Great attention was paid to nuclear energy (at the cost of safe disposal of nuclear waste) and to space exploration. The first earth satellites, Sputnik 1 and 2, were launched in 1957. The first circumnavigation of the earth in a spaceship was made by Yury A. Gagarin in 1961. By the early 1980s Soviet technology had produced more than 30 manned space vehicles, and the USSR had launched more than 1,100 spacecraft and numerous satellites.

Nor were the arts neglected. Unions were formed for communist writers, painters, and other creative people. Theatres and concert halls were built, and orchestras and theatre and dance companies sent on tour. Local clubs and palaces of culture brought politically didactic urban and folk arts to the general public, and the government encouraged thousands of amateur groups. Dissidents and their families, however, were harshly persecuted and often banished to Siberia or imprisoned in mental hospitals.

State Control

The state insisted that all aspects of Soviet culture foster Communist society. This requirement did relatively little damage to science, although the government's vacillating attitude towards biologist and agronomist Trofim D. Lysenko shows how political values can affect scientific views.

Communist influence tended to hamper the social sciences, which had to be placed in a Marxist context. The Communist attitude towards music is less clear: The composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich were both alternately in and out of favour. After the mid-1960s even jazz and twelve-tone music were offered lipservice. The fine arts and literature suffered most from Communism, which required them to adhere to Socialist realism, a secular optimistic exaltation of the Soviet people in a style that satisfied popular taste. In the 1920s Russian modern art experienced a golden age, but at Stalin's instigation Avant Garde literature and the paintings of Marc Chagall, and Kasimir Malevich, and Wassily Kandinsky among others were banned. The government accepted religious toleration in theory but was itself atheistic and opposed organized religion in practice. Religious services were restricted and believers were denied educational and professional advancement and were subjected to antireligious propaganda and imprisonment.

Dissidence

A small but persistent current of dissident intellectuals, artists, religious believers, and nationalists wrote open letters, circulated clandestine literature (samizdat), and staged demonstrations in the cause of greater freedom.