Soviet delegation immediately stirred public interest by announcing the
visit route in local newspapers and thus attracted big crowds.109
The propaganda work load on the cosmonauts was enormous. Dur-
ing the years 1961–70, the cosmonauts made two hundred trips abroad;
Tereshkova alone made forty-two foreign trips.110 She received by far the
most invitations among the cosmonauts.111 Kamanin noted that “nobody
could match her ability to evoke warm sympathy of the people.”112 As a
result of overwork, Tereshkova’s postflight propaganda activities tired her
out much more than preflight training and the mission itself, and she
was growing increasingly irritable and losing her self-control.113 She was
able to escape the political speech circuit only temporarily when she be-
came pregnant. Doctors forbade her to travel after February 15, 1964.114
Tereshkova was forced to do her propaganda job full-time almost to the
last day: she returned from her trip to Africa on February 9.115 Her daugh-
ter was barely two months old, when Kamanin urged Tereshkova to at-
tend a ceremony commemorating Aviation Day, arguing that it was “time
for her to show up in public.”116
Because of the shroud of secrecy that surrounded Soviet rocketry,
the leading designers of spacecraft remained anonymous, and the media
often presented human spaceflights as cosmonauts’ personal achieve-
ments. Some cosmonauts felt it was not fair to focus the spotlight on
them at the expense of all other participants in the space program. A
few weeks after his flight, Gagarin wrote a confidential letter to the chief
marshal of aviation, Aleksandr Novikov: “There is a lot being said and
written around the world about this event [Gagarin’s flight—S.G.]. I do
not feel that I can or have the right to accept all this on my own account.
If my contribution amounted even to one percent of everything that is
being said, this already would have been the greatest reward for my deed.
I know what our pilots had to endure during the Great Patriotic War.
Their service and their hardships were so much greater than mine. I sim-
ply happened to be in the epicenter of events.”117 The more public praise
Gagarin received, the more uncomfortable he became with his public im-
age. “It is awkward to be seen as a super-ideal person,” he later confessed.
The Human inside a Propaganda Machine 95
“It’s as if I always did everything right. But, like anybody else, I make
many mistakes. I have my weaknesses. One shouldn’t idealize a person.
One should take him just as he is in real life. It’s annoying when I’m por-
trayed as a ‘sugar boy,’ who is so sweet that it’s nauseating.”118
More than anyone, Gagarin felt the pressure of the propaganda
windmill that crushed his dreams for another flight and turned him into
a calcified symbol. “Gagarin is still hoping that one day he would fly into
space again. It is unlikely that this will ever happen; he is too valuable for
humanity to risk his life for an ordinary spaceflight,” reasoned Kama-
nin.119 “I must try to convince him to give up flying and to prepare him-
self for the position of one of the leaders of the Soviet space program.”120
A leading space engineer who had many encounters with Gagarin re-
marked: “Gagarin understood full well that he would no longer be able
to serve as an active cosmonaut, that he became a symbol. It was painful,
and it made him depressed, and he could not restrain himself from long-
ing for another flight. Just imagine a young, daring, venturesome Gaga-
rin, who says happily ‘Off we go!’ and flies the first into space, and then,
in a little while, he sees himself as a wax figure in Madame Tussauds
museum. This is an abomination. A normal man, full of life, cannot live
like that; he would look for compensation.”121 And cosmonauts did look
for compensation.
The Human Side of a Public Icon
The cosmonauts faced an impossible task—to fit into their assigned
image of “an ideal citizen of an ideal state.”122 Even though they were
specifically selected to have qualities best matching their future public
mission, the challenge of coping with the burden of fame proved too dif-
Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party. The congress would
adopt a new party program, which set a triple goal of creating a material
and technical basis of Communism, forming the new communist social
relations, and bringing up the New Soviet Man. Gagarin and Titov were
supposed to sit in the presidium of the Congress and to showcase the
tangible achievements of the regime both in high technology and in the
upbringing of the New Man. They were to illustrate the new “Moral Code
of the Builder of Communism,” with its calls for honesty, sincerity, moral
96 Slava Gerovitch
purity, and modesty. A few days before the Congress, however, the plans
went awry: Gagarin broke a facial bone when jumping out of the window
after what looked like a womanizing incident. Gagarin missed the open-
ing of the Congress, and he and Titov were dropped from the Presidi-
um list. Khrushchev was furious when he learned about the behavior of
Gagarin, next to whom he had stood on top of Lenin’s mausoleum during
the May Day celebrations just a few months earlier.123
Once cosmonauts had flown their missions, they became celebrities
and their lifestyle completely changed. Kamanin was showered with re-
ports of their excessive drinking, drunken driving, and angry encounters
with the police. The KGB submitted reports on cosmonauts’ misbehavior
directly to the Party Central Committee, which set up a commission to
investigate the failure of the Cosmonaut Training Center’s leadership to
enforce discipline.124 The irony of the situation was that party and gov-
ernment leaders themselves often invited cosmonauts to their private
parties, where cosmonauts “got accustomed to drinking and became cor-
rupted,” as Kamanin put it.125 Kamanin found himself in a double bind:
he was reprimanded if cosmonauts misbehaved in public, but when he
tried to limit cosmonauts’ private contacts with the political elites to con-
tain their “corrupting” influence, he also got into trouble. “The leader-
ship of the country fusses over the cosmonauts like a child over a new
toy and showers praise, promotions and invitations on them out of the
horn of plenty,” he remarked bitterly in his diary, while he was expected
“to keep the cosmonauts in check and to be held responsible if they drink
too much at an official reception and say or do something inappropriate
under the influence.”126
The cosmonauts received substantial material rewards and privi-
leges, which placed them in the same bracket with the country’s elite.
Lieutenant General Kamanin’s salary was only 15 percent higher than
Major Gagarin’s.127 In addition to formal honors, the cosmonauts received
handsome remuneration for completed spaceflights: a furnished luxury
apartment, a luxury car, a
two-year salary bonus, and a long list of gifts
for their families—from vacuum cleaners to handkerchiefs.128 A year of
training in the cosmonaut group counted as three years of military ser-
vice, and cosmonauts received accelerated promotions in rank.129 They re-
ceived access to goods that were not available to ordinary Soviet citizens—
for example, baby formula imported from Czechoslovakia and paid for in
hard currency by special permission from the Ministry of Finance.130 The
The Human inside a Propaganda Machine 97
top brass of the Air Force and the Ministry of Defense grumbled about
the cosmonauts’ perks, which were decided at a higher political level.131
Kamanin privately suggested that the government’s provisions gave the
members of the cosmonaut group “so much material wealth and so many
privileges that there is no motivation for them to fly into space, especially
to fly the second time.”132 He believed that an accelerated rise through the
ranks could also be detrimental: “The character of most cosmonauts has
not quite solidified, and this may damage it by planting the dubious no-
tion that for them everything is permitted.”133
As the popularity of the cosmonauts grew, it was becoming more
and more difficult for Kamanin to control their behavior. He bitterly
complained in his private diary that “the cosmonauts overestimate the
significance of their personal accomplishments and take at face value ev-
erything that is being written, said, and shown about every human space-
flight in the media.”134 “Reinventing” themselves to fit their iconic image,
the cosmonauts seemed to gradually internalize their public persona, just
as an ordinary Soviet citizen in the 1930s who had to hide undesirable
social origins and, in his words, “began to feel that I was the man I had
pretended to be.”135 The newly acquired celebrity image did not square
well with the daily routine of spaceflight training and strict military dis-
cipline. The tension often resolved in violent outbursts.
Excessive drinking and regime violations plagued the cosmonaut
corps. When a spree of drinking parties and auto accidents involving
Titov culminated in the death of Titov’s passenger, Kamanin ran out of
patience. He called a meeting of the cosmonaut group and told Titov in
front of the whole gathering: “With your own misdeeds, you have put
yourself outside the party and outside the cosmonaut group. There is a
strong basis for expelling you from the party and depriving you of all your
titles: a deputy, a Hero, a cosmonaut pilot, and a lieutenant colonel.” But
taking into account Titov’s world fame, reasoned Kamanin, “Titov’s dis-
grace would be a disgrace for all the cosmonauts, for all Soviet people. We
cannot afford that.”136 Titov received a strict reprimand, a demotion, and
a temporary ban on public appearances, attending receptions, and driv-
ing a car, but his transgressions were kept under wraps, and he contin-
ued to represent the New Soviet Man in public. The cosmonaut Leonov’s
drunken driving led to two serious traffic accidents in four months, and
Kamanin personally imposed a six-month ban on his driving.137 The cos-
monaut Popovich also got into trouble for drinking and brawling. He got
98 Slava Gerovitch
a black eye and had to miss a session of the Twenty-third Party Congress.
Kamanin fired him from the position of deputy head of the cosmonaut
team and suspended his training but did not object to electing Popovich
a member of the Supreme Soviet.138
The attempts to make the cosmonauts into exemplary Communists
proceeded with considerable difficulty. Cosmonauts privately exchanged
political jokes, such as the double-entendre slogan, “Officers of the Mis-
sile Forces, our target is Communism!” Even some of their supervisors
laughed at ideological clichés. One cosmonaut recalled that the deputy
director of the Cosmonaut Training Center in charge of political edu-
cation “understood everything, believed that the cosmonauts would not
give him away, and did not make pretenses with us. . . . When asked ‘How
are things?’ he invariably replied, ‘Our country is on the rise.’ If we mock-
ingly asked ‘And how is the party?’ he replied with an equal measure of
irony, ‘The party teaches us that heated gases expand.’”139
Although cosmonauts were allowed some license in private jokes,
any hint at serious political dissent was quickly suppressed. For example,
at a political education session in early 1964 the cosmonaut candidate
Eduard Kugno raised some controversial questions, such as “Why do we
have only one political party?” and “Why do we send assistance to other
countries, while there are shortages inside the country?” This was im-
mediately reported to his superiors.140 Furthermore, when asked why
he did not join the Communist Party, Kugno replied, “I will not join a
party of swindlers and sycophants!” Kamanin quickly judged that Kug-
no was “ideologically and morally unsteady” and expelled him from the
cosmonaut corps.141 Kamanin privately used even stronger expressions
condemning the incompetence and corruption of the Soviet leadership,
but he was outraged by Kugno’s unwillingness to play by the rules and to
restrict his remarks to the private sphere.
The cosmonaut supervisors’ greatest fear was to see a flown cosmo-
naut use his or her celebrity status for a public expression of political dis-
sent. When the deputy chief of the Air Force heard that two cosmonaut
trainees had raised some criticism at a meeting at the Cosmonaut Train-
ing Center, he reacted at once: “Expel both. If they give such speeches
while still on training, what will they say after returning from space?”142
These fears were not entirely groundless. After returning from space,
cosmonauts did use their newly acquired popularity in the ways that did
not always please their superiors.
The Human inside a Propaganda Machine 99
Cosmonauts Speak Out
The cosmonauts found it difficult to reconcile their professional
selves with the ideal public image assigned to them. Many of them felt
uncomfortable about the unrestrained public praise and the monuments
erected in their honor. The cosmonaut Leonov, for example, defied a
government decree and objected to the installation of his bust, which
remained in the sculptor’s studio for twenty-eight years.143 The role of
a public figure giving incessant speeches did not appeal to the cosmo-
nauts originally trained as fighter pilots. When meeting with American
astronauts, the cosmonauts often forgot about their ideological mission
and engaged in purely professional talk. Having met the astronaut John
Glenn during his visit to the United States in 1962, Titov particularly
remarked about Glenn’s “tenacious professional gaze of the pilot” and ad-
mitted that when the cosmonaut and the astronaut met, they were “con-
nected by everything they had experienced and lived through in space.”144
Most cosmonauts preferred training for new spaceflights to public
appearances. Gagarin, losing patience, once flatly refused to meet with
TV correspondents from East Germany, for which he was reprimanded
by Kamanin.145 Tereshkova long resisted Kamanin’s attempts to turn her
into a professional politician and even enrolled in the Air Force Engineer-
ing Academy, hoping to retain her qualifications for another spaceflight.
Kamanin was convinced, however, that “Tereshkova as the head of a So-
viet women’s organization and of international women’s organizations
would do for our country and for our party a thousand times more than
she can do in space.”146 Eventually he prevailed, and Tereshkova left the
cosmonaut corps and served as the head of the Soviet Women’s Commit-
tee for more than twenty years. Tirelessly rehearsing with cosmonauts
their speeches, editing their memoirs, monitoring their private lives, and
guiding their careers, Kamanin was more than anyone responsible for
shaping the cosmonauts’ self. He was quite justified in his confession in
a private dairy that “it was I who created Tereshkova as the most famous
woman in the world.”147
Cosmonauts gradually developed an independent voice. They started
by criticizing the harsh disciplinary regime at the Cosmonaut Training
Center. In February 1963 they staged a “battle” (as Kamanin termed it)
against the recently appointed head of the Center, Lieutenant General
100 Slava Gerovitch
Mikhail Odintsov. A group of cosmonauts led by Gagarin organized a
party meeting, at which they complained about work overload and Od-
intsov’s heavy-handed management style.148 Kamanin eventually took the
cosmonauts’ side and, when Odintsov continued to ignore cosmonauts’
critique, replaced him.
Soon cosmonauts moved on to more ambitious attempts to influence
space policy on the government level. Mingling with the political elite
at high-level receptions, cosmonauts enjoyed unique access to the Soviet
leaders, which even their military superiors did not possess. In August
1965, after the successful completion of an impressive eight-day mission
of Gemini V, Kamanin decided to petition the Soviet leadership for a fundamental change in the organization of the space program to catch up
with the Americans.149 He realized that this proposal would be much
more effective if it came not from him, but from the well-known flown