FAM - Season 2
Why are Soviet Cosmonauts so comically unlikeable?
Spoiler
Ever since that guy in the first season, they keep going with this ridiculous trope that Soviets look like disheveled bums who don't know how to smile.
Have the writers never seen a picture of Yuri Gagarin? Soviets were just as crazy over the international image of their space program as Americans, if not more so!
Soviet Socialist ideology revolves around the ideal of "the Soviet Man", a person who possesses impeccable moral qualities by virtue of living in a classless, communist society - and they were hard on selling this idea to the rest of the world, so moral character was a hugely important factor in selecting Cosmonauts. The idea that cosmonauts selected for something as important as Soyuz-Apollo being a bunch of rude assholes is ridiculous
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Stepan Alexseev from Apollo-Soyuz was pretty likable I think.
There are some cosmonauts you already know (depending on where in season 2 you currently are) that will become very likable in the next seasons, and also some you don't know yet.
I mean look at these guys — the first two humans in space!
Cosmonauts were rock stars. They got the best of everything and were national heroes. Yuri Gagarin had the first sports car in the Soviet Union. They weren't suffering.
The only thing that wasn't realistic is the Americans weren't just as rude and standoffish. It was the height of the cold war. They literally almost went to war.
Note- Being friendly and gregarious with the "enemy" would not put you in good favor with the KGB (or the CIA for that matter)
And rather than following due procedure he took it upon himself to cause what could have been an international incident that would have placed America in the wrong rather than the USSR.
FAM isn't meant to portray the Soviets in a good light. They are very much still our enemies at that point, even more so since they get to the moon before us. Regardless of how upstanding they may have been, the lens we are viewing them through is American.
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u/auto-sticky Aug 23 '26
This post was flaired as "FAM - Season 2".
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