Putin’s moonshine

A few days ago, the Russians launched the robotic Luna-25 spacecraft that was supposed to land on the Moon yesterday. The spacecraft shot up from Blagoveshchensk’s Vostochny cosmodrome and headed for our satellite.

This was Russia first launch to the Moon surface since the ‘70s, and it was more, infinitely more than just another phase of space exploration. The Russians have always used their space programme the way they’ve used their sports victories – as proof positive of their superiority over the West.

I still remember Khrushchev bellowing from Red Square’s Mausoleum that Gagarin showed those bloody capitalists what was @$£&&*@ what. That was 1961, the last time the Soviets could claim being ahead of the US in the space race with any credibility.

After Neil Armstrong made his “giant leap” that kind of talk didn’t stop, but it began to sound like empty bluster with a touch of hysteria to it. By 1974, when I got a job in Houston, as translator for the Apollo-Soyuz programme, the space gap between America and Russia was already too vast ever to be bridgeable.

Much thunderous publicity surrounded that “peaceful cooperation” in space, but in fact the project was rather one-sided. All the Russians did was get their spacecraft up into orbit, after which the Americans performed every complicated manoeuvre, including the ultimate docking.

I remember drinking with Soviet engineers and cosmonauts and listening to their wistful comments on American knowhow. The cosmonauts in particular, especially the late Alexei Leonov, the Soyuz mission commander, were quite unrestrained in their thinly veiled criticism of the Soviet programme and, implicitly, everything behind it.

(In case you are wondering, the drinking stopped exactly six months before the flight. That is, the engineers and I still drank, but neither the Soviet cosmonauts nor the American astronauts did any longer: “at least six months between the bottle and the throttle”, as Tom Stafford, the Apollo mission commander, told me with audible regret in his voice.)

As time went by, any Soviet successes in space became rare, while the failures multiplied. One spacecraft after another exploded, veered off course, splashed down in the Pacific. But the need for the propaganda noise hasn’t abated – in fact, with Putin’s arrival it became ever more urgent.

Thus the work on Luna-25 started in 2005, 18 years ago. It took Americans much less time to put a man on the moon, but then NASA is no Roscosmos. That government space agency is even more corrupt and inefficient than the Russian armament industry, which is saying a lot.

That’s why the Luna-25 launch, originally planned for 2014, had to wait another seven years before the button was pushed. Then again, Putin got new priorities at roughly that time.

Yet finally the Luna-25 took off, to the accompaniment of jingoistic clamour putting Khrushchev to shame. You see, Russia has suffered a rather bad press lately, and now it’s not only those bloody capitalists but even some Russians who have second thoughts about the innate superiority of their nation, with its “world’s second army”.

The wider such doubts spread, the louder are the screams of Putin’s propagandists. These are as similar to the yelps of their Soviet ancestors typologically as they are different ideologically.

The Soviets were all about Marx, Lenin, the proletariat being “the gravedigger of capitalism”, and Khrushchev screaming: “We’ll bury you!”. Today’s lot are unvarnished Nazis: they proclaim the innate spiritual superiority of Russians over everyone else, to the point of claiming that the Russians have an extra spirituality gene in their physiological makeup. Hence they are destined to lead the world.

All this is liberally laced with appeals to the Christian purity of the Russian Orthodox Church, so inspiringly led by Patriarch Kirill, a career KGB operative. That incongruous cocktail of Nazism and Christianity is to the best of my knowledge unique in history, and this is the only area in which the Russians lead the world by a wide margin.

Words like ‘Nazism’ and ‘fascism’ are emotionally charged, and you may accuse me of unfair bias. In fact, I tend to use such terms in a purely descriptive fashion, but if you think the description doesn’t quite apply to Russia, here’s a little taste for you to savour.

This comment on the Luna-25 was issued by the writer Alexander Prokhanov, who, along with Alexander Dugin, can claim pride of place as the formulator and enunciator of Putin’s Nazi-Orthodox ideology. I can’t tell you whether it’s Prokhanov who is Putin’s mouthpiece or the other way around. Suffice it to say they speak in one voice. So here is Prokhanov’s poetic prose:

“Russia’s roadmap now has a new route: Blagoveshchensk to the Moon. Launched on that route from the Vostochny cosmodrome has been a large rocket carrying a lander to the Moon. While battles rage on the Kupyansk front, while Russian troops at Kherson repulse ten attack a day, while shells fill the Earth’s firmament with craters and smoke, we are taking our civilisation to the Moon.

“This Blagoveshchensk launch is testimony to Russia’s miraculous ability to rise from the dead… Yet again Russia raises a space dome above herself… Clearly heard behind the roar of the launch engine at the Vostochny cosmodrome was the sound of the teeth gnashed by NATO strategists, for whom this Russian spacecraft punches a hole in their Russia containment strategy.

“The space rocket launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome soared over Lake Svetloyar, stirred its majestic expanse and, with the splendour of onion domes, glittering golden crosses and chiming bells, rushed up into the Russian sky, the home of the Russian dream.”

Now we must take the rough with the smooth. If the Luna-25 launch was, as Prokhanov claims so transparently, the vindication of Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, then the spacecraft’s successful landing ought to have had those “NATO strategists” not just gnashing their teeth but running for cover. Their attempt to contain Russia has failed.

Conversely though, if the landing wasn’t a success, then those dastardly reprobates have every right to snigger. All those golden crosses, onion domes and Russia’s unrivalled spirituality would have come to nothing. The bandit raid would remain unvindicated.

That’s exactly what happened. The Luna-25 lander did land, but rather too fast. It veered off the calculated orbit, its engines didn’t turn off in time, and the lander disintegrated against the lunar surface (“ceased its existence”, in Roskosmos’s announcement). Considering that the gravitational pull on the Moon is six times weaker than on Earth, that might have been a pretty rapid landing indeed.

Muscovites wouldn’t be Muscovites if they didn’t come up with caustic comments. One such says: “The spacecraft was supposed to get samples of the lunar soil. Instead, the lunar soil got samples of the spacecraft.”

No one is unduly surprised. A klepto-Nazi regime is incapable of maintaining its scientific progress – or indeed keeping its scientists. Hundreds of thousands have left Russia in the past few years, and the brain drain is beginning to look like a torrent.

Add to this universal pilfering raised to an accepted way of doing business, and it’s clear that something as involved as a space programme has no chance of succeeding. Thieves, murderers and rapists don’t fly – they creepy-crawl on the ground.