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Vostok, where time stops. 70 years of Cold Wars

In 1967, a team of Russian scientists, led by Andrei Kapitsa, concluded an unthinkable discovery until then. It was Lake Vostok, almost five thousand meters under the Antarctic ice, where time stopped thirty million years ago.

18 september of 2020 at 13:38h

In early October 2003, on the streets of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, it was still possible to decipher the symbols of the Soviet legacy etched into the concrete of the environment, the architecture, and the faces of the people. Leaving an Orthodox mass in the city center, three grandmothers bundled up to their heads extended a hand inside a re-stitched and finger-cut wool glove. Hearing us converse in Catalan, one of them intoned "¡no pasarán!", recalling what has become an international cry against fascism. What that almost iconographic verbal snapshot of the old woman harbored, no one should ever worry about, because political upheavals, like environmental disasters, bury the collective imaginary, biographies, and memories under layers and layers of insensitive material through which time does not filter. A short while later, something similar happened to me while we were looking for a place to take refuge from the cold that, by that time of year, was beginning to show its claws. Crossing an antique market along a rusted iron structure with windowpanes missing or broken, a stallholder offered me an album of commemorative Soviet stamps from the 50th anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution. He won the haggling, but to compensate me, he gave me a handful of military passports from that era. Physiognomies, names, stamps; bits of frozen information, as if they were tips of icebergs of time. Who must those men have been?

In May 1965, in the midst of the race for space conquest, Sergei Korolev, the chief engineer of Soviet cosmonautics who had been rescued from a gulag four years before finishing his forced labor sentence, was commissioned to take man to the moon coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Revolution. Korolev's work with the N1, the space machine that was supposed to consolidate the victory of the Eastern bloc, only had a small fraction of the budget that the Kennedy administration allocated for the same purpose. A year later, on January 27, '67, the Americans launched Apollo 1. It was a training mission before consolidating the moon landing that would come two years later with the Apollo 11 expedition led by Armstrong. But Apollo 1 fails. The aircraft explodes a few seconds after lifting off. This fact places the aerospace program of Wernher Von Braun, Korolev's American counterpart and former Nazi SS officer, in considerable crisis.

In a scene of absolute sadness, the team of engineers allows the astronaut, who is inside the uncontrolled spacecraft, to say goodbye to his wife by telephone
Three months later, the Soviets also try it in a risky mission. They manage to place the ship in orbit but one of the solar panels fails and causes problems in the re-entry system. In a scene of absolute sadness, the team of engineers allows the astronaut, who is inside the uncontrolled ship, to say goodbye to his wife by telephone. The astronaut still managed to straighten the apparatus and enter the Earth's atmosphere; even so, at the last minute the parachute failed and he fell into the void. A year later, in March 1968, Yuri Gagarin died when the fighter jet he was piloting crashed due to circumstances that have not been clarified. Gagarin, son of the people and of parents who grew up on one of the collective's farms, is the icon of Soviet cosmonautics. On April 12, 1961, Gagarin advanced, like someone wearing new shoes among strangers, towards the metallic stairs of the spacecraft. He was escorted by a group of gray engineers, the only ones who knew that the chances of surviving the adventure were slightly over 50%. Minutes later, the astronaut's calm voice over the airwaves contrasted with the frantic rhythm of the clock hands in the control room of the Russian station. Gagarin, at that moment, when it was ten past nine in the morning, contemplated Earth from the Vostok capsule, the first to orbit the planet with a human inside, the first shell capable of retaining time.

Months earlier, 50th anniversary Tallinn woke up on the other side of the Iron Curtain to the rhythm of jazz. Also in the same year 1967, another team of Russian scientists, led by Andrei Kapitsa, concluded an unthinkable discovery until then. It was Lake Vostok, almost five thousand meters under the Antarctic ice, where time stopped thirty million years ago. Kapitsa never returned to Antarctica. But studies have advanced and at this point it is even speculated that the lake, one of the most extensive on the planet, already existed before the formation of the ice, when Antarctica was a warm place and infinite thickets surrounded Vostok. Scientists point out that time, trapped in the form of microorganisms, would allow us to understand how life was formed and, therefore, would provide clues about the necessary context to implement it on other planets or stars, and the race, as expected, has already begun.

Featured images: 1. Soviet Vostok rocket launcher at the Paris Air Show. May 1967. Photo by Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo 2. Thermal map of Antarctica indicating the location of Lake Vostok. 3. Stamps of Cosmonauts and spacecraft of the USSR, 1971. Vostok spacecraft, Yuri Gagarin, first man to step on the moon and first orbital station. Scanned by Matsievsky from personal collection. Wikimedia Commons 4. Soviet cosmonaut and first man in space, Yuri Gagarin 1961. Photo by ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy Stock Phot

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