Sputnik Goes to Brussels

Abstract

In April 2008, the ITAR-TASS online journal Ekho Planety carried an article on the Brussels World Fair, also known as Expo ‘58. Focusing on the Soviet pavilion, which an international jury judged as the Fair’s most outstanding, the article cited the two replicas of the first artificial satellites — the Sputniks — as ‘its highlight, the trump card’. Expo ‘58 served as the first venue for the display of the Sputniks, the first time that the general public had an opportunity to view them up close. It also was the first universal exhibition of the post-World War II era and, as such, became a major battleground in the ‘cultural Cold War’. The exhibition enabled the USSR to bask in the glow of its technological achievement before an international audience in excess of 40 million while the US was still scrambling to catch up. Indeed, the period from the launching of Sputnik-1 on 4 October 1957 to the close of Expo ‘58, almost exactly one year later, arguably coincided with the peak of the Soviet Union’s international prestige. No wonder an article published half a century later could look back nostalgically to a time ‘When We Were First’.¹