Into the Cosmos Page 18
about his job and he rarely talked about it (when old friends from school
asked, he said he was a “test pilot”). His wife claimed that as his date for
the launch on April 12 approached, he hinted but never stated explicitly
that he would be the first to fly into space. Instead, Gagarin gave her the
wrong date for this unstated event as he left; he said the “flight” (with a
wink and a nod) would take place April 14, so that she would not worry.
Gagarin’s wife detected in his lie the concern of a loving husband simply
doing his duty.26
While Gagarin continued to present himself as a paragon of sincerity
in Soviet culture, he frequently sacrificed his commitment to the idea that
“even the most bitter truth is always better than a lie.” To take one example,
two days before Gagarin’s tragic death in 1968 he arranged to celebrate
a colleague’s fiftieth birthday. A telegram arrived reporting that his col-
league’s father had just died. Gagarin’s wife brought the telegram to her
husband, sitting at the head of the table for the party, and asked: “Should
we tell [him] or not?” Gagarin said: “Not under any circumstances.”
The Sincere Deceiver 115
The news would have to wait until the next morning, “otherwise we’ll
spoil his party.” Gagarin’s wife cited the incident in her memoirs as a pos-
itive illustration of Gagarin’s moral qualities. It was a seemingly trivial
lie, a white lie, but it also was emblematic of a distinctive and well-noted
aspect of late Soviet culture: good celebrations were not to be interrupted
by the truth, whether it was the disastrous state of Soviet agriculture, the
May Day celebration just after the Chernobyl disaster, or some piece of
unhappy personal news that might spoil a colleague’s birthday.27 A belief
that truth could do more damage than “un-truth” thus also defined the
moral milieu in which Gagarin was raised.
Of all the people who knew Gagarin, his father seems to have been
the most skeptical of Yuri’s claims to honesty and openness. The cos-
monaut’s father, taciturn and gruff by nature, could be crude and cruel.
During his son’s wedding party, held immediately after Gagarin finished
officer training school in Orenburg, he stunned the celebrants by at-
tempting publicly to unmask him and catch him in a lie. According to
Gagarin’s older brother Valentin, Gagarin was dressed to the nines in his
new uniform with lieutenant stripes. He sat at the head of the table with
his beautiful new wife—eager to show his relatives that he had made a
success of himself. As the guest prepared for the ceremonial first toast,
Gagarin’s father tapped his glass with a fork, rose, and congratulated his
son on the marriage and being commissioned as an officer. “But I simply
want to know one thing,” he added. “Did you register [the marriage] . . .
and do you have a document proving that you graduated from the [mili-
tary] academy?” A long moment of uncomfortable silence followed. Yuri
then reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a document, which
his father inspected closely. “Well, everything is clear now! I congratu-
late you son!” Nonetheless, an air of discomfort lingered, and even Yuri’s
brother was not sure how to interpret the public interrogation. If it was a
joke, Gagarin’s brother remembered, it was “crude but from the soul.”28
When Should I Lie?
Gagarin revealed the complex hermeneutics of Soviet truth-telling in
a revealing exchange of letters with a fifteen-year-old Canadian boy from
Montreal in 1963. Like so many of Gagarin’s fans, the boy sent a letter
to Gagarin requesting his guidance. He wanted to know, “is it right to
lie for the sake of principle?” Was it right to do whatever was necessary
116 Andrew Jenks
to achieve one’s ambitions? The questions, according to Gagarin’s wife,
agonized Gagarin, who seemed to recognize in them the same issues he
had confronted since his flight. Gagarin labored long and hard over his
response, composed a letter, and then tossed it, along with many other
drafts, into the trash bin. There was really nothing he could say, he admit-
ted to his wife. “He’s already discovered the most important thing—he
lives in a dog-eat-dog world.” But Gagarin, as always, persevered and com-
posed a letter to “my young Canadian friend” in which he emphasized
his “comradely” upbringing. He concluded that it was wrong to lie for the
sake of “personal interests,” but significantly he did not discuss whether
it was wrong to lie for other reasons. He ended with two pieces of advice:
make sure your goal is reasonable, and surround yourself with comrades
to keep you on the right path. The question of whether it was wrong to
lie on behalf of others was deftly ignored. “I hope that in the future . . .
you will never have to lie and will be lucky.”29 For a time the Soviets put
the letter as well as Gagarin’s response on display at the museum in Star
City—thus transforming Gagarin’s private moral dilemma, along with
his solution, into a shining example of Soviet virtue in action.30
If Gagarin’s lies often grew from a concern for the feelings of others
as well as from the demands of military secrecy, his own behavior caused
him to make lies that entailed more complex personal motives. Gagarin’s
well-known fondness for drink threatened to tarnish his image and com-
pelled him, for personal and political reasons, to engage in many truth-
lies. “Everyone wanted to get drunk with Gagarin for his friendship, for
his love, and for a thousand other reasons,” remembered Kamanin. One
army officer recalled how he and his friends tried to finagle visits to Star
City to party with the cosmonauts. They stuffed their briefcases full of ap-
petizers and bottles of vodka, just in case a party broke out, which it usu-
ally did. Gagarin, in addition, married his love of drink to the cultivation
of a new post-Stalinist masculine identity. As head of the Soviet Federa-
tion of Water Skiing, he was frequently pictured bare-chested and grin-
ning on water skis. He drove cars fast, taking friends on 160-kilometer-
per-hour spins (on Russian roads!) in his fiberglass French Matra (a gift
from his French acolytes). And he definitely liked to keep the company of
pretty women (figure 5.2).31
The cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov remembered one night of hard party-
ing in May 1964. After staying up until four in the morning drinking,
Gagarin, “who drank just as much as the rest of us,” awoke the entire
The Sincere Deceiver 117
Figure 5.2. The “Volga” Gagarin received from the Soviet government is displayed outside his ancestral home in Gagarin (formerly Gzhatsk). His preferred car, however, was a fiberglass red Matra Djet given to him by the French. Source: Andrew L. Jenks.
party three hours later to go on a water-skiing trip. Somehow he had man-
aged to assemble liquor, food, and all the necessary equipment for the
day’s outing. As Gagarin steered the boat, Leonov and the other cosmo-
nauts raised their glasses to toast Gagarin: “Here’s to you Captain!” Gaga-
rin, in response, urged them to serenade him with a song. “Boy could he
organize a party,” Leonov remembered.32 A love of partying, of course,
made him a regular Russian guy—a “man’s man,” in the words of fellow
cosmonaut Vitalii Sevast’ianov.33 It was also characteristic of the Gagarin
clan, who had a reputation back in their native land of Smolensk oblast
for hard partying. The trademark smile and the appreciation of a good
time was thus a family tradition, an enactment of post-Stalin masculine
political identity, and perhaps even a symbolic manifestation of the bright
and happy communist future.34
But the love of Bacchus might also suggest something darker—less a
celebration of success and more an escape from a reality that often did not
accord with the official image. Kamanin’s diaries, published by his son af-
118 Andrew Jenks
ter the collapse of the Soviet Union, are filled with titillating details about the drunken escapades of Gagarin and his comrades.35 The most serious
incident occurred on October 4, 1961, damaging Gagarin’s personal life,
his public image, and potentially the image of the entire space program.
The day had begun with Gagarin and his comrades getting drunk and
taking a speedboat on the water for joyrides—without life vests, far out at
sea, doing circles in the water at high speed. After dinner Kamanin went
to sleep. At 11:30 he was awakened by his frantic wife who said something
had happened to Gagarin. When Kamanin went out into the courtyard,
he saw Gagarin lying on a bench, his face covered in blood and a gaping
wound over his left eye. Gagarin’s wife was screaming, “He is dying!” A
naval doctor performed an operation on the spot to stabilize him. He had
broken his skull above the left eyebrow and would be hospitalized for at
least three weeks.36
Kamanin’s investigation revealed that Gagarin had arisen after tak-
ing a nap and began playing records as the men played chess and the
women played cards. Still drunk, he went up to his wife just before mid-
night and told her to stop playing cards and go to bed. She played on for a
few more minutes and then asked where he went. One of the cosmonaut’s
wives said she saw him walk down the hotel corridor. Gagarin’s wife im-
mediately got up and started checking doors, banging insistently on one
that was locked. Within moments she was greeted by a twenty-seven-
year-old nurse, who said simply: “Your husband jumped from the bal-
cony.” The nurse later told Kamanin that she had just returned from her
shift and was lying in bed reading with her clothes on. Gagarin barged
in, locked the door behind him, and said to her: “Well, are you going to
scream?” He then tried to kiss her. It was at that time that Gagarin’s wife
began pounding on the door and Gagarin made his infamous flying leap
from the balcony, stumbling and falling head first onto a cement curb
and nearly killing himself.37
The Cover Story
Lurid details aside, the incident had political as well as personal con-
sequences. How does one cover up a public idol’s broken skull? The most
immediate concern was to explain Gagarin’s absence from a scheduled
appearance at the Twenty-second Party Congress, which for Khrushchev
The Sincere Deceiver 119
was a key moment in the unveiling of his renewed effort at reform—a
program that emphasized technological prowess and a renewed attack on
the Stalin cult. Gagarin had been slated for the starring role of trumpet-
ing the Soviet Union’s successful mastery of the scientific-technological
revolution, so Khrushchev and the Central Committee were understand-
ably irate. Only a lie, they agreed, could solve this problem: they thus
concocted the story that Gagarin stumbled and fell while playing with
his daughter on vacation. He was fitted with a fake eyebrow and for three
weeks after the incident something unprecedented happened: the most
photographed person in the world vanished from public view. Finally, a
photograph with Gagarin and his fake eyebrow was sent to Khrushchev,
who gave permission “to release Yura into ‘the world,’” as Kamanin put
it. The prosthetic eyebrow, however, only fed the rumor mill, which could
not have concocted a rumor more lurid than what had actually happened.
The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko noted in his 1981 work Wild Berries that
the whole world could now “see the scar which gave rise to so many ru-
mors.”38 One delegate at the Twenty-second Party Congress who escorted
a wobbly and woozy Gagarin to his seat remembered that “the efforts of
doctors and make-up artists did not produce 100 percent results. The
deep gash, filled with a dark brown substance, really stood out.”39 Gaga-
rin’s scar was a constant visual reminder that the real Gagarin was quite
different from the iconic image, that the truth-lie of this image, like so
many of the late-Soviet era’s claims, was “truthy” at best but certainly not
“truthful.” “Everyone paid attention to the scar,” wrote one Russian many
years later. Yet he also remembered that the scar, like rumors of Gagarin’s
partying, may have enhanced rather than diminished Gagarin’s popular
appeal—that he was considered by many a real man precisely because
there was much more to him than met the eye.40
Perhaps rumors of Gagarin’s drunken escapades unintentionally re-
inforced the image of Gagarin as a “man’s man,” but they also threatened
the official narrative of Gagarin’s triumph. Being known for daring and
risk taking was one thing; engaging in drunken orgies quite another.
When the Twenty-second Party Congress was completed, the party and
Gagarin’s commander once again addressed the issue of Gagarin’s con-
duct—and that of his partying fellow cosmonaut Titov. In accordance
with the demands of samo-kritika, a Soviet ritual in which an individual admits to personal faults and failings before comrades, Gagarin and Titov
120 Andrew Jenks
admitted their drunken excesses in a closed meeting of the party cell.
Gagarin claimed he went into the nurse’s room as an innocent practical
joke on his wife. Kamanin was only partially convinced, but he kept his
doubts to himself—or rather, he recorded them in his diary.
Gagarin’s explanation, Kamanin reasoned, “may lessen the impact
of the incident and will not be a reason for family discord.” Besides, ful-
filling the role of a paragon of socialist virtue had greatly complicated
the moral complexity of Gagarin’s situation. The first cosmonaut was
not merely lying for personal reasons but to protect the honor of fam-
ily and country. And so, for the sake of communal harmony, the truth
had to be suppressed. That same day Gagarin gave a speech at Moscow
State University and received a medal. The next day the papers carried a
text of Gagarin’s speech and also his response to a question concerning
that funny-looking eyebrow. “At a resort in Crimea I was playing with
[my daughter] Galka and tripped,” said Gagarin, who then added anoth-
er touching detail that converted the incid
ent into an act of heroic self-
sacrifice. “Trying to save my daughter, I raised her high and fell face first
on a rock. It will heal before Galka’s wedding and even before the next
flight into space.”41
Interestingly, Kamanin’s acceptance of Gagarin’s lie mirrored
the logic behind his own critique of Khrushchev’s second wave of de-
Stalinization, which coincided with the aftermath of the Gagarin inci-
dent. Making Stalin a scapegoat for the “tragic events of 1937 to 1939” not
only tarnished Stalin’s glorious accomplishments, it also represented a
“short-sighted and stupid politics” that would cause problems abroad and
erode the faith of youth in Soviet power. “It won’t do anyone any good,
and even more it could spoil our relations with China and cause new
complications.” If Khrushchev really wanted to tell the truth, he should
admit his own guilt in the purges and “do the only correct thing—give
up leadership of the party and the country.” Given the potentially disas-
trous consequences of telling the truth, the only sensible solution was to
continue telling lies—truth-lies, white lies, for the good of the country.42
If Gagarin’s incident was a personal embarrassment, it was also
emblematic of broader problems for the Soviet regime when it came to
revealing uncomfortable truths about its icons. Because a Soviet icon
symbolized the perfectibility of human nature, the myth-making appa-
ratus of the Soviet regime could not account for evidence of Gagarin’s
fallibility.43 In Gagarin’s case, however, no amount of spin control, or cos-
The Sincere Deceiver 121
metic surgery, could completely submerge the uncomfortable truth that
Soviets—and in particular the most ideal of them all—were no closer to
achieving human perfection than their nonsocialist counterparts. As one
Central Committee member noted when first learning of the incident:
“We can manage in space, it’s on Earth that we act like fools.”44 It was tell-
ing, of course, that party figures kept such thoughts to themselves and
worked vigorously, as they would until the era of glasnost, to maintain the
truth-lie of developed socialism.
The Public and Private Gagarin
In his last years Gagarin’s signature trademark smile often disap-