Fifty-two years ago yesterday, the Soviets sent a living thing into outer space for the very first time. The animal was Laika, a tiny stray dog from the Moscow streets, and she only lived a couple of hours from the time her rocket entered Earth’s orbit. Sputnik 2 was designed and built in just one month, to capitalize on the incredible propaganda coup that the Russians had scored with Sputnik 1. Besides showing off the advances of Soviet science, Khrushchev liked the thought of the imperialist American swine trembling from fear as they heard the faint pinging of Sputnik’s radio as it hurtled over U.S. soil (for that purpose, the radio signal was set to a low frequency that amateur shortwave operators and commercial stations could pick it up). Because of the tight timeline, there was no way to create any adequate temperature control or life support systems, and Laika died from overheating and stress.

Laika is an icon for me for a lot of reasons.

The cell phone/interconnectedness/worldwide-information-superhighway addict in me celebrates her and Sputnik-2 as important steps on the road to where we are today. The Soviet history scholar in me loves her as one more link in the long chain of lives destroyed in the course of the Soviet experiment, a chain that includes so many of my artistic heroes (Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, Tsvetaeva). The vegetarian in me mourns her as another victim of our hubristic belief that we can kill animals for the sake of advancing human knowledge.

Here’s a lovely poem about her, by Zbigniew Herbert.

First the Dog
to Laika

by Zbigniew Herbert

So first the faithful dog will go
and after it a pig or ass
through the black grass will beat a track
along it will the first man steal
who with iron hand will smother
on his glass brow a drop of fear

so first the dog honest mongrel
which has never abandoned us
dreaming of earthly lamps and bones
will fall asleep in its whirling kennel
its warm blood boiling drying away

but we behind the dog and second
dog which guides us on a leash
we with the astronauts’ white cane
awkwardly we bump into stars
we see nothing we hear nothing
we beat with our fists on the dark ether
on all the wavelengths is a whining

everything we can carry on board
through the cinders of dark worlds
name of man scent of apple
acorn of sound quarter of colour
should all be saved for our return
so we can find the route in an instant
when the blind dog leading us
barks at the earth as at the moon

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