into the era of perestroika spun a portrait of Gagarin as a womanizer
and monumental drunk, seemed closer than the official mythology to
a fundamental truth: that Gagarin was a human being, capable of great
feats and colossal blunders.60 Even so, it was not the truth, at least as
professional historians understand it. It was based on rumor and hear-
say; and just as fables and hideous sea creatures grew on the edges of
medieval maps, so too had rumors multiplied in the mysterious realms
of official silence surrounding the Soviet space program. Indeed, rumors
had emerged since the day of the flight on April 12, 1961 (encouraged, it
should be noted, by Voice of America broadcasts): stories that an earlier
unsuccessful flight had preceded Gagarin’s, that Gagarin was a stand-
in for a critically injured cosmonaut from an earlier flight. “The world
is filled with rumors,” as one eyewitness noted, regarding Gagarin.61 If
those rumors had sowed doubts about official campaigns for truth-telling
in the early 1960s, by the 1980s they had blossomed into the cynical view
that fact could never be distinguished from fiction, truth from lies. As the
old saw went, there was no news ( izvestiia) in the newspaper Pravda and no truth ( pravda) in the newspaper Izvestiia (News). In such a context, anything could be true—and anything could be a lie. And no one could
be trusted.62
The circumstances surrounding Gagarin’s tragic death in March
128 Andrew Jenks
1968 illustrate the point. Gagarin died on March 27, 1968, while on a
routine training flight. His death was officially reported in Pravda on March 29, which also announced the formation of a commission to investigate the accident. Although Pravda devoted most of its coverage through March 30 to the funeral and condolences from around the world, it did
not make any further mention of the reasons for Gagarin’s death. Noth-
ing. For those accustomed to the detailed speculations and analysis of the
reasons for tragic deaths (from President John F. Kennedy to Lady Diana)
the absence of any public discussion or explanation of the accident for
nearly two decades is astounding. No wonder there were rumors! The
official investigation, whose results were only partially published in the
Gorbachev period by one participating investigator, clearly pointed to a
combination of technical errors on the part of air-traffic controllers, main-
tenance crews, and aircraft design.63
The truth was suppressed for so long, according to one commission
member, because it cast an unflattering light on Soviet technological sys-
tems. To reveal that truth, it was believed, would only play into the hands
of the Soviet Union’s enemies. In addition, the investigating commission
was paralyzed by a fear among many of its members and their organiza-
tions that they might be held responsible. “In the work of the commission
. . . there was felt a terrifying fear of looking anew at what had happened,
at an independent opinion. . . . As a result there was no official publica-
tion of the results of the commission.” Fear of retribution induced silence
and passivity among those investigating the tragedy, just as it had put
a stop to the investigation of Stalin’s crimes after Khrushchev’s ouster.
Many commission members “literally thirsted for a showcase punish-
ment (and a public one!).” The atmosphere of grief and anger ultimately
prevented anything remotely resembling an objective analysis. “As a re-
sult, a ‘diplomatic balance’ was established, and there was formed a pas-
sive exit from a difficult situation—the position of silence.” The silence
itself only created a vacuum of information that was filled, yet again, by
the rumor mill.64
Almost immediately there emerged a legend that Gagarin had been
seized by angels—or that he was the victim of an alien abduction. Many
in the military continued to blame Gagarin’s lack of preparation and care-
lessness, thus deflecting blame away from themselves and onto Gagarin.
Another popular version claimed that Gagarin took a drunken flight to
The Sincere Deceiver 129
watch a soccer match in Alma-Alta and crashed on the return. Some peo-
ple swear they saw him at the match. Another version echoed the legends
of tsars who supposedly faked their deaths to escape the burdens of their
official position and take up a humble position among the masses. Ac-
cording to one variant, he had plastic surgery after successfully ejecting
from the plane and took on a new identity. A Soviet émigré playwright
staged a play in New York City in 1981 about Gagarin in which the cosmo-
naut “invited death by hunting animals from a low-flying jet.” In Saratov
during the 1980s residents remember a touched elderly man who every-
day paced the city streets and announced in a stentorian voice: “Gagarin
Lives!” During perestroika a person in Moscow claimed to be Gagarin.
His voice was similar to Gagarin’s and he often made calls to cosmo-
nauts. Another version suggested that Brezhnev locked Gagarin up in a
psychiatric hospital as punishment for an incident in which Gagarin sup-
posedly threw a glass of champagne in Brezhnev’s face during an official
reception. The story itself is indicative of the kinds of hopes and ideals
that ordinary people, and not just those in the regime, invested in the
myth of Gagarin. He dared to challenge and humiliate the domineering
bosses.65 But that was also not true. The truth-lie of Gagarin’s public life
was thus countered by the rumor and innuendo of popular urban myth.
As the Soviet Union collapsed, the stories became more and more
fantastic, spilling onto the pages of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet press.
The head of the Gagarin museum in Saratov offered a sociological expla-
nation: “The chaos in our life, the dissatisfaction with the social order,
the profound feeling of many injustices, the lack of full and accurate in-
formation have made people vulnerable to sensations, and therefore they
readily believe absurd rumors about the reasons for Gagarin’s death.”
One editor at the end of the Soviet period remarked to a level-headed
investigator of the crash, who had participated in the official investiga-
tion, that his version of the events was too complex and technical. “The
reader won’t accept it in this form.” It needed to be more sensational,
less reasonable. In 1994 the journal Svet published an article claiming that Gagarin’s brain had been downloaded into another person—and
that Gagarin, languishing in an insane asylum, was struggling to escape
from the alien host. Another article in 1998 claimed Gagarin was a drug
addict. It was accompanied by an illustration of his rocket as a hypoder-
mic needle. Rocks scattered on the ground are in the form of tablets,
130 Andrew Jenks
which presumably explained why Gagarin always had a smile on his face.
The shift from enforced silence to anything goes told volumes about the
transformation of Russia in the three decades after Gagarin’s death. In
1968 nothing could be publicly asserted about his death; in 1998 people
could publish anything about him.
And in both instances there was no
verifiable truth.66
If there is a common element to many of these explanations, it is the
presumption of a vast conspiracy to hide a damning truth. The conspira-
torial mind-set was a by-product of a tendency, going back to the show tri-
als, to explain all misfortunes as a result of evil, enemy intent. It was also
a logical outgrowth of a system obsessed with secrecy, where vast areas of
public life belonging to the Soviet military-industrial complex—of which
Gagarin was a part—were declared off limits to the public. It therefore
seemed perfectly logical to many that a conspiracy of power could have
killed Gagarin for some good reason. “The success of the conspiracy [the-
ory],” remarked one anthropologist, “is rooted in the leaps of imagination
that establish similarity between apparently unconnected events, objects,
and people.” Even the more level-headed observers, who had studied the
technical details of the crash and dismissed the notion of a conscious
conspiracy, nonetheless felt that Gagarin’s death was akin to a kind of
premeditated murder. As one Soviet aeronautical engineer who knew
Gagarin noted, the system of technical incompetence, which was the
result of political imperatives winning out over technocratic expertise,
made Gagarin’s death “objectively similar to murder.” In his view a sys-
tem that could not tolerate an alternative technocratic authority therefore
had to eliminate those who objected to political decisions on technical
grounds. “In the framework of these rules of the game there was no place
for Korolev or Gagarin,” the supposed “sources of scientific-technological
progress” that “semi-literate” party hacks could not tolerate.67 Gagarin
thus died because he supposedly resisted an irrational and unjust system
in the name of technocratic competence.
It is perhaps an appropriate tribute to Gagarin’s life that his death has
become inscrutable: Gagarin had been hoisted upon the petard of his own
truth-lie. During his seven years as a Soviet celebrity, patriotic pretext had
given Gagarin a license to prevaricate. To the extent that he protested
against the mendacious aspects of the Soviet order, he (like millions of
other Soviets) was always compromised by his own participation in their
construction. In the end his belief that truth is whatever enhances Soviet
The Sincere Deceiver 131
power made him unable to tell the truth about himself. Perhaps like the
Manhattan Project’s J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1945, Gagarin believed
that from the moment of his initiation into the supersecret world of the
Soviet military-industrial complex, he could be permitted to experience
“only classified thoughts.”68
The legacy of the truth-lie lives on in post-Soviet society—minus
the Communist Party commandment to be sincere and honest. Those
close to Gagarin, including the Russian Federation government, cling
ferociously to the ideal image of Gagarin. Gagarin’s daughter Elena, the
director of the Kremlin museum today, said that Gagarin was a com-
pletely blameless figure—and she has successfully sued those who claim
otherwise. He was the same person in private, she claimed, that he was
in public. “And this is not because propaganda made him this way, but
because he was such a person.” For many former and present cosmo-
nauts, protecting the “sacred” achievement of Gagarin is a matter of pro-
fessional honor, of defending “the honor of the uniform” ( chest’ mundira).
The truth is beside point.69
The revival of the Gagarin cult has required both a suppression of
negative moments in Gagarin’s life and attacks on those “who have be-
smirched the name of our first cosmonaut.” The Russian Federation has
revived the cult of the ideal Gagarin and planned a high-profile fiftieth
anniversary of Gagarin’s flight on April 12, 2011. Through a combina-
tion of public and private resources, former cosmonauts, Komsomol,
party and KGB officials, as well as Gagarin’s relatives are using Gagarin’s
exploits as the foundation for a new Russian patriotism. As one former
secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee remarked, the American
media company CBS pulled its unflattering biopic of Ronald Reagan after
complaints from advertisers, so why shouldn’t Russians prevent similar
public attacks on Gagarin?70
The managers of Soviet archives have also joined the revival of the
Gagarin cult, among other things, by preventing access to archival sourc-
es that might taint the image. The Russian State Archive of Scientific
and Technical Documentation on its Web site celebrates the heroic im-
age of Gagarin, using a selective culling of images and documents to
maintain the truth-lie of Gagarin’s feat and life.71 It addresses neither
the reasons for his death nor the personal challenges of his life (and an
exhibit it sponsored in 2007 repeated the claim that Gagarin landed in
his capsule!). Among other things, the selective culling of documentary
132 Andrew Jenks
evidence perpetuates the practice of using historical documentation to
manipulate and erase inconvenient memories.72 Presumably, a sense of
duty justified the omission.
6
Cold War Celebrity and the
Courageous Canine Scout
The Life and Times of Soviet Space Dogs
Amy Nelson
of astronauts and cosmonauts marked some of the most iconic moments
of the twentieth century. The race to send humans beyond the Earth’s
atmosphere shifted the battlefield of the Cold War, focusing the ener-
gies of the two superpowers on a struggle for scientific and technologi-
cal supremacy at once more compelling, and thanks to the mass media,
more accessible than conventional warfare. Contoured by personal and
geopolitical rivalries and fueled by the superpowers’ shared aspirations
and values—including a faith in progress, the veneration of science and
technology, and a commitment to harnessing nature to human ends—
the space race might be considered a quintessentially human drama.1 Yet
in the years before Yuri Gagarin’s 108-minute flight ushered in the era
of human space travel, many of the milestones in the quest to make that
era a reality were claimed by dogs. Indeed, from the initial clandestine
launches of “rocket dogs” in 1951, to the highly publicized, doomed voy-
age of Laika in 1957 and the celebrated journey of Belka and Strelka in
1960, the prospects for human spaceflight were measured against the
133
134 Amy Nelson
fates of the stray dogs Soviet researchers used to test life-support systems
and investigate the effects of spaceflight on living organisms.
This chapter considers the life and times of ordinary dogs enlisted
in the extraordinary quest to send humans into space. Building on an
emerging literature in animal studies, it addresses the possibilities of in-
tegrating animals into the history of the human past by reconstructing
the history of the space dog program.2 It examines the global fame of the
canine cosmonauts, especially Laika, to show how competing images and
public discourses situated the canine cosmonauts at the nexus of several
related but sometimes dichotomous categories. Many of these representa-
tional categories circled around the concept of the “canine hero” or celeb-
rity. For example, Western criticism over the use of dogs as experimental
subjects in space research played against the Soviets’ promotion of the
brave canine “scout” and their adept manipulation of the dogs in the Cold
War propaganda war. At the same time, the dogs served as a catalyst and
provided a template for the paradigm of the heroic space traveler com-
monly associated with Yuri Gagarin and the cosmonauts.
The dogs were also scientific research subjects. The decision to use
them to learn about the possibilities of human survival in space rested
on pragmatic grounds (stray dogs were hardy and in abundant supply) as
well as on the traditions of Russian-Soviet physiological research, partic-
ularly the work of Ivan Pavlov. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the space dogs became
subjects of “chronic experiments” designed to yield reliable information
about the effects of particular stimuli and conditions on specific physio-
logical processes. The dogs were surgically modified to provide research-
ers access to information that would help them evaluate the potential for
humans to survive in space. As living organisms modified by humans
to serve human ends, they might even be regarded as creations of the
laboratory—a kind of “biotechnology” in an updated Pavlovian physiol-
ogy factory.3
Like other objects of scientific inquiry, the space dogs functioned as
“boundary objects” a concept that has been used to show how the same
specimen, exhibit, or research subject means different things to different
people.4 Various human constituencies on both sides of the superpower
divide saw the dogs in often contradictory ways—as experimental ani-
mals, brave scouts, hapless victims, faithful servants, or stellar exemplars
of the family pet. This chapter suggests that these sometimes divergent
meanings converged in ways that made the space dogs effective bound-