On October 4, 1957 Sputnik I, the first earth-orbiting artificial satellite, was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. The Soviet space program, under the direction of its Chief Designer, Sergei Kurchatov, thereby achieved a major victory in its competition -- the "space race" -- with the United States.

Sputnik I weighed 184 pounds, or six times more than the Vanguard satellite that the United States tried but failed to put into orbit in December 1957. One month after the launching of Sputnik I, on November 3, 1957, Sputnik II, a satellite weighing 1,120 pounds and containing the dog "Laika" was sent into orbit. Because the alloys capable of resisting the intense heat produced by the thrust of the rocket necessary to launch such satellites were unavailable to Kurchatov, he designed a four-chamber cluster of rockets, adapted from his work on the Soviet ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) system. When Iurii Gagarin was sent into space in 1961, a giant "cluster of clusters" rocket with a total of twenty engines was used.

These achievements astounded the international scientific community and earned the Soviet Union considerable prestige. They also had significant military implications, since a missile that could launch satellites into orbit could also deliver nuclear warheads to targets in the United States. The United States Congress responded to this perceived Soviet technological superiority by passing the National Defense Education Act in 1958. It called for spending some five billion dollars on higher education in the sciences, foreign languages, and the humanities. Despite intelligence reports that the Soviet Union was not undertaking significant ICBM deployment, the Pentagon insisted on, and received, a massive increase in spending on missile development.

In what has been described as an economy of "planned shortages," the Soviet Union was never able to adequately -- not to speak of comfortably -- accommodate its urban population. Still, despite several waves of urbanization, average per capita urban living space did increase over the long haul. If in 1926, each urban resident occupied a mere 5.8 square meters of living space, then in 1961 (the year in which for the first time half of the entire population was recorded as residing in cities), it stood at 8.8 square meters. By 1980, it was to rise further to 13.0 square meters. There were considerable variations from one republic to another. For example, in 1961, per capita living space varied from a low of 7.8 square meters in Uzbekistan to a high of 12.2 in Latvia. In terms of the type of accommodation, as of 1965, 31.6 percent of urban residents in the RSFSR lived in private individual homes, 55.6 percent lived in apartments, 6.4 percent sublet privately, and 6.4 percent lived in hostels. Of all apartment dwellers in Leningrad in 1965, 55.6 percent lived in so-called "kommunal'nye kvartiry" (typically abbreviated as "kommunal'ki and popularly known by their initials as "kaka" which in Russian, as in English, is suggestive of defecation), that is, accommodation in which as many as four families shared kitchen and bathroom facilities. The corresponding figure for Gorky was 30 percent and it was considerably lower in newer towns such as Togliatti and Naberezhnye Chelny.

Housing construction received a major boost in the fifth five-year plan (1951-55) when investment reached almost twice the amount of the preceding planning period. It more than doubled again in the next five-year plan period (1956-60) when it amounted to an all-time high of 23.5 percent of total capital investment. Quality of construction and amenities were sacrificed for the sake of easing the shortage of housing. Many of the apartments constructed in the 1950s were prefabricated four- and five-story buildings, popularly known as khrushcheby, a play on the word trushcheby, which means slum. In his memoirs, Khrushchev claimed that "Throughout my career, I was concerned with the problem of providing housing for our citizens," and took credit for initiating the construction of high-rise apartments on the outer fringes of Moscow. "To use the words of John Reed," he wrote, "we 'shook the world' with our massive program to build housing for our people."

In the Moscow region, whole villages and farmland that had been cultivated for centuries were ploughed under to make way for new apartment blocks. The avatar of such housing developments was Novye Cheremushki, south of the city center. Later, the southwest district, Medvedkovo, and other outlying areas were subjected to the same process. Nevertheless, the new Party Program of 1961, which promised that "during the first decade of the building of communism (1961-70) the housing shortage will be eliminated ...," was far from having been realized.

Soviet nationality policy, particularly with respect to non-Russians, was deeply contradictory. On the one hand, it established as the basis of its federative system ethno-territorial units and encouraged the development of national cultures and education within them; on the other, it promoted Russian as a lingua franca, the settling of Russians and other Slavic peoples in the Baltic and Central Asian republics, and policies of industrialization that stimulated social mobility, all of which tended to erode national traditions. Thus, the pull towards greater national self-consciousness and cohesion was countered by the pull towards an amorphous, Russified Soviet culture.

Under Brezhnev, these contradictions intensified. When in 1978 the draft of a new republic Constitution in Georgia merely referred to "official concern" for the development of the Georgian language, protests erupted leading to the reinstatement of Georgian as "the official language of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic." At the same time, at meetings in the Abkhaz Autonomous Republic within Georgia demands were made to remove Georgian from the list of official languages and even to demand transfer of the Abkhaz republic from Georgia to the Russian republic. Patronage of national cultures continued under the auspices of the party secretariat in republics such as Ukraine, Estonia and Azerbaidzhan, as well as in Georgia. Despite these and other indications of national assertiveness and friction, party theorists and the media promoted the notion of the "drawing together (sblizhenie) of nations" and of "increasing their internationalist cohesion" via "their voluntary learning of the Russian language -- the language of communication between nationalities." While acknowledging the persistence of ethnic differences in domestic and family relations (for example, the predominance of nuclear families among European peoples and extended or multi-generational families among the peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia; attitudes towards marriage and divorce; rates of female employment, etc.), they pointed to the narrowing of differences in material culture, leisure activities, and educational backgrounds.

Even as the 1979 census showed the proportion of ethnic Russians declining in the overall Soviet population, the concept of the drawing together of nations, with Russians occupying the special role of "first among equals of the fraternal peoples," was restated. Celebrating the increasing homogeneity of Soviet society, the chief editor of Kommunist, the party's main theoretical journal, was moved to condemn both "national nihilism" and "national conceit" and to forecast the eventual fusion or merging (sliianie) of nations. The persistence on the popular level of a rich array of ethnic jokes, drawing on and reinforcing derogatory stereotypes, suggests that the Soviet Union was a far cry from having overcome national conceit or even achieving the degree of fraternity among nations that was officially proclaimed.

Cars and communism did not get along very well, at least not in the Soviet Union's formative decades. Few and far between at the time of the October Revolution, private automobiles got scarcer still during the tumult of civil war and for some time thereafter. Then in May 1929, the Soviet government signed a technical assistance agreement with the Ford Motor Company to build an integrated automobile factory near Nizhni Novgorod (later, Gor'kii). However, the resultant Gor'kii Automobile Factory (GAZ), was celebrated more for its vastness ("the largest factory in Europe"), and the wonder of its assembly line than for its products, chiefly the Ford-derived Model A car and 1.5 ton Model AA truck. The production of trucks - vital for military purposes and the delivery of goods within the burgeoning cities - vastly outpaced car production. The party and government elite might have cars and drivers at their disposal, but very few people actually owned a motor vehicle.

Only after World War II did Stalin make a slight concession to the comrades. He approved the production of two new models - the Pobeda (Victory), a swoop-back sedan produced by GAZ, and the Moskvich (Muscovite), a replica of the pre-war German Opel Kadett produced by the Moscow Small Car Factory - and set aside a certain proportion of each for purchase by individuals. Priced at 16,000 and 9,000 rubles respectively, the cars were way beyond the means of the average worker whose wage stood at about 600 rubles per month. But so few were produced - only a little more than six thousand in 1946 and less than ten thousand in 1947 - that demand significantly exceeded supply. Trade unions organized waiting lists that could mean the deferment of one's dreams of owning a car for upwards of six years. By the time it was phased out in 1958, just under 236,000 Pobedas had been produced by GAZ. Built to withstand the roughest of driving conditions, the car was exported to other Soviet bloc countries (including China) and to Finland as well. The Moskvich, an inferior product in just about every respect, went through periodic modifications in subsequent decades. Except for the even more diminutive Zaporozhets that began production in the late 1950s, it remained the most "proletarian" of Soviet cars.

Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the prestige spectrum, Moscow's Stalin Factory (ZIS) was turning out the ZIS-110, a limited edition limousine patterned after a pre-war American Packard. With a 600 cc eight-cylinder engine, the most powerful installed in a Soviet car up to that point, the ZIS-110 was capable of speeds of up to 140 km/hr. More than any other, it represented the Soviet state on wheels. Its components came from a broad range of enterprises - 73 in all - scattered throughout the country. These included processing plants that supplied cork padding for interior panels and - fittingly for a product at this point in Soviet history - the Gulag-run Sokol'niki labor camp that furnished some of the leather upholstery. When it came to distributing the finished product, Moscow received favored treatment as it did in so many other respects. Of the 71 vehicles assigned by the middle of 1946, 38 remained in the Soviet capital. Kiev got seven, Leningrad three, and Minsk, Riga, Tallinn, Kishinev, Kaunas, and Petrozavodsk received four each. Between 1945 and 1958 ZIS sent forth a total of 2083 units, including small numbers of armor-plated (ZIS-115) and convertible (ZIS-110B) versions. The armor-plated model, completed in 1947, went into production just after the American atomic bomb blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The car did not have to endure that punishment, but it truly was a "bunker on wheels," a real colossus. With added layers of steel and seven-centimeter thick plexiglass windows, it weighed in at more than seven tons and required special wheels and tires to bear the additional weight. ZIS only made a few dozen, most of which it dispatched directly to the Kremlin. Stalin reputedly had five of them at his disposal, using a different one every day as a safety precaution.