Martine Mussies
Utrecht, The Netherlands

When Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth on April 12, 1961, his body represented more than human achievement—it embodied a radical reimagining of medicine’s role in space travel.¹⁰ The Soviet space program transformed cosmonauts into living laboratories where medical science, political ideology, and technological innovation converged. This transformation reveals how the USSR weaponized medical knowledge to create not just space travelers, but symbols of socialist superiority.

The medical-political complex

The selection and preparation of Soviet cosmonauts represented an unprecedented fusion of medical expertise and political control. Unlike their American counterparts, Soviet space medicine operated within a system where individual health served collective ideology. The Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine, established in 1957, functioned as both a medical facility and ideological apparatus, screening candidates not only for physical fitness but for psychological conformity to Communist ideals.

Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky, Chief of Space Medicine, pioneered protocols that subjected cosmonauts to extreme physiological testing. Centrifuge training pushed human endurance beyond known limits, while isolation chambers tested psychological resilience. These procedures, ostensibly medical, served dual purposes: ensuring the success of missions and demonstrating Soviet mastery over human biology itself.

The medical records of early cosmonauts reveal this dual mandate. Candidates underwent not only standard physical examinations, but ideological assessments disguised as psychological evaluations. Questions about family loyalty, party membership, and class consciousness were interwoven with tests of spatial reasoning and stress response. Medicine became a tool of political selection, ensuring that only ideologically reliable bodies would represent the Soviet state in space.

Bodies as biopolitical instruments

Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopower”—state control exercised through regulation of bodies and populations—finds vivid expression in Soviet space medicine. The cosmonaut’s body became what Foucault termed a “docile body,” disciplined through medical protocols that served political ends.¹ Sergei Prozorov has argued that the Soviet system was an early and extreme form of biopolitical governance, one that sought to shape life rather than merely repress it.²

This biopolitical project extended beyond individual cosmonauts to the broader Soviet population. Medical bulletins detailing cosmonauts’ perfect health served as propaganda, suggesting that socialist medicine could produce superior human specimens. The state’s investment in space medicine implicitly promised that Soviet healthcare would eventually deliver such optimization to all citizens.

Dr. Oleg Gazenko, who supervised the medical aspects of early missions, explicitly connected cosmonaut health to socialist progress.^11,12 In published papers, he argued that Soviet space medicine demonstrated the superiority of planned healthcare over capitalist medical systems.¹³ The cosmonaut’s body became evidence of socialist medicine’s capacity to transcend natural human limitations.

The cyborg socialist subject

The fusion of human biology with Soviet technology created what Donna Haraway would later term “cyborg” subjects—hybrid beings that challenge traditional boundaries between organism and machine.³ Soviet cosmonauts, encased in life-support systems and connected to spacecraft through umbilical cords, embodied this hybrid identity.

Medical monitoring systems transformed cosmonauts into extended organisms whose vital signs were remotely observable by ground control. Electrocardiograms, blood pressure monitors, and temperature sensors created a distributed nervous system linking individual bodies to state surveillance apparatus.¹⁴ The cosmonaut’s biology became legible to political authority in unprecedented ways. This concept echoes Haraway’s and Valente’s reading of cyborgization as a practice that codes and disciplines the human for ideological conformity.⁴

Gendered bodies and medical authority

The exclusion of women from early Soviet space missions, despite Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 flight, reveals how medical arguments masked gender politics. Soviet space medicine constructed female bodies as inherently unsuitable for spaceflight, citing menstrual cycles, emotional volatility, and reproductive capacity as medical contraindications.

Dr. Evgeni Karpov, who oversaw female cosmonaut selection, published papers arguing that women’s “biological rhythms” made them unreliable for long-duration missions. These claims, lacking empirical support, reflected cultural anxieties about gender roles. Medical authority thus became a legitimizing force for political exclusion, an embodiment of what Susan Bordo described as the cultural inscription of gendered bodies.⁵

Tereshkova’s mission, rather than challenging these assumptions, reinforced them through careful staging. Her short mission was framed as an exceptional case. Post-flight medical reports emphasized her composure over capability, maintaining the fiction that women’s bodies were generally unsuited for spaceflight.

Internal colonization and medical control

Alexander Etkind’s theory of “internal colonization,” or the projection of imperial power inward over one’s own population, offers another lens to understand Soviet space medicine.⁶ Cosmonaut bodies were colonized by the state: diets, sleep patterns, exercise routines, and even reproductive plans were monitored and regulated.

At Star City, the site of cosmonaut training, medical authority superseded personal autonomy. Cosmonauts surrendered bodily privacy to continuous surveillance before, during, and after missions.¹⁵ These practices extended to cosmonauts’ families. Children underwent routine health assessments, allegedly to monitor heredity, but effectively to maintain loyalty and control.

The medical legacy of Soviet space power

The Soviet space program’s medical innovations, from stress protocols to closed-loop life support, influenced global aerospace medicine and even civilian care.¹⁶ Yet, its biopolitical context raises ethical concerns. Contemporary analysis has identified violations of informed consent, exploitation of test subjects, and the prioritization of state aims over individual welfare.¹⁷

Still, technology can also empower, especially when it enables the “misfits” of society to engage more fully with the world around them.⁴ The cosmonaut’s body, thus, is not only a symbol of oppression but also of expanded human potential, albeit within the confines of authoritarian control.

References

1. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
2. Sergei Prozorov, “Foucault and Soviet Biopolitics,” History of the Human Sciences 27, no. 2 (2014): 51–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695113510215.
3. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81.
4. Martine Mussies and Emiel Maliepaard, “The Cyborg Mermaid (or: How Technè Can Help the Misfits Fit In),” Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 1, no. 4 (2017): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.3390/mti1010004.
5. Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” in Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 165–84.
6. Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).
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18. Asif Siddiqi, ed., “Declassified Sources on Gagarin,” Wilson Center Digital Archive, accessed June 14, 2025, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/declassified-sources-gagarin.