Sputnik Goes to Brussels: The Exhibition of a Soviet Technological Wonder

Abstract

The first universal exhibition of the post-Second World War era and a major battleground in the ‘cultural Cold War’, the 1958 Brussels Exposition served as an appropriate venue for the display of Sputniks I and II. As the centerpiece of the enormous Soviet pavilion, the Sputnik replicas enabled the USSR to bask in the reflective glow of its scientific and technological achievement before an international audience of 40 million. Based on archival sources (from Brussels and Moscow) as well as contemporary published material, this article employs a modified version of Stuart Hall's reception theory to analyze Soviet authorities' production (or ‘encoding/writing’) of the exhibit and its appropriation (‘decoding/reading’) by radically different publics – non-Soviet visitors and Soviet readers back home. It argues that the producers exercised only tenuous control over the meaning of Sputnik.