough. If America’s salt of the earth, its average people, past and present, were dismantled into 50 separate countries and their entire social structure was changed, overnight, Savitskaya asked, how would they feel? Even today, support for the bygone days of a one-party state and a renewed sense of nostalgia for its dependability, remain strong. In a fascinating BBC television documentary, Russia, narrated by the British writer Jonathan Dimbleby, many Russians, including today’s youth, continue to yearn for an era of ‘strong leadership’, to establish firm foundations for the state and its people. “We want our country to be strong,” one pretty female student told Dimbleby in a Vladivostok coffee bar, “so we can be proud of it. We can have really tough, strong leaders of our country, so that our country will be strong in the world.” Strength, certainly, is the name of the game in modern Russia and it is certainly personified in the characters of political leaders like Vladimir Putin and the steely Svetlana Savitskaya. Strength first, democracy later, was another student’s view. “You need someone strong to lead you out of the dangers,” he said, “then you can play democracy.”