by Kurt Caswell
As Sharik recovers from his wounds and settles into the good life, Philippovich reveals his sinister intent. He takes the dog into his medical lab, surgically implants a human pituitary gland in its skull, and then gives it human testicles. Sharik transforms into a man, but a poor example of a man, with the ill-beseeming behaviors of the low-life alcoholic from whom the organs were taken. As a result, Sharik turns Philippovich’s household upside down. He leaves a spigot on and floods the apartment. He attempts to rape a woman, one of the servants. He takes a disgusting job strangling stray cats for the state, their furs to become coats for Soviet workers. All this, and some trouble with the law for his strange experiment, prompts Philippovich to reverse the surgery, transforming Sharik back into a dog.
The novel is read as a satire of the New Soviet Man, Soviet communism’s insistence that the system would transform its male citizens into supermen, men who would no longer fall prey to their natural impulses but instead achieve self-mastery. One of the central characteristics of the New Soviet Man is a selfless devotion to the collective, which might manifest itself in the form of self-sacrifice. The New Soviet Man is willing to give his life for his nation’s cause or any cause furthering the glory of his nation. The novel was banned from publication in the Soviet Union but circulated illegally until 1987, when it was finally released. Heart of a Dog is now read and discussed widely in Russia and many other countries.
Like Sharik and the New Soviet Man, Laika is an experiment of the Soviet state, and she gives her life to that experiment. While we cannot say that Laika understood what was happening to her or that she chose to be a space dog, and while certainly she did not choose to be sacrificed, like most dogs she was devoted to her caregivers and trainers. What they asked of her, she did. Laika was selfless because she was a dog; it is humans who are selfish and self-serving, who ask animals to accept risk and danger in their stead. Fundamental to Laika, and the other space dogs, is her innocence. “Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are sinless,” writes Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.
Much like Philippovich in the novel, Soviet scientists experimented with dogs, killing them and bringing them back to life. A 1940 film, Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, apparently filmed at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy in Moscow, features Doctor Sergei Bryukhonenko’s autojektor, a pump not unlike those systems used today in renal dialysis and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The film begins with a demonstration of the autojektor keeping organs from a dog alive outside the body, the heart and lungs, for example. Following that, the scientists reanimate the severed head of a dog, again using the autojektor to circulate blood. When a technician stimulates the eyes of the severed head, it blinks. An application of citric acid to the isolated head’s nose and mouth causes it to lick its lips. The head also reacts to bright lights and to sound, a hammer banging away at a table’s surface. Next comes the whole dog. Under anesthetic, the scientists drain the blood from a dog’s body. The dog dies and remains dead for ten minutes. They put a stopwatch on it. The scientists then pump the blood back into the dog and keep the pump running until the dog resumes normal heart and lung function. In time, the dog gets up off the table and resumes its life. The lab where these experiments were conducted, so the film claims, kept a number of dogs in residence, many of which had been previously killed and reanimated, with no visible ill effects.
Human beings are animals with a central anxiety that grows out of our knowledge of the limits of earthly life. Death, and our fear of death, is a source of deep and perhaps nearly insolvable loneliness. To be alive is to be at war with loneliness. Experiments like the reanimation of dogs rose out of a near worship of science and technology in the Soviet Union (and elsewhere) and made possible the hope for a future where human beings could mitigate the process of aging, even overcome it. Such experiments, writes Henrietta Mondry in Political Animals, “were perceived by the scientific community and the public alike as a step towards the possibility of immortality and resurrection.” Laika and the space dogs’ “journey to the stratosphere,” writes Mondry, “propelled them into the domain of celestial beings. It gave them immortality that could be understood metaphorically but also literally.” So too with Soviet cosmonauts, who are the embodiment of the New Soviet Man. After becoming the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the nation’s highest honor.
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Mukha, or Little Fly, served as the control dog for Laika. She might have served as Laika’s backup—the role Albina played—but the team felt she did not have the appropriate conformation. Her legs were too short, her body out of proportion. She was not a fitting symbol for the Soviet Union. How could such a homely dog become the darling of the world? So Mukha would stay on the ground, but as the control dog she would train no less vigorously. She would do everything Laika did in preparation for the flight. She would live in the same conditions. She would undergo the same training exercises. She would eat the same food. She was Laika’s shadow. The data collected from Laika during her time in orbit would later be compared to data collected from Mukha on the ground. Mukha would also test the life-support systems in Laika’s capsule before launch. If she could live sealed inside the capsule on the ground, then Laika could live sealed inside the capsule in space.
When the day of the capsule test arrived, Mukha went into the little slot where Laika soon would go, wearing the suit attached to restraining chains, and facing the window where that stream of light came in. For the next three days all of Mukha’s air, food, water, and waste elimination needs would have to be provided by the capsule.
Imagine that little dog sealed inside the capsule. How long before she got bored? Is “bored” even the right word for what a dog experiences in its mind? Agitated, sure. Restless, of course. Her stomach desperate for reasonable food, certainly. Even spiders in space (dining on filet mignon) were fed better than Mukha, and later Laika. A day passed. And another. Mukha seemed to be doing just fine, but she was not eating her food. It was probably hard to tell, however, peering in through the window at that lump of sticky goo in the feeding tray. Had she eaten a little of it? None of it? Half of it? On the third day one of the team members, Konstantin Dmitrievich, made a routine check and found Mukha in distress. He “looked inside the cabin through the window,” Ivanovsky writes in The First Steps, and “saw such sad dog eyes full of tears that he became uneasy.” The team made the call to bring her out. Once out, they discovered that Mukha had not touched any of her food, which meant that she would also have had no water. After nearly three days in the capsule she was severely dehydrated and possibly on a downward spiral toward death.
“It remained unclear how the doggy had lived these days,” writes Ivanovsky. Inside the capsule she “did almost nothing but breathe.” This was strange behavior for Mukha, who had always performed well during her training. According to Ivanovsky, some of the scientists and engineers made light of it, explaining that “short-legged Mukha was upset to learn that it was not her but long-backed Laika who had won a flight into space.” A humorous anecdote, to be sure, but the incident might better serve here as a warning, evidence that once in space, Laika would not fare much better. Ivanovsky notes that Konstantin Dmitrievich had a “rather serious conversation” with a colleague about Mukha’s trial run. They approached the problem from several angles: Mukha’s personality, a misunderstanding of dog psychology, the space dog food. The food had been prepared by biologists who assured the team that it was adequate. But how did it taste? What Konstantin Dmitrievich knew for certain was that Mukha did not eat, even after three days with nothing else to eat. So “why not just flavor this food with delicious sausage?” Ivanovsky writes.
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In some cultures, it is believed that the dog is a medium through which communication with the spirit world is made possible. Anubis in ancient Egypt attends the dead, oversees mummification, and measures the scales that weigh the heart to determine if
its bearer is worthy of entering the land of the dead. The dog is a guide between the worlds of life and death, between the known and the unknown, the human and the animal (for the dog reminds us that we are animals), between the conscious mind and the murky wild of the unconscious mind, between the psyche and the soul. The dog is our companion, just as death is our companion. The dog does not desert its master even in death; the two might travel into death together. The dog eats the dead and chews the bones, and digs to exhume or to bury the dead. Anubis is the protector of graves. The dog guards the gates of hell—Cerberus (Greek) and Garm (Norse), the hellhounds, or the hounds of hell. The dog is a healer. The dog is a wanderer too.
The human animal longs for the companionship of the animal dog, for connection with dogs is to reconnect with our animal natures, our animal soul. The human animal longs for companionship with dogs to help us dismember the ego and join in the feast of the senses. This is why the Norse god Odin travels with companion wolves; why dogs accompany the war god Mars; why the founders of Rome—Romulus and Remus—are said to have been raised by wolves; why in North America the wolf is revered for its courage, endurance, cooperation, and protection of its young; why Fenrir, the death wolf of Nordic myth, destroys the old to make way for the new.
The dog is an extension of the human animal, like a club is an extension of the hand to empower it. We cast a dog out beyond us to test the boundaries of our sight, to take us where we cannot go alone. We cast a dog out beyond us to scout. Dogs are scouts. Hands and eyes, the shepherd sends his dogs out to bring the sheep around, or bring the lambs home, to defend the sheep and lambs from the wolf, the bear, the big cats. On the hunt, we send dogs out to retrieve what we have killed. We send dogs out to kill. We send dogs out to tell us what is out there that we might kill and eat, and so survive. The dog improves us, enhances us, makes us stronger. And it has long been so. The dog’s unparalleled sense of smell, with its ability to track and discover, can help us find what we have lost. We cast a dog out on the trail of our own longings, our searches, our explorations. The dog does not hesitate, or waver, or falter. It is singular in its purpose, its only life stripped down to what is, at last, necessary. The dog is an extension of the human mind, like science is an extension of the human mind. We cast the dog out before us like a scientific instrument, like the Mars rover Curiosity, an extension of our hands and eyes on a far distant planet. The Mars rover is like a mechanical dog. Dogs can understand us, our feelings, our gestures, our language. They can nearly speak to us, at least we can understand something of what they want to say. And in listening to what they say to us, and what we say to them, we come to think of them as feeling like us. We sometimes think we feel like them. And a dog will go to its death for us, to protect us, to protect its place that is with us.
What is all of this but an expression of love? Dogs will go and do and give, to us, because we ask, because they depend on us, because they love us, because we, in turn, love them.
FOUR
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Scouting the Atmosphere
Let the dog, man’s helper and friend since prehistoric times, be sacrificed for science. But our dignity obligates us to do this only when necessary and always without unnecessary torment.
IVAN PAVLOV
inscribed on the memorial to his lab dogs in
Saint Petersburg, early twentieth century
Between 1951 and 1966, the Soviet Union launched some forty-two rockets into space and into orbit carrying more than fifty different space dogs. Most flew in pairs, and with the exception of two dogs that each flew with a mannequin, Laika is the only dog who flew alone. Some dogs flew only once, because they were either killed or retired for some reason. Others flew multiple times, the record probably held by a dog named Otvazhnaya, or Brave One, who flew seven times.
Cataloging the flights of the space dogs is a difficult task, because some had more than one name. In fact, some of the scientists and engineers working on rockets and missiles also had alternative names to help hide their identities. If a dog died on a flight mission, a new dog might be given its name. Some of these dogs assuming the name of another were numbered in sequence, as in Fox and Fox 2, and some were not. The team might change a dog’s name from its first to its second flight, or change a dog’s name as it waited on the launchpad for liftoff. The two most reliable sources I found for the identification of the space dogs and their missions are Olesya Turkina’s Soviet Space Dogs, which includes a comprehensive list of space dog flights; and Animals in Space, by Colin Burgess and Chris Dubbs, who invested considerable time and effort in piecing together a chronology of the flights.
To better understand Laika’s story, a number of space dog flights deserve our attention, missions by some dogs who flew before her and some who flew after.
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Three hundred fifty kilometers up the Volga River from its delta at the Caspian Sea is the site of the Soviet Union’s once secret military missile test center, Kapustin Yar. Backed by the vegetated green of the great Volga’s braided channels, the test center faces eastward onto a vast system of dunes and wastes, the Ryn Desert stretching some six hundred kilometers into western Kazakhstan. Temperatures here can reach highs of 45 degrees Celsius in summer and lows of –35 degrees Celsius in winter. It is a windswept and arid land, empty of people but for a few scattered villages and towns. Kapustin Yar is not so secret anymore, but at its genesis in 1946 it was central to the Soviet Union’s covert missile program and the site of the first suborbital space dog launches.
On July 22, 1951, the first two space dogs—Dezik and Tysgan—were launched into the upper atmosphere from Kapustin Yar. Laika had yet to be born, and while putting a satellite into orbit, followed by a dog and eventually a man, was the dream of some engineers and scientists, it was yet far from possible. So much was unknown. So much had yet to be tested.
Mostly white with medium to long hair, Dezik had a fluffy, kind-looking face and an amiable and positive spirit. Tsygan, whose name means “gypsy,” had a mostly white body with black patches over her eyes and much of her head, like a border collie. Both dogs had remained calm and easy during the rigorous training, making them prime candidates for this first test flight.
While the rocket that was to carry Dezik and Tysgan into space waited on the launchpad, the dogs were dressed in their flight suits and sealed in a capsule inside the rocket, even the capsule that would be repurposed for Laika’s flight six years later. The team had chosen to launch early in the morning because the light at this hour would make the rocket visible against the broad expanse of desert sky. A fleet of vehicles sat nearby so that the recovery team could drive to the site where the capsule came down. Also invited to the launch was a party of dignitaries, VIPs, and members of the Soviet government, all eager to witness this historic launch. Just before the hatch was closed, Yazdovsky spoke to the two dogs through the portal, words commonly offered to Russian soldiers on their way into battle. “Return with victory,” he said.
The rocket went up, a long line of white into the blue. A million-horsepower engine pushed the rocket higher and higher, hitting a top velocity of 2,610 miles per hour. The dogs’ heart rates shot up. The g-force of acceleration bore down on them, their bodies now weighing five times more than on Earth. They could not hold up their heads. The rocket reached an apex altitude of more than 100 kilometers or 62 miles, just above the Karman line. And then a sudden and calming relief as the dogs entered microgravity. Their heart rates slowed and returned to normal. Secured inside the capsule, Dezik and Tysgan did not float about the pressurized cabin, but they were nearly weightless for four full minutes.
On the ground, the party of onlookers watched, as in the distance an object could be seen falling back to Earth. It struck the ground hard and exploded in a ball of flame. It was not the capsule, however, but the cast-off rocket body, the remaining fuel igniting and burning on impact. The spacecraft that carried the dogs was still in the sky, turning over the smooth curve of its path, and the
n down it came, faster and faster. A white parachute appeared in the sky. At this distance, the observers watched the chute like a tiny paper toy unfurling in the blue, slowing the descent of the spacecraft, slowing it, as down, down it fell.
Yazdovsky had directed the party to remain at a safe distance until the spacecraft landed, but the weirdness of it, the novelty, the joyful excitement was too much to bear. Two little dogs were inside that spacecraft, and they had just made a trip to outer space. Were they alive? Were they injured? Was their air running out? What was it like to ride that rocket into space? As the team ran for their cars, the invited guests ran after them, and in a torrent of gas and dust the whole lot went shooting across the desert to the landing site.
Alexander Seryapin approached the spacecraft first. He was especially fond of Tysgan, he admitted in an interview for the film Space Dogs, and now that she had been to space and back, he was desperate to know what had become of her. He leaned in to look through the window into the capsule. “Our animals were alive,” he said in the interview. “They were sitting calmly. We released the dogs and took off their sensors. We gave them sausage to eat, and water. Everyone was very happy, especially Sergei Korolev. He was normally such a serious man, so I was surprised when he grabbed one of the dogs and ran around the [spacecraft].” All the reports concur that Dezik had no identifiable injuries or ill effects from her ride, and Tysgan had but a scrape on her belly where the capsule had caved in against her upon landing. While the US was just completing the Albert flights and killing one monkey after another, the Soviet Union had launched its first dogs into space and recovered both alive.