Sky and Telescope - December 2015 - 76

Focal Point

Alex Gurshtein

Aquarius in a Loincloth
What worked for Hevelius decidedly did not for one Soviet postal oﬃcial.

JOHANNES HEVELIUS

Hevelius' Aquarius (below)
and Komlev's
dressing-up
(right). See more
images, including the 2004
stamp, at http://
is.gd/sovietstamps.

December 2015 sky & telescope

COURTESY ALEX GURSHTEIN

With the 30th anniversary this March of the Soviet
Vega missions - a pair of spacecraft that investigated
Venus before ﬂying past Halley's Comet in March
1986 - I'm reminded again of an amusing event in the
former USSR in which I played an indirect role. The
event speaks volumes about a bygone era when the Soviet
Union was both a planet-exploring powerhouse yet also
distinctly less progressive on the public morals front.
It concerns the depiction of Aquarius on a Soviet
stamp - one that shows the zodiacal water-bearer quite
untraditionally swathed in a kind of loincloth.
For almost 60 years I worked where I was born, in
Moscow. In the last decade of my Muscovite life, fate
chose to place me on the Artistic Advisory Board of
the Ministry of Communications of the USSR. Arising
during Gorbachev's perestroika, the AAB oﬀered nonbinding advice concerning the artistic merits of post-

age stamps, envelopes, and the like being prepared for
publication. Its members were primarily artists; as an
astronomer and a philatelist, I was the black sheep of
this council. In any case, from time to time during AAB
meetings, I bore witness to many curious incidents with
Soviet stamps. To wit:
In the early 1980s, artist Gherman Alexeyvich Komlev
received an order for three stamps dedicated to the Vega
project. The stamps came out at diﬀerent times and were
printed in standard sheets as well as in miniature sheets
of eight. To design the margins for one of these miniature sheets, Komlev drew inspiration from Johannes
Hevelius' 1690 star atlas - which, as many amateur
astronomers know, depicts Aquarius with bare buttocks.
And so it came to pass that the exposed behind of
Aquarius, as Komlev sketched it, landed on the desk of
the head of the Directorate for the Production and Distribution of Instruments of Postal Revenue. This body gave
ﬁnal approval to all Soviet stamp projects.
Now, the chief of the Directorate at the time was
ignorant of mythology and astronomy - or perhaps he
simply knew the preferences of upper-level authorities.
But without hesitation, he declared that it was utterly
unacceptable to expose the delicate morality of the Soviet
citizenry to a nude male ﬁgure, even a half-turned one,
and promptly demanded that the artist alter the design.
To avoid changing the entire, largely approved composition, the hapless Komlev quickly slapped a loincloth
onto Aquarius. And in precisely this way the ancient
water-bearer saw the light of day in December 1984, on a
Soviet minisheet of eight Vega stamps.
Twenty years later, in 2004, the postal service of the
new Russia ﬁnally realized a proposal I'd ﬁrst made in
my AAB days of publishing 12 stamps with the signs of
the zodiac. Among sources for artist Vladimir Beltyukov
was once again Hevelius' star atlas. But this time no one
in Russia commanded covering up Aquarius' backside.
How times change! ✦
Alexander Gurshtein is an astronomer and historian of
science at Colorado Mesa University. A former president of
the IAU Commission on History of Astronomy, he helped
initiate the International Year of Astronomy (2009).

http://is.gd/soviet-stamps http://is.gd/soviet-stamps http://is.gd/soviet-stamps

Sky and Telescope - December 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - December 2015