This book accompanied the exhibition 'Cosmonauts' at the Science Museum, London in 2014.

We think of the 'Space Race' as being a product of the Cold War; the truth is far more interesting. Russian popular interest in spaceflight and astronautics began at the end of the 19th century with the translation into Russian of books by Verne and Wells. From this grew the movement of cosmism, which was a quasi-mystical movement anticipating the next stage of human development being a destiny to live and work in space. At the same time, more practical visionaries were thinking about spaceflight; perhaps the best known of these being Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who, in a series of thought experiments and writings anticipated many of the basics of spaceflight that were to be realised nearly sixty years later.

As with Germany and the USA, so with Russia; various spaceflight and rocketry societies were formed and did much to promote the idea of spaceflight in the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolsheviks encouraged this as part of their drive to modernise the new Soviet Union; at the same time, Modernist and Suprematist art also tapped into these ideas. Only under Stalin did research take a backward step, only to be revived in the post-war world of superpower confrontation and nuclear weapons.

Germany - and later the USA - had Wernher von Braun; Russia had Sergei Koralev, their 'Chief Designer of Rockets'. This book has an essay on Koralev's life by his daughter. However, this and other contributions from Russian hands tend towards the hagiographic; Korolev's imprisonment by Stalin, for example, was one of the few instances in the era of purges where an actual crime had been committed, Korolev surreptitiously diverting funds within the Tupolev aeronautical design bureau where he worked into unofficial rocketry research. This is not mentioned in the book; merely that in due course he was sent to one of the specialist labour camps set aside for scientists, engineers and designers.

The hagiography continues, but it is a small price to pay for access to the material in the book. Other highlights include work from Tsiolkovsky's great-granddaughter and the daughter of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Other cosmonauts and people connected with space industries in Russia contibute. And the book is lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs as well as pictures of the artefacts that came into the exhibition, from engineering mock-ups of the Soviet lunar landing module to a commemorative tea service marking Gagarin's first flight in 1961.

The emphasis throughout is on the human stories of the Soviet and Russian space programmes. After the failure of the Soviet Moon mission, the decision was taken to refocus efforts on the long-term occupation of space. As a result, the Russians became expert at actually living in space, and many of the artefacts on display and the stories told have a very human scale to them.This is perhaps the underlying theme to the whole exhibition and book, that for a society so given over to centralisation and great institutions, so many of the stories are of individuals and their personal relationship with spaceflight. As such, this is a useful counterpoint to the usual narrative of national effort and space in the context of the broad sweep of history. In the end, it's all about people. ( )