Why is there a lack of grand, forward-looking vision in contemporary Russian space policy? Our study reveals nothing that compares with either ambitious Soviet goals or contemporary American goals of being first, reaching farthest, and being a dominant power in space; nor are there any clear explanations available of what goals Russia pursues in space. Notwithstanding the celebrational rhetoric on Russia being an ‘acknowledged leader’ which recurrently refers to its superpower past, the substance of contemporary Russian space policy is not focused on hegemony but rather on reaching equal status, catching up, being competitive, and strengthening independent access to space. Whether motivated by a shift to a less ambitious great power identity seeking equal status rather than dominance or departing from a perception of inferiority in comparison with the West, Russian space policy simultaneously seeks lasting space cooperation with the US and criticises the US for militarisation of space. This may seem paradoxical from a geopolitical perspective, but it makes sense from an identity perspective; for better or worse, the US remains Russia’s ‘significant other’ in space.

This article investigates the political implications of contemporary Russian cultural artifacts that appropriate Soviet space culture. Scholarship on Soviet and post-Soviet space history, increasingly interested in cultural production, highlights the transformation of Soviet space into usable history for the Russian regime. Nostalgia for Soviet space facilitates nation-building, allows political and economic capitalization on behalf of many state-affiliated actors, and lubricates the commodification of Soviet space heroism. In this article, such appropriations are discussed in terms of a neo-heroic Soviet space narrative characteristic of Russian space culture. This narrative, which principally performs a function of legitimation, has significantly progressed in recent years. This becomes clear from the recent release of Russian historical space blockbusters. However, other attempts to use Soviet space are also present. This article suggests two other narratives that attempt to appropriate Soviet space culture: the globalized Soviet science fiction (SF) narrative, and the “futuristic realist” narrative of constructing a new USSR. In both cases, there seems to be an attempt to change a nostalgic orientation of post-Soviet space culture, offering futuristic visions instead. While such attempts are not unproblematic, this article argues that they also deserve attention, especially if we want to better understand Russia's present stance and future alternatives in the new space race. Places such as Russian space museums are especially interesting in how they appropriate Soviet space culture and history, given that they seem to integrate narratives and maneuver between them. Performing both legitimizing and futuristic functions, Russian space museums are places where a new master narrative of Russian space, connected to the Soviet one, might appear.

USSR-2061 is a Russian futuristic online project that imagi-nes a new USSR a century after Gagarin’s journey into space. This article connects the project to Soviet space utopianism and the nostalgia that followed it, while seeing USSR-2061 and its artefacts in the light of utopian studies. In particular, the project’s hesitation with regard to utopianism and its thirst for realism are situated within a classical utopian problem of how to achieve real, not only imaginary, transfor-mations. Such realism generally coincides with Levitas’ (2013) framework of utopia as a method, and, as the analysis shows, it hinders the construction of “an image of a future” at which the project aims. Instead, the resulting narratives and visions commonly overlap with the official Russian political discourse that makes use of Soviet nostalgia, or fall into retrofuturistic replications of commonly satirized Soviet discourses. However, a different way of constructing utopia is also present in USSR-2061, even if it is never highlighted. To make utopia possible in anti-utopian times, one might need to rethink its place of possibility or topos. Theoretically, such an alternative is presented in connection to Latour’s (2017) Terrestrial, a place with agency that in utopian terms presup-poses a transgression of the boundary between the real and imaginary, the political and cultural. In the same line, the paper argues that USSR-2061 might attempt the construction of a new utopia through rethinking space. This might be fostered through the inclusion of cosmist ideas such as those of Vladimir Vernadsky and Alexander Chizhevsky, whose intersections with Latourian framework have previously been observed.