Into the Cosmos Read online

  cosmonauts. He persuaded Gagarin and five other cosmonauts to sign a

  letter, which Gagarin then passed on to Leonid Brezhnev’s aide.150 The

  letter warned that the Soviet Union was “losing its leading position” in

  space and pointed out the “many defects in planning, organization, and

  management” of the space program, such as the lack of planning of hu-

  man spaceflight, the absence of a central agency responsible for space

  efforts, the “scattering of efforts and resources in space exploration,” and

  the prevalence of policy decisions that “often reflect narrow departmental

  interests.” The letter boldly accused the leadership of the Strategic Missile

  Forces, and even the minister of defense of insufficient support for the

  space program. The letter concluded with a suggestion to unify all mili-

  tary space affairs under the Air Force command, which would provide the

  basis for “thoughtful planning of space research.”151

  The cosmonauts’ celebrity status gave them many privileges, but

  it did not translate into tangible political influence. The Soviet leaders

  passed on the cosmonauts’ letter to the top brass of the Ministry of De-

  fense—to the very people about whose indifference to the space affairs

  the cosmonauts complained. In November 1965 the Military Engineer-

  ing Panel of the Ministry of Defense discussed the issues raised in the

  cosmonauts’ letter. Of all the cosmonauts only Gagarin was allowed to

  attend the meeting, and he was not given an opportunity to speak. Ka-

  manin suspected that the top brass were afraid of the cosmonauts’ frank

  and authoritative statements. As a result, Kamanin and the cosmonauts

  The Human inside a Propaganda Machine  101

  suffered a “crushing defeat.”152 The cosmonauts never received a formal

  response to their letter from the party authorities.153

  Outraged by the lack of action on the matters raised in the letter,

  the cosmonauts decided to pursue a personal meeting with the Soviet

  political leadership. Kamanin advised them to “cool their heads” and to

  plan the next step very carefully.154 Cosmonauts ignored his warning and

  asked the head of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastnyi, to arrange a meet-

  ing with Brezhnev. While the KGB was secretly monitoring cosmonauts’

  activities and submitting reports to the party authorities, Semichastnyi

  privately mingled with the cosmonauts, and they felt confident that he

  would be friendly enough not to report them to their military superiors.

  Eventually the deal fell through, as Semichastnyi himself soon lost his

  position and influence.155

  The Erosion of the Cosmonaut Myth

  In the first half of the 1960s the Soviet space program boasted one

  spectacular success after another—the first man’s flight, the first day-

  long mission, the first group flight, the first woman’s flight, the first

  multicrew mission, and the first space walk. The names and faces of the

  first eleven cosmonauts were well familiar to any Soviet citizen who read

  newspapers, listened to the radio, or went to cinema theaters. The myth

  of the cosmonaut—a perfect hero conquering outer space with flawless

  technology—fed from and sustained a larger political myth of the Soviet

  Union as a mighty superpower that produced perfect heroes and created

  flawless technology.

  The cosmonauts—professional fighter pilots—had to reinvent them-

  selves to become public ambassadors, atheism lecturers, and political

  agitators. They had to assume a new public persona and to learn a new

  language of public speech, a Khrushchevian variant of Stalinist “Bolshe-

  vik.”156 Just like the “confidence men” of the 1930s, they had to pretend

  to be someone else, for their professional skills as cosmonauts were ir-

  relevant to their public role. The constant tension between their profes-

  sional identity as pilots and their public persona made the burden of fame

  suddenly showered on them even heavier. Strict discipline imposed on

  the cosmonaut corps clashed with the elite lifestyle they came to enjoy

  as world celebrities. The cosmonauts’ role as a symbol of technological

  102  Slava Gerovitch

  progress and bright future brought them popularity, but this popularity

  created temptations that seriously undermined their ability to represent

  moral perfection. Moreover, their public duties often interfered with their

  training for future flights. To function efficiently as symbols, the cosmo-

  nauts had to stop being cosmonauts.

  Soviet aviation heroes of the Stalin era were not “merely passive

  symbols in the pantheon of Stalinist propaganda” but took active steps

  to define their own place in Stalinist culture.157 Cosmonauts similarly at-

  tempted to break out of the assigned role and to use their celebrity status

  to take an active part in the discussions of space policy. These attempts

  proved futile—not only because their fame did not translate into power,

  but also because the Soviet space age was already passing its heyday, and

  they were losing their emblematic appeal.

  In the second half of the 1960s the string of space spectaculars gave

  way to a chain of unfortunate and tragic events. In early 1966, Sergei Ko-

  rolev—the legendary anonymous “chief designer,” an energetic and char-

  ismatic leader of the Soviet space program—suddenly died. His identity

  was finally disclosed and his contributions widely honored. The focus of

  space mythmaking began to shift from the cosmonaut heroes to the en-

  gineering geniuses behind the miraculous rockets and spacecraft.158 Yet

  the myth of flawless technology did not last long. In April 1967 the para-

  chuting system of the new piloted spacecraft, Soyuz 1, malfunctioned,

  and its flight ended in a fiery crash and the death of the cosmonaut Vladi-

  mir Komarov. The Soviet authorities had hushed up the first casualty of

  the space program, the 1961 accidental death of the cosmonaut candidate

  Vladimir Bondarenko during training, but Komarov’s fate could not be

  concealed from the public. The death of Komarov—one of the heroes of

  the 1964 Voskhod mission—shattered the myth of perfect reliability of

  Soviet space technology. In March 1968 the nation was shocked by the

  death of its most beloved hero, Yuri Gagarin, when his aircraft crashed in

  a training flight. Sad public rituals of state funerals took the place of the

  former mass celebrations of space triumphs.159

  In the meantime, the Soviet secret manned lunar program was

  foundering, as the giant new rocket N-1 kept exploding at trial launches.

  These failures went unannounced, but it was difficult to keep from the

  public the news of the successes of the American lunar program—the

  circumlunar flight in 1968 and the lunar landing in 1969. The attempts

  to counter American lunar spectaculars with Soviet orbital missions

  The Human inside a Propaganda Machine  103

  proved futile. In October 1968 the cosmonaut Georgii Beregovoi misread

  signal lights and failed to perform a manual docking during his Soyuz

  3 flight. Though Beregovoi’s return was greeted with usual fanfare, the public remained puzzled
about his seemingly pointless mission. The successful Soyuz 4-5 mission in January 1969 did not bring the expected

  propaganda dividends either. The crews showed tremendous courage and

  skill: Vladimir Shatalov performed the first manual docking of two pi-

  loted spacecraft, and Evgenii Khrunov and Aleksei Eliseev carried out a

  risky spacewalk from one spaceship to the other. Yet the mission almost

  ended tragically: a technical glitch resulted in a fiery descent and hard

  landing of Soyuz 5, nearly killing the cosmonaut Boris Volynov. Although the flight was touted as a complete success and the accident was hushed

  up as usual, rumors spread quickly. A popular joke—an elaborate pun

  on the cosmonauts’ names—portrayed the four cosmonauts as “hanging

  about, slacking, doing zilch, barely landing.”160 The public no longer saw

  the difference between true accomplishment and a failure dressed up as

  a success.

  Former public enthusiasm was succeeded by cynicism. Gagarin pub-

  licly admitted that “overly stormy applause led to the perception of space-

  flight as a predictably easy and happy road to fame.”161 As one memoirist

  recalled, soon after the crash of Soyuz 1, in a small group of Komsomol activists, Gagarin raised a toast to his fellow cosmonauts. Someone kept

  interrupting him, saying that space technology had already been perfect-

  ed, and that it was not difficult to become a Hero (of the Soviet Union).

  “Tearing up, Yuri said, ‘And what about Komarov who burned up? What

  do you say about that?’ Yuri threw the glass on the table and turned to

  leave.”162

  As failures of space technology and cosmonauts’ errors began to

  chop away at the mythological perfection of the space program, the pro-

  paganda machinery also began to sputter. The finely choreographed pub-

  lic welcome ceremony for the Soyuz 4-5 crews was ruined by an attempted assassination of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. At the gates to the

  Kremlin, a disgruntled military officer mistook the car carrying the cos-

  monauts Beregovoi, Nikolaev, Tereshkova, and Leonov for Brezhnev’s

  limousine and fired fourteen shots into the car. The driver was killed, but

  the cosmonauts escaped unscathed.163 The cosmonaut myth, however, re-

  ceived a decisive blow. Following this incident, top Soviet leaders no lon-

  ger attended public welcome ceremonies for returning cosmonauts. The

  104  Slava Gerovitch

  political status of public space events was downgraded. The cosmonauts

  no longer stood on the mausoleum next to the country’s leaders. “The

  cosmonaut became less visible as a symbol of political power, and more

  visible as a profession,” the historian Cathleen Lewis has written.164

  The public image of Soviet cosmonauts both resembled and devi-

  ated from its most salient model—the public image of Stalin-era aviators.

  According to the scholar Katerina Clark, the hero pilots of the 1930s il-

  lustrated a cultural hierarchy of spiritual generations. The “sons”—the

  Stakhanovites and Arctic pilots—displayed (sometimes reckless) bravery

  and “spontaneity.” The “fathers”—flying instructors, worker mentors,

  and the ultimate embodiment of fatherly love, Comrade Stalin—rep-

  resented “‘wisdom,’ ‘care,’ and ‘sternness’ to guide the chosen sons to

  ‘consciousness.’” Clark has stressed the stability of this cultural hierar-

  chy throughout the Stalin era: “Despite the many gradations of maturity,

  society’s sons were not to grow into fathers; rather, they were to be per-

  fected as model sons.”165 At the dawn of the space age, however, Stalin’s

  “falcons” finally acquired their own spiritual sons, the cosmonauts. The

  young pilots of the Gagarin generation grew up on stories of Stalinist he-

  roes’ great feats. Titov, for example, recalled how he was influenced by the

  Soviet polar exploration tales from his childhood.166 Kamanin noted with

  satisfaction someone’s comment that Gagarin was setting an example

  for the Soviet youth, just as Kamanin did for his own generation.167 After

  Gagarin’s tragic death Kamanin, who had lost his own son, an ace pilot,

  twenty years earlier, told Gagarin’s widow: “Yuri was so dear to me, as if

  he were my only son.”168

  Called to be harbingers of de-Stalinization, the cosmonauts, ironi-

  cally, had much in common with icons of Stalinism, their spiritual “fa-

  thers.” The cosmonaut myth drew on the established canon, imagery,

  and ritual of Stakhanovism, the aviator myth, and the Arctic myth of the

  Stalin era. The cosmonauts “received the same honors and celebratory

  rhetoric that aviation heroes had received a generation before.”169 Like the

  Stakhanovites, the cosmonauts inspired workers to boost their productiv-

  ity.170 Like Stalin’s “falcons,” who symbolized the union of “fearlessness

  with training and iron self-control,” cosmonauts served as role models

  for their generation.171 Like Stalinist propaganda, the cosmonaut myth

  was sponsored from above, heavily promoted in the media, and reached

  all strata of the population—from schoolchildren to retirees. It encour-

  The Human inside a Propaganda Machine  105

  aged dreams of exploration and skillfully channeled genuine public en-

  thusiasm into actions that affirmed the Soviet technological prowess and

  helped legitimize the Soviet regime.

  Unlike the Stalin-era icons, however, the cosmonauts faced a funda-

  mental tension between their public persona and their professional iden-

  tity. The Stakhanovites’ mission was tied to their profession: they called

  on other workers to imitate their productivity drive. Stalin’s hero aviators

  attracted masses into aviation clubs to create a large supply of pilots for

  the Air Force. Yet the cosmonauts’ mission was not to recruit a large num-

  ber of new cosmonauts. As historian Lewis has remarked, “there was no

  state sponsored inducement to adopt spaceflight as a national pastime

  in the name of civil defense.”172 The cosmonauts set a moral example

  and carried a political message, rather than pointed a career path for the

  masses. The cosmonauts’ professional accomplishments made them into

  celebrities, but in their function as celebrities they no longer needed their

  professional identity. To maintain their public credentials, Aleksei Stakh-

  anov had to continue setting new records, and Valerii Chkalov had to

  keep flying. The cosmonauts publicly acted as propagandists, educators,

  and ambassadors—not as cosmonauts. They talked about peace, friend-

  ship, and science—not about the details of their flights. Six of eleven first

  cosmonauts never flew into space again, despite their best efforts to stay

  on the active cosmonaut list.

  Paradoxically, Khrushchev’s cultural policy of de-Stalinization drew

  on quite traditional, Stalinist rituals of hero-worshipping and organized

  mass celebrations. Space propaganda was directed by a generation of

  ideologues brought up under Stalin, and its leading architect, Nikolai Ka-

  manin, modeled it after his own role in the Stalinist aviation myth. The

  cosmonauts took their place in the generational hierarchy of Soviet spiri-

  tual heritage
as “sons” of the famous aviators of the 1930s, thus becom-

  ing Stalin’s spiritual “grandsons.” The cosmonaut myth was conceived

  as novel, futuristic, and high-tech, yet it was constructed out of many of

  the same elements as the old propaganda discourse. The medium sub-

  tly undermined the message. And the messenger—the cosmonaut—felt

  ambivalent about the message. The crucial questions that interested the

  cosmonauts—the technological aspects of spaceflight, emergencies in

  orbit, and plans for future flights—were left out of their public speeches.

  The cosmonauts had to follow the preset agenda of the space propaganda

  machine, just as they had to fit into the controlling machinery of their

  106  Slava Gerovitch

  spacecraft. Neither machine left them much room for initiative. Just as

  they tried to increase their control over spacecraft, the cosmonauts tried

  to wrestle greater control over their social role. Just as they were not per-

  fect automatons on board, they were not ideal models in the social arena.

  5

  The Sincere Deceiver

  Yuri Gagarin and the Search for a Higher Truth

  Andrew Jenks

  The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin once remarked to a curious Ca-

  nadian journalist: “A lie is never a fair means to achieve a goal. I do not

  believe that conditions force you to lie. You know, the truth, even the

  most bitter truth, is always better than a lie.” Perhaps in this instance

  Gagarin spoke from the heart, but on other occasions the world’s first

  man in space played fast and loose with the facts. Although he publicly

  endorsed a new ethos of openness and sincerity in Soviet culture after

  Stalin’s death, Gagarin also concocted deceptions for purposes of main-

  taining state secrets. He lied to keep his wife from worrying too much.

  He created cover stories to protect his comrades and country. And like so

  many mere mortals, he spun tales to mask personal failings. In the words

  of one of his admirers, Gagarin was an able practitioner of the “truth-lie”

  ( pravda-lozh’): the justified commission of an untruth so long as it was done (supposedly) for noble and patriotic purposes.1

  Gagarin’s penchant for consciously hiding truths was hardly

  unique—or even venal. Societies have long used national security as a