Into the Cosmos Page 19
peared in the morning of a hangover. Being a “man’s man”—enacting
the role of a Soviet playboy—was clearly taking a toll on his iconic im-
age as a Soviet superman. He gained weight after his flight (from 64 to
73 kilograms, or about 141 to 161 pounds) and his face became visibly
bloated. Adding to the other mark of imperfection over his left eyebrow,
he acquired a paunch and his hair grew wispy thin—physical facts that
eroded the believability of his public biography. In the meantime he fell
on and off the wagon. In his personal journal from 1967, Gagarin ranked
as one of his more significant accomplishments that he went to a party
“and drank juice.” His personal struggles with alcohol, however, could
not be incorporated into his official persona. While Hollywood stars
could humanize themselves before an adoring public by declaring their
weaknesses and going into rehab, Gagarin remained a privately drunken
model of public sobriety. His only possible redemption came through
another questionable public utterance. As he said to a group of foreign
reporters: “I do not have time for wine or cognac.”45
Drunkenness, tight living quarters, constant surveillance, marital
spats, public speeches—it was all so exhausting. Gagarin’s wife remem-
bered that he was sometimes “devilishly tired, upset and even angry.”
When Gagarin’s mother noticed his unhappiness and asked him what
was wrong, he jokingly asked her if she had been sent by foreign spies.
Or was it a joke? The only way he could make time for all the demands
placed on him—including living up to his image as a partier with all the
right stuff—was by cutting back his sleep to just a few hours. He once
complained bitterly about being diverted from his studies because of a
summons to Moscow to autograph pictures. “I wasted four hours. I’ll
122 Andrew Jenks
have to make it up at night.” He lamented that he did not have time to
fully develop his thoughts or write his memoirs.46
Although Gagarin’s public persona symbolized spontaneity and the
promise of freedom under Soviet rule, his private life was completely
controlled, which was perhaps appropriate for a system that consciously
eroded the boundaries between public and private life.47 In her mem-
oir Gagarin’s wife hoped that “it would not appear strange that in these
purely personal remembrances about Yuri two things, so to speak, are
intertwined: the public and the private.” But that was characteristic of
Gagarin, she said. “As concerns public life, with him it was never sepa-
rated from private life.” Vacations were invariably interrupted by calls to
return to Moscow for this or that duty. He wrote in his diary from 1963
that he was beginning to lose his bearings. “Everything is mixed up to-
gether in one big pile: studies in the academy, flying, training.”
Gagarin said to one friend in January 1965 that his greatest desire
was to just go somewhere and relax “incognito.” He tired of the constant
visits to the doctors that now marked his life after the flight—his trans-
formation into a human guinea pig, the constant prodding and poking
and measurement of his vital signs. Like Lenin’s body, even Gagarin’s
own body was no longer his own property. “The doctors make you do
all sorts of useless things. In a word, idiocy. I really can’t stand people
who say one thing to your face and do another behind your back.”48 But
of course he had on many occasions said many things that did not accord
with what he actually did. And he continued to report for his daily regi-
men of prodding and poking by the doctors. One of those doctors remem-
bered how difficult Gagarin’s situation must have been: constantly asked
to conceal the truth of his flight and life from the public even while his
doctors “demanded from him the truth, and only the truth.”49
If the public face of Gagarin was one of youthful, albeit rapidly dis-
sipating, energy, his journal entries from the mid-1960s lamented his
passing youth. “Life is going by so fast,” he wrote in 1963. In 1965, at the
“advanced” age of thirty-one, Gagarin remarked: “Oh youth, how quickly
you are disappearing.” The death of Korolev in 1966, the chief engineer
for the Soviet space program and a man Gagarin greatly admired, was
especially traumatic—not only because of what it meant for the space
program but also because of what it revealed about the real state of Soviet
technology. Korolev died under an incompetent surgeon’s knife (the min-
The Sincere Deceiver 123
ister of health!) during a routine operation for hemorrhoids. The truth,
of course, could not be told, just as Korolev’s identity or critical role in the Soviet space program was concealed as a military secret. Public meetings, Gagarin remarked in private, were a farce, an exercise in feigned
sincerity. “The hen praises the rooster for the fact that the rooster praises
the hen.” Shortly before his death in 1968, he complained that his “popu-
larity and fame” had made it difficult for him to do anything other than
be a living monument.50
But even earlier Gagarin had grown weary of the accolades and at-
tention, of the competing demands of being sincere and deceptive. The
glowing accounts, he remarked shortly after his flight, made him “feel
embarrassed. You can’t idealize a person. You have to accept him for what
he is.” The idealized portrait of himself, he wrote in 1962, “makes me
sick.” Not long before his death, a jaded Gagarin returned from another
trip abroad where he was awarded yet another “Gold Medal of Heroism.”
His voice dripping with sarcasm, Gagarin flipped it over and read aloud
the etching on the back: “No. 11,175.” He remembered stopping in a vil-
lage during a road trip and knocking on a door for a bite to eat. The elder-
ly woman greeting him at the door refused to believe he was Gagarin—
although she did admit there was a vague resemblance. He often seemed
to wonder the same thing about himself: Was he that same Gagarin they
write about in the papers?51
The truth-lie was also apparent to Gagarin as he traveled abroad im-
mediately after his flight. He encountered a “carefully guarded border”
that seemed to function as much to keep people in—to prevent them
from seeing “forbidden zones”—as to keep foreign invaders out. His
spaceflight, he once joked, was the only time he was allowed to go abroad
“without any permissions or visas.”52 His press conferences during his
world tour were exercises in planned spontaneity where, as if on cue, he
“started acting as he was taught.” While he was constantly watched and
coached, he appeared to his hosts in Canada, England, France, Italy, and
Japan as a refreshing and spontaneous breath of fresh air, a proletarian
chap who could cut through the stifling protocol and formality of an of-
ficial bourgeois reception (although not a Soviet one). There is a revealing
photo of Gagarin and his commander/handler Kamanin on the streets of
Havana, both dressed to the nines in their lily-white, newly knit, short-
sleeved uniforms. Gagarin is smiling and waving. Kamanin—his com-
124 Andrew Jenks
mander, watcher, and speech writer in the background—wears a stern,
suspicious, and weary look. People saw Gagarin, but with few exceptions
they did not see his alter ego Kamanin.53
Irreconcilable Contradictions
If Gagarin dutifully played his appointed role, the spaceflight none-
theless gave him a cosmic perspective that allowed him to distinguish
representation from reality, to catch a glimpse, as one acquaintance put
it, of “the disharmony of society, the absurdity of its arrangements.”54 Yet
Gagarin was also a willing participant in the absurdities and “truth-lies”
he sometimes condemned. He had internalized the values of a system
where lies were not just lies but essential tools for achieving higher po-
litical ends. Vladimir Vysotsky—like Gagarin, a postwar icon who par-
tied hard and died young—may have best captured Gagarin’s dilemma
in a 1970 song entitled, “I First Measured Life Counting Backwards.”
Vysotsky’s lyrics created an image of Gagarin as a confused and tragic
figure. In it Gagarin was complicit in his fate but he was also innocent;
like everyone else, he had no choice but to do and say as he was told.
In such a situation “not guilty” could not mean the same thing as “not
complicit,” wrote Vysotsky. One could therefore lie and still be a decent,
upright person.55
It was difficult, however, for Gagarin to distance himself entirely
from responsibility for his own actions. If the growth of the Gagarin cult
in the 1960s reflected the logic of the truth-lie, it also paralleled a new
dialogue about the nature and function of the truth. Not just writers such
as Solzhenitsyn but even the party had suggested that lies were morally
indefensible under any circumstances. Gagarin was not immune to such
notions—ironic, because it was the party’s own morality campaigns, for
which he was the front man, that had made the truth-lie potentially prob-
lematic. Gagarin’s scar, in this new cultural context, could easily become
a metonym for falsehood, a window into the mendacious nature of of-
ficial image and public celebrity. Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization,
meanwhile, raised the problem of whether a partial truth—Stalin’s part
in the crimes of the Great Terror but not Khrushchev’s own—was just a
lie. Was a smaller lie better than a bigger one? Was a partial truth some-
times better than a whole truth? How could one determine if a liar was
lying for public benefit or personal gain—or both simultaneously? Fi-
The Sincere Deceiver 125
nally, what happens when people begin to suspect that everything is a
truth-lie? In the words of one philosopher: “Once it is accepted that there
are ‘different kinds’ of truth, some superior to others, then truth acquires
the advantages of falsehood in being multiple, not single. It is hard to
distinguish one from another.”56
French journalists, according to Gagarin’s wife, once asked him why
he was so active in so many spheres of public life. “That’s a complex ques-
tion,” he said. “If I say that I am a communist and I act out of a sense of
duty, they will say: ‘Communist propaganda.’ If I say I do it because it is
interesting to me, they won’t believe me. All those additional obligations
and social work, which I perform, are not unpleasant to me. On the con-
trary, I love to work with young people, with Komsomol members, I love
sport and I find it interesting to take trips and meet with people of labor . . .
all of this is tremendously satisfying.” But the condition of the truth-lie
made it impossible to know if he was telling the truth—and, indeed, if
public service itself was not a kind of lie. Following the exchange, Gaga-
rin was frustrated that no matter what he said, people would not believe
him.57 His frustration reflected another problem with the truth-lie: once
everyone believed public statements had to be deceptive, even for legiti-
mate national security reasons, the foundation for faith in the system and
its claims no longer existed. Purity of motive, and perhaps even a com-
munity of interests, was no longer deemed possible.
Even long before the notorious cynicism of the late Brezhnev period
some Soviets expressed disappointment in unpublished letters to the
editor of Komsomol’skaia pravda that they were not getting the full truth about their idol. One letter writer, a pensioner named Aleksei, addressed
his letter of April 16, 1961, to “Dear Newspaper People.” Calling himself
a confederate ( edinomyshlennik), to stress his loyalty, the writer challenged the versions he had recently read in the newspaper point by point. He
wanted to go beyond the “ceremonial stories and parade speeches” that
had filled the pages of the press and get to the truth, which Khrushchev’s
policies had led this man to expect from his government. Based on what
he had read about Gagarin’s biography, he wondered how someone could
finish military school so quickly, in just two years, and then get a promo-
tion from lieutenant to major just three years later (Gagarin was promot-
ed to major in space, thus skipping a full rank). “Did he study, using the
language of our time, at a cosmic speed?” A proper education for a major
would have to be at least five years, making Gagarin’s precipitous promo-
126 Andrew Jenks
tion another example of “hastiness.” “After this I truly see that miracles
occur on Earth!” He could understand such a promotion in wartime, but
in peacetime it made no sense. “Something is not right here.” Even more,
the hasty promotion to major seemed to demean the much more deserv-
ing service of those who had fought in the war, a point echoed by another
letter from a group of war veterans, who wondered why “his title does not
correspond with the rules of protocol in the Soviet army.”58
He also smelled a new personality cult in the making—something
he thought was not supposed to happen with living people following
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s cult of personality. “And so this
Gagarin, like Stalin, will get to the rank of Generalissimus. And it’s the
same thing. Both were never soldiers. They didn’t smell gun powder. But
still they went right up to the rank of Generalissimus.” He wasn’t sure
how Gagarin’s promotion to major happened, but he suspected someone
pulled him aside and said, “If you fly, we’ll make you a major, if you don’t,
you’ll rot forever in the rank of a lieutenant. Of course, all the newspapers
say he flew, risking his own life, and not for the sake of glory and fame,
but for the sake of the motherland, the people, the party, the government,
and so on and so forth.” The letter writer also did not buy official news-
paper accounts about Gagarin’s landing—a point repeated, it should be
noted, by a number of other readers who admired Gagarin but wondered
why something in the official reports of the landing did not add up.
“Where is the so-called ‘planned spot’” where Gagarin was said to
have landed, he asked. Did he really land in the capsule? The newspa-
pers provided not a word about this, or about the point of launch. “Why
can’t they talk about this honestly and openly?” The answer, he said, had
nothing to do with protecting state secrets, as he was sure he would be
told, because the “American spies surely know the launch site.” The real
reason was that the government did not trust its own people—and that is
why they hid the truth. Finally, even if everything the newspapers wrote
was true, it still avoided the main issue. “How many of the peoples’ ko-
peks have been wasted on the launch of these satellites into space, how
many billions of rubles have been and will be spent on these sensations?”
If Lenin were alive, the letter continued, “he’d probably hop right back
into the grave. . . . And so we have atomic bombs, rockets, and spaceships.
But how often do you see automobiles for sale? Every year they make
the promise. And refrigerators? The same thing. And sewing machines?
Even worse! Not in one store will you see even a meat grinder or an elec-
The Sincere Deceiver 127
tric iron.” There was plenty to do on Earth, he concluded. “We need to
take care of that and not stick our nose into the heavens, the cosmos. Let’s
fix things first on Earth, where the cows on collective farms are starving,
where there is a housing crisis, where there is a shortage of school build-
ings, and then we can crawl into space, to Mars and Venus.”
The writer declined to offer his name and address, “for reasons that
are completely clear to you, even more so since you would never print my
letter, because, as they say, ‘truth stings the eyes.’” It should be noted that the letter writer in early 1961 was in a very distinct minority; most Soviets
in the early 1960s seemed content with the official coverage of Gagarin’s
flight.59 Only during the long collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s
did those early feelings of betrayal—expecting to hear the truth and be-
ing told a lie—become more and more common. That was especially the
case when Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost inadvertently confirmed what
many now suspected: much of what they were told, it seemed, was just
not true.
The popular mythology of Gagarin, which by the late 1970s and