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
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