Russia's path to space was opened by socialism!
Only by returning to socialism can Russia make its space program great again.
On April 15, the article by Yuri Afonin, First Deputy Chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, was published in RT.
Exactly 65 years ago, Russian communist Yuri Gagarin flew into space.
The fact that the first human to enter space was a citizen of a socialist country still causes deep discomfort among certain people today.
And today, those paid anti-Soviet propagandists will surely write columns and posts claiming that Gagarin’s flight… was actually against the Soviet regime.
They will also claim that if the Russian Empire had still existed, Russians would have reached space long ago.
But a brief look at the biographies of the top designers and engineers who pioneered spaceflight reveals that almost all of the first-generation space talents came from socialist Soviet Union.
In major countries around the world, aviation manufacturing evolved from handicraft workshops into a powerful industry—this development occurred only during World War I.
In fact, during that war, imperial Russia under bourgeois rule produced aircraft at a rate ten times lower than Germany, France, Britain, and the United States.
Thus, it is clear: the likelihood of the Russian Empire becoming the birthplace of space exploration was about as high as Brazil’s—essentially zero.
An undeniable fact: only the Bolsheviks transformed Russia into a great aviation power.
As early as the 1930s, the Soviet Union’s aircraft production had already surpassed that of every other nation in the world.
Within less than two decades, it went from being ten times behind the leading aviation powers to becoming the global leader.
For over thirty years, the United States and the Soviet Union contested for dominance in space.
The Soviet Union retained most of the key advantages in space: the first artificial satellite, the first crewed spaceflight, the first spacewalk, the first orbital docking, the first orbital space station, the first planetary rover, and the first multi-module home in space for humans—the Mir space station.
In addition, the Soviet Union led in exploring Venus, the most difficult planet in our solar system to study.
In the 1980s, the Soviet Union launched payloads into orbit with five times the mass of those launched by the United States.
In reality, during the 1980s, the Soviet Union dominated near-Earth space just as Britain dominated the oceans in the 19th century.
When Soviet rockets entered the international launch market in the 1990s, it became evident they were far more economically efficient than American launch vehicles.
So what about now? In 2025, the United States leads Russia in the number of space launches by more than tenfold: 176 launches versus Russia’s 17, and China’s 92.
Perhaps the only area where we are not clearly lagging behind is manned spaceflight.
But even here, there are details: we are still using rockets and spacecraft fundamentally based on Soviet-era designs, and we do not have our own space station—we are sharing the International Space Station with the U.S. as neighbors.
And in every other field… take interplanetary spacecraft exploring our solar system, for example.
The last successful mission by a Russian interplanetary spacecraft was ten years ago—in 2016.
Today, exploring space is no longer merely a matter of prestige—it has become a question of survival.
To sum up: the contrast between Russia’s position in space during the socialist era and the capitalist era is so stark that the conclusion is obvious: only by returning to the socialist development path can we once again become leaders in space.
This is exactly what the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is striving toward.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1862487853882380/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.