Shaping the Soviet Experience of the Atomic Age: Nuclear Topics in Ogonyok, 1945–1965

Abstract

It was the sudden disappearance of American scholarly publications on nuclear fission in the early 1940s that alerted Soviet scientists to the secret American nuclear weapons program. Georgi Flerov, a Soviet nuclear physicist, wrote a letter to Stalin in 1942 and warned him that this conspicuous silence could only mean that the Americans were working on a nuclear bomb.¹ Intelligence soon confirmed Flerov’s suspicion, and in early 1943, the Soviet Union initiated its own nuclear weapons project. Shrouded in secrecy, the Soviet state set up organizations and facilities supporting an army of nuclear scientists and engineers, who developed and mastered fission and fusion devices soon after their American counterparts. The ground work was laid for a nuclear arms race that would soon escalate. Yet another race started in 1954, with the launch of a Soviet nuclear power plant—named “The World’s First.” This race was about capturing the public’s imagination, and providing a vision of what the “peaceful applications” of nuclear energy might bring to the world. Popular media were key instruments to disseminate such visions to the public, in the Soviet case perhaps even more consciously so than elsewhere. Since the October revolution in 1917, the young Soviet state had continuously fine-tuned its mass media system to reach all citizens, and to enroll each and every one of them into the “construction of communism in one country.”