For a long time, reading the Soviet space programme was an exercise in reading between the lines: official cosmonaut testimonies, state encyclopaedias, authorised panoramas, sources that say both what happened and what the times allowed to be said. Facing them, Western observers tried, from the outside, to pierce the secrecy of the launchers and the design bureaus.
The opening of the archives from the 1990s onwards reversed the perspective: engineers' memoirs, biographies of Korolev and the great designers, documented histories of the programmes confront the official narrative with what it left unsaid.
It is a theme in which every source says two things: what happened, and what its era could say about it. The critical reviews set out to untangle one from the other.