The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin

By Andrew L. Jenks

"Let's go!" With that, the boyish, grinning Yuri Gagarin launched into space on April 12, 1961, becoming the first human being to exit Earth's orbit. The twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel departed for the stars from within the shadowy world of the Soviet military-industrial complex. Barbed wires, no-entry placards, armed guards, false identities, mendacious maps, and a myriad of secret signs had hidden Gagarin from prying outsiders—not even his friends or family knew what he had been up to. Coming less than four years after the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit, Gagarin's voyage was cause for another round of capitalist shock and Soviet rejoicing.

The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling relates this twentieth-century icon's remarkable life while exploring the fascinating world of Soviet culture. Gagarin's flight brought him massive international fame—in the early 1960s, he was possibly the most photographed person in the world, flashing his trademark smile while rubbing elbows with the varied likes of Nehru, Castro, Queen Elizabeth II, and Italian sex symbol Gina Lollobrigida. Outside of the spotlight, Andrew L. Jenks reveals, his tragic and mysterious death in a jet crash became fodder for morality tales and conspiracy theories in his home country, and, long after his demise, his life continues to provide grist for the Russian popular-culture mill.

This is the story of a legend, both the official one and the one of myth, which reflected the fantasies, perversions, hopes and dreams of Gagarin's fellow Russians. With this rich, lively chronicle of Gagarin's life and times, Jenks recreates the elaborately secretive world of space-age Russia while providing insights into Soviet history that will captivate a range of readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501752865

Book preview

JENKS_jktd_HR.tif

© 2012 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper.

All Rights Reserved

Design by Julia Fauci

Figures 1 and 24 are courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and figures 11 and 14 are from RGAE (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomii). All other pictures are taken either by the author or from his own archive.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jenks, Andrew L.

The cosmonaut who couldn’t stop smiling : the life and legend of Yuri Gagarin / Andrew L. Jenks.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87580-447-7 (cloth-bound: alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-1-60909-052-4 (electronic)

1. Gagarin, Yuri Alekseyevich, 1934–1968. 2. Astronauts—Soviet Union. 3. Soviet Union—Civilization. I. Title.

TL789.85.G3J46 2012

629.450092—dc23

[B] 2011038318

Contents

Acknowledgments

ONE—Yuri Gagarin and the Many Faces of Modern Russia

TWO—A Victor’s Congress Baby

THREE—The Industrial Boys

FOUR—The Chief Designer

FIVE—The Flight that Launched a Thousand Rumors

SIX—Exegesis

SEVEN—Homo Sovieticus

EIGHT—Sacred Lies, Profane Truths

NINE—Landscapes of Russianness, 1991–2011

Notes to Chapter One

Notes to Chapter Two

Notes to Chapter Three

Notes to Chapter Four

Notes to Chapter Five

Notes to Chapter Six

Notes to Chapter Seven

Notes to Chapter Eight

Notes to Chapter Nine

Index

Acknowledgments

Given the funding crisis in California higher education in 2011, it seems hard to believe that there was a time when my institution would provide time and resources to fund a project such as this. But it’s true. California State University, Long Beach, paid for my trip to Russia in 2007—in which I did much of the research for this book—and then offered me time off from teaching duties to finish the manuscript.

I am grateful to the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, which allowed me to use two of its Valentin Shkolny photographs of Gagarin, and to Francis French, who put me in contact with the museum. My colleague and friend at Niagara University, Brian Bennett, gave me many of the Gagarin photographs that appear in this book. Gurbir Singh allowed me to use his fine unpublished manuscript on Yuri Gagarin’s trip to Manchester. The published version, just out, is Gurbir Singh, Yuri Gagarin in London and Manchester: A Smile that Changed the World? (Manchester: Astrotalkuk Publications, 2011).

A number of colleagues invited me to their institutions to present my research on Gagarin: my good friend Steve Barnes at George Mason University, Amir Weiner at Stanford University, Steven Norris at Miami University of Ohio, Catriona Kelly at Cambridge University, and Clint Walker at the University of Montana. Slava Gerovitch provided invaluable tips on archival sources in Moscow. Donald Raleigh helped me find contacts for my stay in Saratov in the summer of 2007. Velikhan Mirzekhanov, Alexander Novikov, and Mikhail Kovalev made my stay in Saratov intellectually productive. Aleksandra Rossoshanskaia opened up the resources of the People’s Gagarin Museum in Saratov to me, as did Maria Stepanova, director of the Unified Yuri Gagarin Memorial Museum in the city of Gagarin. Vladislav Zubok gave me the amazing opportunity to meet colleagues from around the former Soviet Union on the spectacular Black Sea coast for the 2009 conference The Teaching of Russia’s Cultural Legacy in a Global Context. I attempted a brief presentation on Gagarin in Russian in between seminars, wine tastings, sightseeing, and sea bathing. I am especially grateful to NASA Chief Historian Bill Barry, who allowed me to speak at NASA headquarters with a group of distinguished historians at the April 2011 conference, 1961/1981: Key Moments in Human Spaceflight. While Bill introduced me to many members of the space history community, he also provided incisive and detailed criticism that forced me to change many of my interpretations of the Soviet space program and the history of space exploration. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript—and to Alex Schwartz and Amy Farranto at Northern Illinois University Press, who were models of professionalism. The mistakes, of course, are all mine. Parts of chapter 8 appeared in my essay, The Sincere Deceiver: Yuri Gagarin and the Search for a Higher Truth, in Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture, ed. Asif Siddiqi and James T. Andrews (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). Parts of chapter 7 appeared in my essay, Conquering Space: The Cult of Yuri Gagarin, in Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, ed. Catriona Kelly and Mark Bassin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Finally, this book would not exist except for the forbearance of my wife, Deanna, and my children, Alexander and Elisabeth. They endured my absences and grumpiness with grace, good humor, and only a little whining; and once I was home they generously permitted me to shut the door to my home office and type away in relative peace and quiet.

Chapter One

Yuri Gagarin and the Many Faces of Modern Russia

At 9:07 in the morning of April 12, 1961, a boyish-looking Yuri Gagarin exclaimed, Let’s go! and his spacecraft the Vostok (the East) launched him into the cosmos. Why he chose that phrase (Poekhali! in Russian) is not entirely clear. Some have suggested that the phrase reflected his peasant roots: a Russian peasant would say "Poekhali when taking off on a horse. Perhaps more likely, Gagarin uttered a phrase that in English would be closest to Geronimo, spoken by Americans on the cusp of a daring and dangerous maneuver.¹ Whatever the meaning, the twenty-seven-year-old senior lieutenant left earth’s atmosphere from a secret enclave within the Soviet Union. That world was encased in an elaborate edifice of military secrets, factories, cement barriers, and even entire cities. Barbed wires, censors, armed guards, false identities, mendacious maps, and a myriad of secret signs had hidden Gagarin from outsiders. Not even his parents or closest friends knew what he had been up to. Gagarin, in short, lived in a Do Not Enter" realm. On April 12, 1961, he exited that land, a grinning space traveler from the mysterious domain of the Soviet military-industrial complex. He was the first human to enter earth’s orbit—and a Soviet, just like the first man-made satellite Sputnik and the mongrel muttniks Belka, Strelka, and Laika.² The capitalist world was aghast; the Soviets rejoiced.

There was no official announcement that the flight was going to take place. True, Soviet officials hinted at a possible flight, sending the capitalist press into a rumor-mongering frenzy.³ But the Soviets were also acutely aware that the flight could end in disaster. Recent events had provided little cause for comfort. An explosion of an ICBM (­Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) rocket on a launchpad less than a year earlier killed more than one hundred of the best and brightest in the Soviet Rocket Forces, including the Marshal of Soviet Rocket Forces I. M. Nedelin. Although the rocket "did not have any direct connection to the piloted space effort, there was clearly a repercussive delay on the Vostok program," which involved many of the same design bureaus and engineers.⁴ On the day before the flight, engineers discovered that Gagarin’s seat, with Gagarin in his space suit, was 30 pounds over the ­acceptable maximum, which they attempted to fix by stripping away parts of the capsule’s internal ­apparatus. That action, however, disconnected two critical gauges for pressure and temperature, causing a short circuit that engineers struggled on the eve of the flight to fix.⁵

Equally sobering, many of man’s best friends had preceded Gagarin into orbit. Some of these mutts, mostly street dogs, survived the flight, but others—20 out of 48 dogs who flew prior to Gagarin’s flight and 4 of 10 used to test the Vostok capsule—perished ignominiously. So everyone was intensely aware of the possibility of catastrophic failure—especially given mounting political pressures to accelerate the Vostok 3 schedule, primarily because of the stream of news on Project Mercury, the American attempt at manned space flight.⁶

Contemplating a tragic outcome, Gagarin penned a good-bye letter before his flight to his wife—to be opened by her only in the event of his death. Writing it two days before the flight, Gagarin said he believed completely in the Vostok technology, but there are times when you are walking on a smooth spot and fall and break your neck. . . . if something should happen, I beg you, Valiusha, to not die from grief. Things happen in life and there is no guarantee that tomorrow you won’t be run over by a car.⁷ How joyous, then, was Gagarin’s successful ascent into space. Sensing the possibility of a propaganda coup of historic dimensions, ­Soviet authorities summoned the legendary Soviet announcer Yuri Levitan for an emergency assignment, which he learned of only at the moment he fulfilled it. He was the Walter Cronkite of the Soviet Union. Reading from a letter in a specially sealed envelope that he had just received permission to open, he announced to the world the details of the flight while the craft was still in orbit—an impressive act of bravado, given previous doubts about the flight’s outcome. When regularly scheduled programming was interrupted and he started speaking, many Soviets initially believed the worst: the Soviet Union had been invaded again and must prepare for war.⁸ In the distinctive slow cadence so familiar to Soviets from his daily reports during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, Levitan announced: On April 12, 1961, in the Soviet Union there was launched into orbit around the earth the first satellite-ship with a person on board. He paused to accentuate the impact. "The pilot-cosmonaut of the ship Vostok is a CITIZEN of the UNION of SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, the pilot, Major GAGARIN, YURI ALEKSEEVICH. The announcement, in near real time, intensified immensely the drama of the event for Soviet citizens—especially since there was only one radio station and it played constantly into every nook and cranny of public and private space. Soviet apartments were wired for radios that could not be turned off. Radios blared constantly in courtyards, school yards, factory floors, and street corners. It was one of those moments when people remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing when Gagarin went into space"—sort of like the day Kennedy was assassinated or Elvis died, but eliciting tears of joy rather than paroxysms of grief. Like Victory Day over the Nazis on May 9, 1945, Gagarin had united the nation. The most famous voice in the Soviet Union thus introduced Soviets to the person whose smiling face would soon become the most recognized visage in the Soviet Union, if not the world.⁹

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin was made anew—the first of a series of personal makeovers. He left earth’s atmosphere a human being (at the rank of senior lieutenant). He returned to earth a national icon (at the rank of major, a heavenly promotion). In the years that followed he became a sex symbol, motivational speaker, politician, beloved hero, son of the motherland—and ultimately a martyr, in a picture-imperfect ending. When he died mysteriously during a routine training flight in 1968—with the exception of a brief news release from the Russian government for the fiftieth anniversary of his flight in 2011 there has never been an official explanation for the cause of his death—Russians filled the official vacuum of silence with their own explanations, elaborate conspiracy theories involving aliens, assassins from the KGB (Committee for State Security), drunken copilots, and CIA spies. In death, Gagarin’s story became the Soviet equivalent of the Kennedy assassination or the car wreck of Lady Di: an outlet for the expression of public fears and fantasies, for the elaboration of heroes and villains, of friends and enemies. Each one of those conspiracy theories—in 2001 the director of a Gagarin museum in Saratov identified dozens in popular lore—said far more about the obsessions and folk fantasies of Russian culture than about Gagarin’s death, which remains a mystery to this day.¹⁰

This book is a search for Gagarin. It contains elements of conventional biography, but it also examines Gagarin as a window into Soviet and Russian culture. As the director of the Gagarin museum in the city of Saratov aptly noted, Gagarin was (and is) a cultural phenomenon. Few figures in twentieth-century Russian history have attracted more attention than Gagarin since his flight. In the early 1960s, Gagarin was possibly the most photographed person in the world. He met Nehru, toasted Castro in Cuba, dined with the queen of England, and grinned broadly as he stood beside the Italian sexpot Gina Lollobrigida. After his mysterious death, Soviets spun the story of his tragic demise into morality tales and conspiracy theories. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he became one of the few Soviet-era figures to be immortalized on a post-Soviet piece of Russian money—a series of commemorative coins honoring his feat issued in 2001. People value what they put on their money. He continues to be grist for the Russian popular-culture mill as the subject of pop-rock ballads and rap songs, the equivalent, perhaps, of Eminem doing a rap song about John Glenn or the nerdy Neil Armstrong.

Much of the reason for the Gagarin phenomenon has to do with the Soviet propaganda machine, but it is hard to imagine the Gagarin phenomenon without Gagarin. He was straight out of Soviet central casting: an ambitious, handsome, clever, and charismatic provincial boy who had all the right Soviet stuff. Born on a Soviet collective farm two hundred kilometers to the west of Moscow, he grew up in one of the most impoverished and depressed areas of the Soviet Union. Too young to fight in World War II (the Great Patriotic War, as Russians call it), he spent his boyhood under Nazi occupation, witnessing a Gestapo thug torture his younger brother in the backyard. The horrific memory fueled Gagarin’s fierce patriotism. He dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, like those that he met in person during the war and in the pages of Soviet novels after the war.¹¹ His entry into the military sphere was partly driven by patriotic passion, but he also wanted to prove his validity before the older generation, who constantly reminded him of their superior heroism and sacrifice in fighting the Nazis. What did you do during the war? was a familiar and irritating refrain for those like Gagarin who spent most of World War II playing at war rather than fighting it. Gagarin must have often thought to himself: I watched helplessly as a Nazi maniac tortured my little brother. But above all the young Gagarin dreamed of rising above the miserable circumstances of his youth—just like so many other millions of Soviets—and of making himself into someone his parents, party, and commanding officers would be proud of—and that the capitalist world would have to respect.¹² Gagarin the provincial boy, like Russia itself, was forever trying to prove himself to others.

A Master of Disguise

But there were other Gagarins. If there is a trait at the core of Gagarin’s identity, it was that he had a talent for becoming what people wanted him to be, for adapting himself to the expectations of his Soviet and foreign audiences. He loved to dress up in costumes for masquerade balls in Star City. He was a great charmer and storyteller. He was an official optimist, a man with a love for life and a fondness for partying and practical jokes. He adored fast cars, taking his buddies for harrowing spins in his fancy French sports car, hands off the steering wheel and accelerator to the floor, and smirking as he watched their ashen faces.¹³ He was an athlete, an avid outdoorsman, a hardworking student, a water-skiing enthusiast, an obedient soldier, a competent foundryman, a communist youth leader, and a respected commander. Even before he became a household word, he managed to put himself at the center of nearly every photograph in which he appeared. Improbably, he was selected captain of his technical institute’s basketball team in 1953—the smallest man on the team, little more than five feet tall, but easily the player with the biggest smile.

Perhaps the greatest paradox about Gagarin was that he became the most famous public figure in Soviet life, yet he came from the inner sanctum of the most secretive part of Soviet society. Living in a secret world taught Gagarin to wear masks and create cover stories. His closest friends after his flight were his KGB bodyguards. He led a bifurcated existence—one life behind the fences of the Do Not Enter zones and another life outside those fences. He cultivated an image of candor and openness, yet he was secretive and had a penchant for telling lies. He seduced the public with a bewitching smile and seemingly boundless optimism, but privately he experienced moments of intense sadness, grief, and disillusionment. He presented himself as an ideal family man, yet his home life strayed far from the ideal. He preached a sober life, yet he and his fellow cosmonauts drank prodigiously and heroically. He was faithful to the point of naïveté in the superiority of the Soviet system (after all, this was the system that defeated the Nazis and launched the first man into space), yet he was sometimes shockingly cynical about what a person must do to succeed in the system. His million-ruble smile became a symbol for a Soviet people, who were famous in the capitalist world for frowning in public. He was as contradictory and complex as his country and its leaders: proud of his humble roots yet intensely ashamed of the Soviet Union’s poverty—and fearful that it would once again embolden enemy attackers.

Gagarin’s charisma and chameleon-like abilities, combined with the remarkable flight and the instant fame it provided, ultimately transformed him into more than a run-of-the-mill Soviet hero. During World War II, heroes of the Soviet Union multiplied, becoming a kopeck a dozen; inevitable, perhaps, when nearly thirty million people die in war. But Gagarin stood out as the first and perhaps last of the official Soviet heroes in the post–World War II era. Officially hyped, yet popularly worshipped, he became a kind of palimpsest. Into the image and biography of Gagarin, Soviets and Russians began inscribing their dreams, hopes, fears, values, ideological preferences, manias, and perversions. The construction of Gagarin as a Soviet and Russian icon began with Levitan’s first report of the flight. Almost immediately, Gagarin dictated his life story to Pravda journalists, who then edited the story into a standard socialist hagiography of the collective farm boy and Soviet hero.¹⁴ He was the hero of socialist-realist novels come to life. Photography specialists smoothed over the blemishes and wrinkles that began to appear on his face as he grew slightly longer of tooth and bigger of paunch. He was even outfitted with a fake eyebrow after a drunken mishap fractured his skull and nearly killed him. The shaping and alteration of the Gagarin story continued long after his death—­indeed, up to the present—as more and more people created an image of Gagarin that suited their various personal, political, and aesthetic agendas. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the new tabloid press of the 1990s, centered in Moscow, had constructed a new Gagarin: Cosmonaut Number One as an alcoholic and dim-witted rube (versions of which had circulated unofficially in the form of jokes and anecdotes since the 1970s, no doubt inspired by his odd-looking fake eyebrow). He was Boris Yeltsin in a space suit, the first rogue in space, as one popular joke put it. The aim of these journalists was partly to tear down old icons, but mostly to titillate and sell newspapers.¹⁵

The transformation and complication of Gagarin’s public image was itself a by-product of what one scholar has termed the privatization of memory in the Soviet space program. With the collapse of the Soviet system of censorship and the emergence of market mechanisms in the dissemination of information in Russia, the memory of Gagarin splintered, presenting a profound dilemma for the self-appointed custodians of public memory.¹⁶ In the Putin years, as the fiftieth anniversary of his flight approached, the pendulum swung back toward an official revival of the Soviet cult of Gagarin—led by the provincial homeland and haunts from whence Gagarin came. His relatives have launched a vigorous defense of the heroic and prim Gagarin. Like some sort of legal Battle of Stalingrad, the drama has played out in Russian courts and libel suits defending Gagarin’s name—and in competitions among schoolchildren from the provinces to be like Gagarin (the sober and industrious one, that is).¹⁷ Journalists began calling for an end to the anti-Gagarin campaign, which was supposedly rooted in an attempt, since the time of perestroika . . . to demonize Russian history and to make public consciousness schizophrenic.¹⁸

If the Gagarin of the 1990s was a wobbly, space-traveling Boris Yeltsin, the Gagarin of the twenty-first century was beginning to resemble a cosmic, karate-chopping Vladimir Putin, a person of high morals and very responsible, said Larisa Filina, director of the Korolev Space Museum in Moscow.¹⁹ The connection was made explicit in the city of Saratov in late 2007. A group of patriotic politicians floated two proposals, apparently hoping that making two would increase the chances that one would pass: one proposed that the city of half a million be combined with the adjacent city of Engels and be dubbed Putin, and the other that the two be conjoined into Gagarin (never mind that another city, Gagarin’s hometown and the former Gzhatsk, already had that name). The proposal was narrowly defeated, but its proponents vowed to continue their quest.²⁰

Peer long enough into the many images of Gagarin, and the outlines and details of modern Russian culture begin to emerge. The images are a projection of Russia’s fantasies, its utopian urges and mania for secrecy. They broadcast Russia’s paranoid delusions and technological enthusiasm, its cynicism and patriotic pride, its hero worship and personalization of power, and, above all, its intense insecurity as a Cold War superpower which lost nearly thirty million of its own citizens to defeat the Nazi scourge. Gagarin could have been a nuclear bomb perched atop his rocket, a nuclear deterrent with a smile painted on its detonator. That would have suited Soviets just fine, haunted as they were by the memory of the war. The sense of insecurity, and the chip on the shoulder it engendered, still lingers, amplified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the petulant posturing and defensiveness of the Putin/Medvedev era. The biography of Gagarin therefore contains more than the story of one man; it is also the tale of the society that continually looks into Gagarin and sees a mirror of its many selves—from the time of Gagarin’s emergence from behind the barbed wire of the Soviet military-industrial complex to Russia’s current petroleum-powered renaissance.

Reentry

Surviving his flight had made Gagarin far luckier than he or the Soviet authorities ever let on. Unbeknownst to the world until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gagarin’s capsule had spun wildly out of control during its descent. Up seemed like down and down seemed like up.²¹ Nothing went smoothly, contrary to published claims and Gagarin’s own public accounts of his flight. Search parties had been instructed to find him where he was not: approximately five hundred kilometers to the east of the actual landing site. The actual site, however, was along the Volga thirty kilometers from the twin cities of Saratov and Engels, where no one expected him to land. Of course, that didn’t stop the Soviet authorities from claiming he landed precisely where he was supposed to touch down. The truth never bore much of a relationship to the public face of the Soviet space program. After the harrowing reentry, when Gagarin parachuted out of his capsule at a height of seven kilometers, he was stunned to see a familiar body of water: the mighty Volga. Gagarin realized he was landing not far from the city of Saratov, where he had first learned to fly and studied in a technical institute for four years. He couldn’t believe his luck. It was fate, remarked German Titov, cosmonaut number two and Gagarin’s backup for the flight. By another twist of fate, Titov also landed near Saratov four months later during the Soviet Union’s second manned space flight—nowhere near the planned landing site, though once again the Soviets said he landed just where he was supposed to.²²

When Gagarin gathered his wits and detached himself from his parachute, he was greeted suspiciously by collective farmers from the Lenin collective farm near the village of Audacity. They had images of the CIA spy Gary Powers—and American surveillance cameras in the heavens—dancing in their heads. But they quickly connected the dots between the recent radio report and this strange-looking person in a jump suit who carried a helmet, seemed to speak native Russian, and appeared a bit confused, but who nonetheless managed a charming smile. He was friend not foe—though the smile perhaps seemed somewhat suspicious. When Gagarin asked the collective farmers if they had a vehicle he could use to get to a phone and report to his superiors, one peasant replied with a toothless grin: How about a horse?²³ Spacemen and horse-drawn carts—the combination neatly captured the curious disconnect between Soviet technical accomplishment and the conditions of everyday life. Nearby military units quickly discovered that the Gagarin Levitan had talked about on the radio had landed nearby. They whisked him away to a nearby missile base, where Gagarin then contacted his commanders.²⁴

Every step of the way, crowds gathered for a glimpse. Despite the absence of any official information about Gagarin’s landing site, news of Gagarin’s landing, in what today is called the Gagarin field, traveled faster than an ICBM, a testimony to the incredible efficiency and occasional accuracy of the vaunted Soviet rumor mill (in contrast to the deliberate inaccuracy of official accounts). Even when Gagarin was transported by plane to Kuibyshev, where space program officials awaited him for a full debriefing, the entire city seemed to know that Gagarin was coming, though his whereabouts and movements were supposed to be a secret. As Gagarin rode in a car from the airport, one idiot chucked his bike under the wheels of one automobile in the procession, hoping to slow it down and snap pictures of Cosmonaut Number One. It was then that Gagarin fully realized that his life had changed forever.²⁵ His cover was blown. Gagarin later remarked that his personal journey from an obscure existence behind the veil of national security to instant fame was more disorienting than the G-forces he encountered upon reentry.

Gagarin’s ship, it turns out, was a special kind of space portal. It connected the super-secret world of national defense to the Soviet public realm. In passing through that portal, Gagarin had done something totally unprecedented—as shocking, perhaps, as the actual technical feat of the flight. He had revealed his secret identity and life. This act of revelation, in a system that constructed elaborate barriers to protect closed worlds from public view, created an initial sense of panic as well as joy among Gagarin’s handlers and commanders, many of whom worked in the ranks of the KGB. They were overjoyed that he had survived his ­ordeal. They were eager to trumpet the flight as proof for the whole world to see that the Soviet Union had a superior way of organizing its political and technological affairs. They wanted to brag. But they were terrified that in the process of talking about themselves they might compromise national security. One eyewitness account remembered the alarm of KGB officers who arrived at the landing site of Gagarin’s charred capsule, which alighted about two kilometers away from Gagarin. People were climbing all over it, snapping pictures (photography of military objects was strictly forbidden), and stripping off pieces as personal souvenirs. One souvenir seeker managed to privatize, in his words, a few tubes of space food. Within hours, before a security cordon could be reestablished and a black tarp placed over the capsule, the details of a top-secret enterprise had been dangerously exposed to the public.²⁶

The solution to the problem of Gagarin’s blown cover was simple and inelegant: the Soviet authorities began a cover-up, followed by lies. The process began literally when authorities covered up the capsule with a black tarp to prevent locals from seeing any of the craft’s details. From the KGB point of view, there was not much difference between cover-ups, lies, and protecting national security. They had to conceal and alter the details of his feat—especially information that might provide insight into the technological capabilities of the Soviet Union, already dangerously compromised by inquisitive locals at the landing site. They had to impress the hostile capitalist world with the Soviet Union’s awesome technological capabilities, but leave it befuddled and confounded regarding the generalities and specifics. Official news of Gagarin’s feat thus began as a conscious distortion and fabrication. It was a noble and sacred fabrication from the perspective of its KGB creator, and Gagarin’s commander, General Nikolai Kamanin. The cult of Yuri Gagarin was born—from a cocoon of lies, a kind of original sin.²⁷

Distortion Zones

Gagarin’s situation was certainly unprecedented, but in many ways it was also typically Soviet. Creating cover stories was a national pastime and one of the key attributes of modern Russian culture revealed in Gagarin’s story. Like Gagarin, millions of Soviets lived simultaneously in open and closed worlds. The vast infrastructure associated with the Soviet military-industrial complex touched, directly or indirectly, nearly every aspect of Soviet life. Millions of Soviets worked in secret factories about which they could not speak. The elaborate rules of national security dictated that vast realms of the Soviet economy, and of Soviet society, remain a secret, even if they were in plain view. Of course, pretending that these realms did not exist did not mean that people were not aware of their existence. But the inability to call things by their names did change the way people talked and acted to those who lived outside the secret worlds they occasionally inhabited. Like Gagarin, Soviets became adept at negotiating the boundaries between closed and opened worlds, at reading the various literal and figurative Do Not Enter signs of their existence. Making matters more complex, secret worlds resided within secret worlds—like the famous Russian nesting dolls. For instance, the cities of Saratov and Engels, spanning both sides of the Volga and close to the site where Gagarin landed, were themselves officially closed cities. They were closed because they contained a preponderance of defense and military factories. Thousands of locals, just like Gagarin, worked every day in secret factories, closed to the more general public and certainly to foreigners. Many of those workers actually produced the parts that comprised Gagarin’s rocket systems—and thousands were secretly rewarded for Gagarin’s flight. Like Gagarin, they led secret lives. Everything in the area of space work was a secret, said Gagarin’s basketball coach from Saratov—who, it turns out, worked in the production of electronic parts for Gagarin’s spaceship and received a medal (secretly) for his efforts. His sporting life was a kind of cover. Now I can talk about this openly, but not then.²⁸ The secret nature of one’s life grew more intense the closer a person was to anything remotely associated with supposedly military interests, which was potentially anything, since the entire society was mobilized for national security, and the state owned and operated all of the nation’s resources.

Of course, the problem of boundaries between open and closed worlds was as much a Cold War phenomenon as it was a Soviet phenomenon. During the Cold War, the United States, like the Soviet Union, developed a mania for building walls and no-go zones. The United States, similar to the Soviet Union, built a gigantic infrastructure of secret weapons production at a cost of nearly $6 trillion, hidden in plain view, as one scholar has noted. The Cold War was a war with no clear ­boundaries, no clear battlefields, a war of scientists and radar; a war waged in such ­secrecy that both records and physical locations are often utterly blurred.²⁹ On both sides of the Cold War divide, the civilian-built environment was ­bifurcated, split into places off limits to the public and devoted to ­national security and places that remained open. Citizens on both sides of the Cold War became accustomed to fences, do-not-enter signs, barbed wire, and secret installations. They began to master the complex rules for ­negotiating open and closed space. They accepted as natural the existence of man-made fences and concrete barriers. They became accustomed to the paradox that they lived in a supposedly democratic society where public often meant off limits to the public, where vast realms of the state were closed for security reasons to all but the most privileged citizens, marked by signs that read Top Secret.

While the bifurcation of society into open and secret worlds was common to the United States and the Soviet Union, it was nonetheless far more intense and pervasive on the Soviet side of the Cold War divide. Driven by a far more profound sense of insecurity stemming from the devastation of World War II, not to mention an intensely paranoid and occasionally terrifying style of politics, the Soviet system erected physical barricades in every conceivable place. There were secret worlds within secret worlds. The Soviet authorities placed bans on all aerial photography—and on the photographing of any structure or site with a potential national security function. The bifurcation was mental as well as physical. The Soviets consciously distorted maps to change or conceal the location of military facilities. They said they launched rockets from a place called Baikonur, but in fact they launched from another place not on the map called Tiura-Tam, which was sometimes referred to within secret circles as simply Tashkent 90. People got used to talking about things in indirect and coded ways, not merely because they were afraid of frank talk, but because they believed that national security demanded silence and an occasional lie. Again and again, in the summer of 2007, defense and aerospace workers who contributed to Gagarin’s flight said that national security demanded secrecy—and secrecy, on occasion, required a little lie, in the words of Vladimir Tsybin, an engineer who built and tested guidance systems for the Soviet space program in the 1960s. We couldn’t always say the truth, he said, adding that his position was really no different from the position of his colleagues in the United States. Isn’t that right? he said, offering a knowing wink and smile.³⁰ So the fact that the Soviet government lied was not particularly surprising or even damning for many Soviets; they believed that lying was a patriotic necessity, and under certain circumstances, a moral duty, given the Soviet Union’s security needs. To condemn lying outright was therefore wrong—and naïve.

Still, the Soviets were proud of their technological accomplishments. They had become accustomed to legitimizing themselves through the construction of large-scale technological projects, which were simultaneously exercises in physical and social engineering. For example, the Soviets treated completion of massive hydroelectric plants in the first five-year plan, or of the first line of the Moscow metro in 1935, as definitive signs of progress toward the final victory of communism. Through the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders also measured progress toward Utopia by tallying and trumpeting technological ­accomplishments. Along with the guidance of the party, those accomplishments were supposed to move Soviet society inexorably along a path toward the communist promised land. This element of technological determinism in Soviet ideology—the idea that technology is the driving force in human history—became even more pronounced in the post-Stalin years. Thus, even as the Soviets hid the truth of the Soviet space program, they desperately wanted to tell the whole world about their triumphs in space, precisely because those successes seemed to prove that history was on their side.

The story of Gagarin’s flight and public persona was a product of these competing urges to invite the world into Soviet society and to keep it far, far away; to tell the world all about how they managed to put a man into space and to prevent the true story from ever getting out. The dilemma mirrored the larger political problem Khrushchev faced when he condemned Joseph Stalin’s terror—halfway and without mentioning his own role; or when he attempted to open Soviet society to the outside world, even while berating writers such as Boris Pasternak for being too open to the outside world. Unable and often simply afraid to lift the veil of secrecy, the authorities transformed Gagarin and his life story (along with much of the Soviet Union) into a kind of distortion zone, a place where truth, lies, and power blurred and became indistinguishable.

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