One of the world's least likely-looking spots for the
space race
The 18th-century buildings of Peter and Paul Fortress have been the site of many historical events, from the foundation of St Petersburg to the imprisonment of the Decembrists, from the funeral of Peter the Great to the seizure of arms from the fortress' arsenal by the organizers of the October revolution.
Hard to believe, then, that space travel also has its roots at the historical heart of St Petersburg.
Nevertheless, it is true. In the early 1930s, the Ioannovsky Ravelin housed the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, where the first Soviet rocket engines were developed and tested.
The laboratory was founded by Nikolai Tikhomirov, an elderly engineer well-known for the inventions he came up with for the Russian Defense Ministry during World War I. It was a mysterious and top secret area.
Jobless and robbed of his property by the Bolsheviks, Tikhomirov decided to cooperate with the Soviets and offered some of his pre-revolutionary developments to the Red Army commanders.
Originally, his laboratory for development and design of jet weapons was small, in Moscow, and few people worked for it.
In 1927, the laboratory was transferred to Leningrad, and, in 1928, was officially named the Laboratory of Gas Dynamics.
From 1929 to 1933, several jet engines were made in the workshops of the laboratory, and some of these engines were tested in Ioannovsky Ravelin.
The old red brick ravelin was hardly fit for such work, however, and the workers' equipment was primitive. But some of the developments they made deep inside the fortress would later be used in the first Soviet space rockets.
In 1930, Tikhomirov died. After his death, a group of talented young engineers continued his work. Among then was Valentine Glushko, who would later become one of the leading designers of engines for space rockets.
The engines he designed were installed in the Vostok and Voskhod rockets, so one can say that Soviet space rocket engines originated in the laboratory in the Peter and Paul Fortress.
The Katyusha, so famous during World War II, also had its roots in the Gas Dynamics Laboratory.
The engineers worked hard, but not because they wanted to develop weapons to further the cause of "World Revolution." A job inside the fortress meant decent salaries and the chance to buy food and clothes in "special distributing centers" when millions of people were starving all over the Soviet Union.
This was also the time of Stalin's "Terror-Famine," when millions were starving to death all over the Soviet Union, or being sent to labor camps for the most trivial reasons.
Engineers at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory thus had good reason to work hard. Of course, fear is not the best thing to promote engineering research, but that was the Soviets' method.
In 1933, the independent Gas Dynamics Laboratory was transformed into a department of the Jet Engineering Research Institute and left the fortress.
But the history of the unique laboratory continued. Many of the engineers who had worked in it continued developing jet engines and later participated in the Soviet Union's space programs.