This essay, by Manifesto Club member Zinovy Zinik, was published on 4 October 2007, the 50th anniversary of Sputnik.

Sputnik in Russian means both a companion and a fellow-traveller. The problem was to locate this fellow in space. I remember myself, a ten-year-old boy, standing in our courtyard with my friends, staring into the Soviet night sky. There was always a clever little comrade around who would tell you that this moving dot, which was blinking, is not Sputnik but the lights of a night airplane, and that trace of light belongs to a falling star or meteorite. Eventually, we succeeded in identifying one of the hardly noticeable lines across the night sky as that of Sputnik. But Sputnik itself was invisible. We were told about Sputnik at home and in school. Yes, we saw photographs of it in Pravda. It looked totally unreal but quite cute. A metallic basketball, adorned with a few strange needles like a balding porcupine. I still remember the signal that our Sputnik was broadcasting: bee-beep, bee-beep, bee-beep. No! Not like that. Perhaps, it was beep-beep-beep. I am not quite sure. With the similar enthusiasm and disbelief, decades later I would hear in my transistor radio the mysterious BBC Russian Service’s beeps. Why should I believe that this or that sound was real? How could I know for certain that Sputnik did exist?

We were made to believe in what we were told about, even if we suspected that all that was told could not be entirely true. We were born and lived in the world of make-belief: to believe in made-up facts was part of our life. There was no way of checking these facts by experience. There was no way to prove that there was a world behind the iron curtain of our Soviet illusions. But even if Sputnik didn’t exist, we had to imagine it. I remember my tears of joy when I first heard about Sputnik in the sky. With millions of Soviet citizens I thought: “We made it there!” Unbelievable. Improbable as it sounded at the time, the jump outside was possible. We are not chained to our earthly existence.

Only now I feel that my tears of joy were partly psychotic – like those of a prisoner at the sight of a bird in the prison cell’s window. If your house becomes a prison with a little opportunity of communicating socially or verbally with you neighbour, you tend to occupy yourself with something contemplative, suitable for solitary confinement – like mathematics or chess playing: two vocations Russians are famous for. For the same reason, space research and nuclear physics had become the most desirable professions in the USSR.

When I think about Sputnik with the hindsight, I see a group of Soviet geniuses – scientists and engineers – brought together by a decree from the Kremlin in some poorly equipped laboratory in a remote part of the Soviet Union, in order to stun the world with yet another revolutionary achievement of the proletarian state. Such laboratories were described by Solzhenitsyn in his books about the Gulag. Scientists, assigned for such a project, were in many cases political prisoners who were transferred from labour camps to join the team. It is also a well-established fact that space projects in the USSR were made possible because of the deportation to Russia, after the German defeat, of a number of leading German scientists, together with their research laboratories and factory equipment that were developing military missile technology during the Second World War.

It was with some bemusement that I read, decades later, a commentary on Sputnik’s launch by Hannah Arendt, herself an exile from the Nazi Germany. In her book The Human Condition she quotes a newspaper’s description of the event as a “step toward escape from men's imprisonment on earth”. The “banality of the statement”, Arendt says, “should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was; for although Christians have spoken of the earth as a vale of tears and philosophers have looked upon their body as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men's bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon”. Hannah Arendt should have been perfectly aware that in the Soviet context the reference to the earth as a prison was not simply a metaphor.

Of course, I wasn’t aware of all that at the time. I wasn’t aware of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Neither did I have a clue about Khrushchev’s speech a year before Sputnik was launched. At the 20th Congress of the Communist Party he let it be known to the people that Stalin was not our beloved leader but a leading criminal of the century. Nor could I comprehend why a year after the launch of Sputnik, the crowd of 14,000 people at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow gathered to condemn the pride of Russian poetry, Boris Pasternak, as an enemy of the people for the publication abroad of his Doctor Zhivago. I didn’t know that the Western world of literature was at the same year in turmoil over the publication of Nabokov’s Lolita. These facts, personalities, books, historical dates relating to the bigger world simply hadn’t existed for a Soviet child.

We spent our childhood in a huge square courtyard, surrounded on four sides by apartment blocks. There were even gates to be shut for the night. The yard was a universe of its own. There was a playground in the middle. But we preferred places that were raised high above the ground. Such as rooftops of big industrial garages – we imitated the launch of Sputnik by jumping off these heights into the snow. We also spent many hours inside the gigantic lofts under the roofs of our apartments blocks. You could easily climb out on the roof itself – a dangerous place to be standing on, but closer to the night sky than any other place in the vicinity.

The whole country resembled that courtyard. People’s movements were closely monitored in capital cities. It is difficult to comprehend now, how meticulously the geography of life was regimented, how travelling even inside the country was strictly regulated. There were entire regions in the Northern Russia and, of course, in Siberia which were firmly closed for outsiders. There were so-called “zones”, tightly controlled by the security forces, because they were locations of either corrective-labour camps or military installations or gold mines. Even in Moscow such no-go areas existed. Each Soviet citizen had an internal passport, a kind of ID card, which also served as your residence permit. If you were born in one place you couldn’t freely move and settle down in another. And it was practically impossible for an ordinary Soviet citizen from the provinces to acquire a Moscow residence permit without a little help from a party boss or a powerful state institution. To be born and live in Moscow, next to the stars of Kremlin, was perceived as one step closer to the skies. The distant stars above us were mere twins of the red stars of the Kremlin towers.

Perhaps, subconsciously, we wanted to peep into that wilderness outside. But the desire to leave the country was regarded as sinful if not criminal. The world ended where the Soviet border did. Beyond it, there lay the darkness – the void without form, an alien world of capitalist jungle, crawling with Cold-warriors and imperialists, corrupted by exploitation of the masses and depravity of the upper classes, from which we were defended in our socialist paradise by our glorious Soviet army. Therefore, the only way out was up, vertically. We believed in the vertical world. We wanted to get higher and higher. Sputnik was for us like a bottle thrown into the sea, with a message for the outside world – the message that we did exist, inside.

In the Soviet Union, it was much easier to become a cosmonaut on a spaceship than to get an exit visa to travel abroad. This is why we, Soviet adolescent boys, all wanted to fly. Our cosmic ambitions were not undermined a year later by the tragic fate of the first live creature in space: a dog called Laika. Laika died of suffocation in her overheated capsule of Sputnik No.2. She was deprived of the breathing room that existed in her ordinary earthly life. She was burnt in space. To commemorate this heroic sacrifice, the Soviet tobacco industry produced a new brand of cigarettes called “Laika”: as if the burning end of every cigarette was meant to be a reminder of Laika’s fate. My first ever smoked cigarette was of this brand and it made me cough and filled my eyes with tears. Before Laika became a cosmonaut, she was a stray dog wandering the streets of Moscow. This is why her fate reminded to every Soviet child of a beloved canine character from a melancholic Chekhov’s story Kashtanka.

This is a tale of a female mongrel, like Laika, who accompanies her brute uncouth owner, a carpenter, on one of his drinking binges and gets lost in the street hustle and bustle. She is picked up as a stray dog by a circus man who becomes her benefactor, adopts her and teaches her some tricks so she starts a creative life of a circus artist. But on the day of her performance, she suddenly hears the drunken voice of her former owner shouting her name from the gallery. She loses her head and leaps out of the arena to run madly after this dear voice, to come back to the familiar depravity of home. The dog and the owner are united. The return of a homesick character to the ruthless master, to the native habitat is complete - like that of Laika whose time in the circus of Soviet cosmonauts was also very brief.

This is why Sputnik for me is not only a story of triumphant flights but also of tragic landings - an impossibility of escape from your past. To quote the lines of a Soviet patriotic song on space travels: “The motherland hears, the motherland knows where exactly her son flies in clouds”. Unless, that is, you’re prepared to limit your flights to the domain of your dreams, as I did in my adolescent years. I still do it. The technique is fairly simple. I stand on my toes, straining the muscles of my legs, and stretch myself upwards as high as possible. Then I give my body a little push, no more than an inch up, a light jump, until gradually I can take myself off the ground. After two or three sweeps with my hands, I begin to feel free to make pirouettes in the air above the ground - to everyone's amazement.

In the research I’m conducting these days, I ask people which technique they use if and when they fly in their dreams. It turns out that many of those questioned, use a totally different method of flying. Most of them hover above the earth or travel between the planets like heavenly creatures. Having analysed my own school of flying, I came to the conclusion that I am not a bird, neither am I an angel. They need wings to fly. I don’t. During my research I’ve also discovered that I am not alone. There are quite a few of us who don’t need any superfluous appendages like wings: we can fly by working our muscles only.

But the most amazing aspect of it is that, while flying, we use exactly the same set of muscles in an absolutely identical way. Perhaps, it is a rudimentary instinct that was once fully functional amongst some human beings but now becomes operational only when we dream? Alternatively, this ability to fly has been, perhaps, lodged inside us to remain dormant until a future date, when we, a special unit of human kind, the chosen ones, will be called up to save the world?

Two decades after the launch of the first Sputnik, I managed to get an exit visa and had flown away from the Soviet Union. I had successfully landed in Great Britain. The country I emigrated from doesn’t exist anymore. I do. Perhaps, a new generation of Sputniks should be modelled after us, dream-flyers?

Zinovy Zinik is a novelist and broadcaster. He is the editor and presenter of West-End Radio Show for the BBC World Service in Russian. He is the author of eight books of fiction, translated into a number of European languages. His collection of sketches and stories about his life outside Russia “At Home Abroad” will be published in Moscow later this year. A version of this essay was broadcast on Radio 3, on 2 October 2007. Listen to it here

© Zinovy Zinik, 2007