Warning: Minor spoilers ahead for Star City episodes 1 and 2.
Secrets, surveillance, surviving in the wilderness alongside bears and wolves – the first two episodes of Star City have it all. But just how true is the new Apple TV drama?
The For All Mankind prequel takes us back to the 1970s to imagine what might have happened had the Soviet Union won the space race and never stopped venturing out into the stars, delving into the lives of the cosmonauts, engineers and intelligence officers at the heart of the space programme.
But, while creators Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi clearly let their imaginations run wild for the series to invent a story around the Soviets beating the Americans to the Moon, they also revealed that a fair amount is plucked straight from Soviet history.
So, to sort the fact from the fiction, Radio Times broke down episodes 1 and 2 with Asif A Siddiqi, one of the world’s leading experts on the Soviet space race. Here’s his verdict!
Cosmonauts leaving for space without telling anyone – FICTION (mostly)
The scene: The opening moments of Star City see cosmonaut Alexei Leonov’s wife (Jenny Walser) panicking as she’s woken up by the KGB and discovers her husband is nowhere to be found. Soothing her fears, the Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) reveals he’s been part of a lunar mission and is already on the Moon.
Our expert says: “For the most part, by the late 1960s, that level of secrecy was gone, so the cosmonauts would definitely tell their families that they were leaving on a space mission.
“But in the very early days – like we’re talking the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, those very early days – there was an extreme level of secrecy. The first group of cosmonauts were really forbidden to talk to anybody, including their families, about what they were really doing.
“But, within a quick period of time, that level of secrecy was given up so [in the 1960s], that part isn’t true, that you would not be able to tell your family that you were going on a space mission, especially your wife. But at the same time, there was a level of secrecy. You wouldn’t tell anybody beyond your inner family. You wouldn’t tell your cousins or your uncle anything.”
He adds: “They were really afraid and paranoid of spies, and if there was a failure, they didn’t want people to know. So, for the very first mission, they didn’t really want anybody to know anything just in case it failed, and then they would hush it up.
“For that mission, I know that [Gagarin] did tell his wife that he was going on a mission, but his mother didn’t know [the date of the mission], and nobody else knew, and it was only when he was in space they found out. But right after that mission, they relaxed these rules.”
Cosmonauts’ apartments being bugged – FICTION
The scene: We see Agnes O’Casey’s Irina Morodova enter the KGB headquarters and sit down at her desk amid a sea of people with headphones on, who are tapping away at typewriters. It’s soon revealed that each of them is spying on a key figure in Star City, with their apartments being bugged.
Our expert says: “That’s a bit exaggerated. What the show is doing is mixing up a couple of different periods, because there is an extreme level of paranoia, surveillance, and oppression under Stalin. Stalin dies in 1953 but up to that point it’s a very sort of terrorising society, and people could disappear, and all this other stuff.
“But, after his death, there’s a little bit of what we might call loosening up, and things sort of normalise, so by the time the space programme happens in the ’60s, it’s not like those old times where you might just disappear suddenly.”
He adds: “When cosmonauts, for example, travelled abroad, the KGB kept very close tabs on them, but at home, there wasn’t that surveillance. Cosmonauts that had flown in space, like Alexei Leonov, they actually had some power – they weren’t just weak cogs in a machine. They could resist the overtures of the KGB because they had such public standing… In terms of having bugs in apartments in Star City, I don’t think that’s true.”
The secrecy around the Chief Designer – FACT
The scene: Rhys Ifans’s nameless protagonist, known only by his job title, receives state honour for his work in ensuring the Soviet Union is the first to reach the Moon. There’s barely anyone in the audience, as his identity is kept a secret. Ifans’s character is based on a real man, Sergei Korolev.
Our expert says: “During his lifetime, very few people knew of his existence. Even the CIA had trouble figuring out who he was.
“One reason officially was that, if the CIA found out who he was, they would try to assassinate him. That was the reason [the Soviet state] gave, but I think the other reason was that it allowed Soviet leaders to claim the successes, so Nikita Khrushchev, who was the Premier, didn’t have to share the glories with some other person.
“Obviously, [Korolev] was the head of a pretty large organisation, so everybody within that organisation had access and knew who he was, so they had to sign all these papers, and basically, if you revealed his name, you would be thrown in jail. And then once you were in the team, you saw him everywhere, but that process of getting in the team was very onerous.”
Cosmonauts having to survive in the wilderness after landing off-course – FACT
The scene: The Luna 16 mission lands back on Earth 450km off-course in the central Siberian plateau, near Lake Baikal. Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert) faces up to a bear, and she and her fellow cosmonaut, Valya Markelov, are forced to survive on their own in the wilderness until they’re rescued.
Our expert says: “I’m glad they played that out. There was a mission in ’65 [Voskhod 2] – their automatic system failed, so the cosmonauts had to punch in all the buttons to do a manual return, and they missed the landing site by hundreds of kilometres.
“They landed off course in Siberia in a very dense area, very thick forest. It was bitterly cold and it took a while for the rescue people to locate their beacon, because it was so off target.
“They ended up spending two nights there. They had blown the hatch, so they couldn’t get back inside and close it, and it was open to the elements. They didn’t have fur coats or anything like that. They ripped up the parachutes and wrapped themselves, and they tried to start a fire.
“One of the cosmonauts later on was extremely colourful, and every time he told the story, it changed a little bit. He claimed that there were wolves and bears and things like that.”
He adds: “The helicopters found them, but it was so dense, the helicopter couldn’t land, so they had to land quite a few kilometres away. Then they had to get a ski team to come and find them, and they had to stay a second night, but fortunately they had supplies and food by then.
“When they were brought back to Moscow, they had a press conference, and they never said a word about it until many, many years later, because [the state] wanted to convey the feeling that everything was successful.”
Arranged marriages between cosmonauts – FACT (sort of)
The scene: In an effort to control Belikova after her return from the Moon, Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) arranges for her to be married to Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod) despite the pair not exactly sharing any romantic feelings. Neither is given a choice in the matter.
Our expert says: “Yes, there was a case like that in the 1960s. The first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, was encouraged to become friendly with one of the cosmonauts, Nikolayev. He was genuinely interested, but she was maybe not so interested in him, and they were sort of gently nudged towards each other.
“There was a famous wedding that happened in 1963 between these two and, no surprise, they were divorced a few years later.”
It should be noted that Tereshkova has denied that her marriage was formally arranged by Soviet authorities.
He adds: “She was a big poster child for Soviet feminism. She was sort of trotted out abroad, and she went to these international women’s congresses and represented the glories of gender equality under communism.
“It was a propaganda thing, because, especially in the space programme, there was no gender equality. The men were firmly in charge, and women were basically second-class citizens. Communism encouraged a kind of equality, and everybody was educated… but there was a glass ceiling.
“In terms of the cosmonauts, the actual ones who flew, they had a small cosmonaut team of women, I think five of them were selected, just for the propaganda ballot, and then one of them was sent to space, Tereshkova. Once that was done, and they got the first woman in space, they closed down the team.”
The ever-present fear of American spies – FACT
The scene: Almost every scene in the first two episodes of Star City is underpinned by a fear of espionage from the American side.
Our expert says: “This was the Cold War, this was cloak and dagger times. There’s lots of spying on both sides going on. The Soviet Union was such a closed society, it was harder to get spies inside, whereas in the US, it was more possible to have spies – Russian spies and Soviet spies – because it was a relatively more open society.
“So the way that the US spied on the Soviet Union, it was mainly through spy satellites. They would fly them over Star City, they would take very high resolution pictures and figure out what buildings and what transportation systems were used.
“That’s why the Russians, for example, spent a lot of effort camouflaging things on the ground. They would drag out fake rockets, for example, so that when the spy satellite would picture something, they would go, ‘There’s a new missile!’ and it was just a made-up thing.
“There were all sorts of games being played on both sides.”
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