Into the Cosmos Read online

  justification for secrecy and obfuscation. Modern politics, regardless of

  its ideological orientation, “seems to require a recognition that truth-

  107

  108  Andrew Jenks

  telling at all costs is not possible, indeed not even desirable.”2 A sense

  of patriotic duty justifies concealment, prevarication, and dissimulation.

  British political culture, for example, has never endorsed a public right-

  to-know regarding national security matters. The image of the lying

  politician, praised for deftly distorting and dissimulating at press confer-

  ences, has become a kind of cliché even in supposedly open and democratic

  societies—famously captured by the American satirist Stephen Colbert

  in the phrase “truthiness.”

  This chapter uses the example of Gagarin to examine the relation-

  ship between political and personal morality in the post-Stalin era.3 The

  goal is not to catch Gagarin in a lie, a futile task since truth is as much a

  social and political construct as an objective fact. As the philosopher Lud-

  wig Wittgenstein once noted: “Truth is a matter of what the community

  accepts.”4 Besides, Gagarin may very well have believed many (though

  not all) of his public utterances. It would therefore be unfair to call Gaga-

  rin a liar if he believed what he said—or perhaps even if he thought his

  lie might serve a noble goal. Nor is the purpose to prove that the Soviet

  Union was based on falsehoods and lies, as if dissimulation and prevari-

  cation were uniquely Soviet. Rather, the aim is twofold. First, the chapter

  examines the ways in which the perceived demands of national security

  continually challenged a very different trend in Soviet culture during the

  Khrushchev “thaw” and early Brezhnev era: the demand that Soviet citi-

  zens be more sincere, honest, and open. Gagarin’s soul became a kind of

  battleground between countervailing currents of secretiveness and open-

  ness, sincerity, and dissimulation.

  Second, following more recent scholarship in anthropology and cul-

  tural history, the chapter highlights the absence of a clear dichotomy

  between public and private Soviet life and between official and unoffi-

  cial Soviet society. Living in post-Stalinist Soviet society was far more

  complex than being either a “dissident” (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for

  example) or completely selling out and becoming a mouthpiece for the

  party line (Gagarin). Most Soviets simultaneously absorbed the values

  and ideals of official culture while also violating and transforming those

  values in the conduct of their everyday life—sometimes consciously but

  more often not.5 Gagarin was no exception; his moral dilemma derived

  from his attempt to enact broader Soviet cultural and political ideals that

  demanded, paradoxically and perhaps impossibly, that a Soviet citizen, in

  public and in private, be both sincere and deceptive.

  The Sincere Deceiver  109

  The Gagarin Cult

  Soviets felt genuine affection for Gagarin—a love that was enhanced

  rather than diminished by his official promotion as Hero of the Soviet

  Union.6 Unpublished letters to the editor of the Soviet Union’s major

  newspapers, like those that were published, expressed unbridled joy at

  Gagarin’s feat. Peasants and factory workers, in particular, identified

  with the provincial lad. Born on a collective farm and trained as a found-

  ryman, Gagarin was the underdog who had conquered Moscow and the

  world. Even complete strangers forged a bond of familial intimacy with

  Gagarin, referring to him by his diminutive “Yura” or “Yurochka.” Wher-

  ever he went, adoring crowds laughed at his jokes, teenage girls swooned,

  schoolboys pledged to be just like him, and older women shed tears of

  joy—as if he were the son so many Soviets had lost during the war.7

  The kinder, gentler, smiling cult of personality embodied by Gaga-

  rin—the welcoming cult of the son to replace Stalin’s terrifying cult of

  the father—was well suited to immediate post-Stalin years. Technologi-

  cal accomplishment, a yearning for peace, and the official condemnation

  of state-sponsored terror had nurtured a climate of hope. As one Soviet

  journalist remembered: “The thaw and the roar of rocket engines filled

  this epoch with new content. The cult of personality was condemned,

  Solzhenitsyn was published, poets and artists created fresh new works.”8

  A new emphasis on truth-telling and sincerity, it was hoped, would so-

  lidify trust and faith in the party’s plans to reach the Communist prom-

  ised land by 1980. Besides, being sincere seemed to be the right way to

  live. “The key word of the epoch was sincerity,” noted one study of So-

  viet values during the 1960s.9 Writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Yevgeny

  Yevtushenko, among others, began speaking previously unspoken truths

  about the Soviet gulag and the massacres of Jews during World War II.

  Even the so-called dissidents of the late 1960s, after Khrushchev had

  been ousted, initially took their cue from the regime. “The party called

  upon them to be sincere—and they spoke the truth.”10

  Nonetheless, interpretations of the new emphasis on truthfulness

  and authenticity in post-Stalinist society varied greatly. In Solzhenitsyn’s

  case, for example, truth-telling was a moral imperative, an end in and of

  itself. In the case of Khrushchev, however, truth-telling was subservient

  to political goals, which in turn often masked personal ambitions. He fa-

  110  Andrew Jenks

  mously condemned Stalin but passed over his own role in Stalin’s crimes.

  For Khrushchev, as for his successor Brezhnev, lies were not really lies

  so long as they upheld political power. And truths were not really true so

  long as they jeopardized political power. As the Czech dissident Vaclav

  Havel once noted, echoing the position of the ancient Greek Sophists:

  “The principle involved here is that the centre of power is identical with

  the centre of truth.”11

  To complicate matters, individuals often took poetic license when it

  came to revealing politically charged truths. The great artist Picasso once

  proclaimed that “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. . . . The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of

  his lies.”12 The movie director Grigory Chukrai, in his popular 1959 film

  Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate) used his simple tale of a soldier who goes on leave during World War II and falls in love as an opportunity to

  extol the virtues of truth-telling. He tackled problems previously unad-

  dressed in Soviet film: sexual attraction and adultery on the home front.

  Yet even as Chukrai discussed previously forbidden topics, he closed de-

  bate on another matter: not once in the supposedly more realistic rep-

  resentation of World War II does there appear an image of Stalin or a

  mention of his name. Like so many commissars from the Stalin era, Sta-

  lin, the proverbial elephant in the room, was now the commissar whose

  image and memory had vanished. In the name of one political truth, and

  perhaps even a sense of justice, another historical truth was suppressed.
/>
  Gagarin similarly struggled with fulfilling the new mandate of truth-

  telling. Publicly he seemed to espouse Solzhenitsyn’s notion of truth as

  absolute: no circumstances could ever justify a lie. Georgii Shonin, a fel-

  low cosmonaut who trained with Gagarin before his flight, said of the

  original group of cosmonauts that they came from similar backgrounds,

  experienced the privations of war, were incredibly ambitious and hard-

  working, and were determined to “live honestly.”13 But then the party and

  the state asked them to lie, which they felt honor-bound to obey.

  The contradiction was embodied in the July 1961 party program,

  which outlined the moral principles of an ideal Communist. Principle

  No. 7 proclaimed: “Honesty and truthfulness, moral purity, modesty and

  guilelessness in social and private life.” Yet an ideal Soviet was also ex-

  pected to have “a high sense of public duty” and unflinching “devotion

  to the Communist cause,” even if that meant being insincere.14 Handling

  secrecy with tact and discretion, and using deception to prevent secrets

  The Sincere Deceiver  111

  from being revealed, was a positive part of the moral development of

  “homo sovieticus,” of whom Gagarin became the exemplar. Gagarin thus

  operated in a cultural and political context in which national security re-

  quired deceptive behavior, while the new emphasis on truth-telling trans-

  formed him into an icon of sincerity and guilelessness who always spoke

  from the heart. Open and closed, honest and insincere, a truth-teller and

  dissimulator—Gagarin, like so many of his compatriots, was all these

  things simultaneously.

  Duty Made Me Do It

  Behind Gagarin’s many distortions was the justification that military

  and political duty compelled it. The idea of duty to others—and above

  all to the state—runs like a red thread through Gagarin’s life. The head

  of a Gagarin museum in Saratov, who spent much of his life collecting

  images and reminisces of Gagarin’s life, concluded that the core of Gaga-

  rin’s identity was a sense of obligation and duty, moral Principle No. 1

  outlined in Khrushchev’s July 1961 party program. “An order is an order,”

  he said. Gagarin once wrote to his mother in 1957: “I have to obey. There

  is no other choice.”15

  Although the first commands for Gagarin to lie came immediately

  after the flight, the very nature of the Soviet space enterprise heightened

  the perceived need for duplicity. The Soviets insisted, of course, that their

  space program pursued civilian and scientific goals, but its underlying

  logic and chief rationale was military—to wit: the development of the So-

  viet ballistic missile program. As a classified military project, there was

  virtually nothing, according to Soviet censorship rules, that the Soviets

  could say about the flight—or about Gagarin, for that matter, who was

  himself a classified object. Reading the sixty-page pamphlet for Soviet

  newspaper editors that outlined, in small type, all the classified objects

  that could not be publicly discussed, it seems a small miracle that they

  said anything at all about Gagarin’s flight.16 Before his postflight press

  conferences, Gagarin was thus carefully prepped by his commander

  Nikolai Kamanin and the “competent organs,” who found in him an able

  practitioner of obfuscation. Kamanin, a KGB officer and head of cosmo-

  naut training from 1960 to 1971, was both commander to the cosmonauts

  and a template for their heroism. Trained as a fighter pilot, he had been

  awarded the very first Hero of the Soviet Union in 1934 for his rescue of

  112  Andrew Jenks

  survivors of the Chelyuskin steamship crushed by Arctic ice. As the cre-

  ator of the public face of Soviet cosmonautics, Kamanin’s daunting chal-

  lenge was threefold: maintaining the integrity of military secrets; spin-

  ning Gagarin’s biography and feat into a model for all young Soviets to

  follow; and convincing the world that the Soviet space program pursued

  exclusively peaceful and scientific purposes.17

  One solution to the problem of talking about the flight without re-

  vealing anything militarily significant was simple and inelegant. The So-

  viet authorities began a coverup, followed by cover stories. The process

  began on the very day when the ship, the Vostok, landed on a collective farm outside of Saratov. The authorities covered up the capsule with a

  black tarp to prevent locals from seeing any of the craft’s details. One eye-

  witness remembered the alarm of KGB officers who arrived at the land-

  ing site of Gagarin’s charred capsule, which alit 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. 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.18

  The cover-up continued at the first press conference in which Gaga-

  rin fielded questions about his flight from those wily capitalist journal-

  ists. Like a nimble bantamweight eluding an opponent’s jabs, his task

  was “to find the right answer, that is, to say, not what you are thinking

  and not what is really the case, but what is necessary and correct in a

  given situation,” said one cosmonaut-candidate from the early 1960s. The

  process was “no doubt . . . the product of insincerity, but at the time it

  seemed natural.” The cosmonauts especially enjoyed watching their col-

  leagues spar with foreign journalists who tried “to pierce through the

  wall of secretiveness. . . . We were relieved and ecstatic when one of those

  answering questions managed to successfully ‘wriggle out’ of a tough

  spot.”19 Gagarin’s “diversionary” account at his first press conference con-

  tained two lies. The first was that he had landed in his space capsule

  when in fact he had parachuted out before the capsule landed. The fiction

  was designed to ensure that the Soviets would be officially recognized as

  launching the first man into space—which required that he land in the

  capsule (figure 5.1).20

  Gagarin then uttered another falsehood. He claimed that after land-

  ing in precisely “the planned spot” (which was nearly a thousand kilome-

  The Sincere Deceiver  113

  Figure 5.1. The primary portrait in the main exhibit of the Gagarin museum in Saratov maintains the fiction that Gagarin landed in his capsule. When asked about this, the director replied: “It looks better that way.” Source: Andrew L. Jenks.

  ters away from where he landed), he was met “almost simultaneously”

  by a search party and a film crew. This suggested, contrary to the truth,

  that Gagarin’s ship had landed exactly where its designers had planned.

  Later cosmonauts joked among themselves, whenever they were lost by

  foot or car, that they were in the “planned spot again.” The games of cat

  and mouse continued, as Gagarin refused to reveal either the launch site

  (later erroneously called Baikonur, although it was really in a place
called

  Tiura-Tam) or the landing site. When he was asked when he learned he

  had been chosen for the flight, Gagarin answered evasively: “In a timely

  fashion.” The Soviets in the audience, incidentally, laughed and applaud-

  ed. When Gagarin was asked about his salary, he replied: “As with all

  Soviet people, my salary is enough to satisfy fully my needs.” As for when

  the next flight would occur, Gagarin said: “When it is needed.”21 There

  was no small irony in the complaint from a Pravda journalist at the time that foreigners “know almost nothing about the details of the flights of

  Soviet space ships,” when the Soviets themselves had deliberately pre-

  vented those details from being publicized.22

  114  Andrew Jenks

  In the meantime, Soviet authorities masked the military purpose in

  the rhetoric of peace. In Bulgaria, Gagarin was photographed releasing a

  white dove into the air—an iconic image that was reproduced by the thou-

  sands. An Egyptian newspaper noted: “A person with a soul like Gaga-

  rin’s could not drop atom bombs,” yet it did not mention that Gagarin

  had been trained as a fighter pilot. To maintain the pretense of peaceful

  purpose, the Ministry of Defense’s official newspaper, Krasnaia zvezda, transferred all the letters to the editors from its readers requesting to go

  into space to the civilian Academy of Sciences. The academy was simi-

  larly chosen as the venue for Gagarin’s press conference and as the public

  face of the Soviet space program, although it had almost nothing to do

  with its creation or management.23 Meanwhile, the military logic of the

  flight often belied the message of peaceful purpose.24 As the crisis in

  Cuba mounted after the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco, a Soviet general

  had a moment of candor, now permitted by the shifting demands of na-

  tional security. He reminded Americans of the flight’s underlying mili-

  tary logic: “that the Soviet rocket that had hurled Maj. Yuri Gagarin into

  space could be used for military purposes ‘if necessary.’”25

  Like a wave originating deep in the ocean and washing ashore thou-

  sands of miles away, the obligation to obfuscate moved seamlessly from

  Gagarin’s life in the Soviet military-industrial complex to his personal

  life. As he prepared for his flight into space, Gagarin’s wife did not ask