Soviet Space Artifacts Put Faces on Secretive Program : History: Clothing, diaries to be offered in New York auction help humanize former U.S. adversary.

Among the fading spacesuits, three-ton capsules and other Soviet space program artifacts to be sold to the highest bidder here today is a pair of dirty and mangled gloves valued at $1,500 to $2,000.

The gloves were worn by cosmonaut Vasily G. Lazarev when a malfunctioning booster rocket aborted his April, 1975, mission, marooning him on a mountainside near China, where he managed to survive until he could be rescued.

“To hold those gloves is to relive the harrowing ordeal of his crash-landing,” said James Oberg, an independent Russian aerospace expert. “That was as near to death as you can come--and still live to lie about it.”

Sotheby’s, the 250-year-old auction house better known for selling art than things aerospace, is holding the first auction of historic objects from the once-secretive space program of the former Soviet Union.

The more than 200 artifacts, many long classified as secret, were consigned to Sotheby’s by key figures in the Soviet space program, many of whom stand to make tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars from the sale.

Some items may help answer lingering questions about the United States’ once mythic space race adversary. But more than that, they shed light on the people behind the program, long made faceless by secrecy and propaganda.

“What much of this material does show is how . . . many obstacles there were to overcome, which makes it much more human and more real,” said David Redden, a Sotheby’s vice president who helped organize the sale that was proposed by Sotheby’s in 1990.

“You suddenly realize, these people were real heroes--both the engineers and the people who went into space. . . . Russia is not a rich society. They took the resources they had and they did something that was quite magical.”

Among the articles on display this week is Ivan Ivanovich, the sole surviving cosmonaut mannequin (valued at $200,000 to $250,000), whose successful orbit of the Earth on March 23, 1961, cleared the way for the flight three weeks later of Yuri A. Gagarin, the first man in space.

There is a manuscript of Gagarin’s acceptance speech in his loopy script, the orange nylon and zippered spacesuit in which he trained, a draft copy of his flight instructions (“Record: How do you feel in weightlessness?”) and the congratulatory telegram he received from Nikita Khrushchev upon his return.

Among the most intriguing items are 31 volumes of private diaries and notebooks of Vasily P. Mishin, the longtime deputy and successor to the program’s original chief designer. Sotheby’s describes the diaries as “extraordinarily frank and unsullied by the kind of secrecy and misinformation that cloaks so much of the Soviet space program.”

Take an entry for Oct. 14, 1961, describing the testing of a rocket for an unspecified mission: “There is a fire in the bunker, and some people are inside. . . . Three people have been rescued. One is badly burned. . . . The cause of the disaster is lack of discipline and poor organization (somebody lit up a cigarette in a gas-filled room). It is a major setback.”

There is a massive spacesuit (with a button fly) designed for walking on the moon (something the Soviets denied they had ever aspired to after the United States got there first); a fishing tackle set for use in the event of an emergency landing on or near water, and the Kosmos 1443 three-seater capsule that spent 5 1/2 months in space in 1983.

One of the most touching objects is a child’s doll that cosmonaut Georgi Grechko kept in his room at the space complex. Despite a superstition among cosmonauts that signing an autograph before a flight brings bad luck, cosmonaut Viktor Patsayev inscribed the doll’s back, without Grechko’s knowledge, shortly before Patsayev’s Soyuz 11 mission. He postdated the inscription with the planned date of return.

The three-man mission went ahead, docking with the first Soviet space station. But when the capsule returned to Earth on June 30, 1971, Patsayev and the two other crew members were dead. They had suffocated, apparently when a valve had opened prematurely during the descent. The public mourning that followed has been compared to the U.S. response to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

“It provides an extraordinary resource to anybody who tries to understand the history of the space program in Russia and . . . the space race in general,” Redden said of some of the artifacts. “The American space race would never have existed without the Russian space program and vice versa.”

The Soviets started off with a massive psychological advantage when they launched the satellite Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957. They went on to rack up 31 consecutive firsts in space--first living creatures (dogs), first man, first walk, first rendezvous in space.

It was in direct response, historians say, that Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. When the United States succeeded on July 20, 1969, the space race was forever changed.

“Kennedy picked up the lunar landing thing as a challenge to beat the Russians,” said Robert B. Hotz, editor in chief of Aviation Week and Space Technology from 1955 to 1980 and an expert on the Soviet space program. “And, by God, we did it. They were terribly chagrined.”

Only in recent years, with glasnost and the breakup of the Soviet Union, have Western historians begun to have access to the participants and records of the Soviet space program. Gradually, stereotypes have crumbled.

“The old notion was that the Soviets, because they had a centrally planned economy, had an extremely orderly and methodical program that was not trying to beat us to the moon, and that we had a chaotic program and were in a moon race with ourselves,” said John Pike, director of the space policy projects at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.

“As it turns out, the Russians had an astonishing number of different plans to get to the moon and their program was ostentatiously chaotic compared to ours,” he said.

Discovering the truth, Pike said, is important, in part because the Apollo program cost the United States $125 billion and was “one of the defining events of . . . the Cold War.”

Was the public’s money spent wisely?

“Don’t know,” Pike said. “Would like to know. Until all these documents are made widely available in the West, I think we will continue to suffer from a substantial amnesia about a very critical period in our history.”

Much in today’s sale sheds little light on such weighty questions. There are cosmonauts’ wristwatches, exposure suits, flotation suits, flight jackets, a sleeping bag valued at $800 to $1,200, space mail, autographed photos, even the “first guitar in space.”

Vladimir A. Shatalov, a Soviet Air Force lieutenant general who flew three missions as a cosmonaut and who is selling some of his space suits and personal possessions, said he was willing to part with them because he wants the world to understand better what he and his colleagues dared and accomplished.

“Of course, these items are of great value to me because they are associated with the brightest days of my life,” he said, speaking through an interpreter here on Wednesday, shortly before celebrating his 66th birthday with cake and vodka. He said he kept some mementos for himself, and insisted that profit was not a major consideration.

As for the agency that built the Kosmos 1443 capsule, engineers said its motivation was in part public relations. “We consider a sale of our historic vehicles like good advertising for our program,” said Dmitry A. Rastorov, vice general director of NPO Mashinostroenia, the semiautonomous state industry that designed the capsule.

But cash is also a consideration for such agencies, which no longer receive the level of government funding they once did, observers said.

“The immediate problem is that the cosmonaut program is in trouble for money, both officially and personally,” said Hotz, who last visited the program in 1991. “Even then, they were scrambling for hard currency. And it’s gotten worse.”

Exactly who will bid on the artifacts is not clear. Museums as well as individuals are expected. A few observers suggested that the sale is less a historic event than a bazaar for space buffs--the “cottage industry in counting cosmonauts,” as Duke University historian Alex Roland put it.

Pike, for one, is staying away to avoid temptation. But he has been coveting a Star Trek-style flight jacket worn by Yuri Romanenko--a blue and red, knit-jersey affair with the natty but dated look of apres -ski wear from the 1960s, valued at $1,200 to $1,800.

“If I had any way of believing that might fit me, I’d be sorely tempted to buy it,” Pike mused this week. “Be a neat thing to wear!”