Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture

4. The Human inside a Propaganda Machine

77 On April 11, 1961, as Nikita Khrushchev was resting in his vacation residence at the Black Sea resort of Pitsunda, he received a telephone call. The head of the Military-Industrial Commission, Dmitrii Ustinov, had called to report on the impending launch of the first manned spacecraft with the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin the very next day. Just a few days earlier , on April 3, Khrushchev had chaired a meeting of the Presidium of the Party Central Committee, which approved the launch but did not set a specific date. Now the date was set, and Khrushchev began to think ahead about the postflight publicity that this event deserved. He flatly turned down Ustinov’s suggestion to bring Gagarin after the completion of his mission to Pitsunda. Khrushchev reasoned that this would look like a private event, and he wanted a spectacular public ceremony. He proposed instead that he would fly back to Moscow, greet Gagarin at Vnukovo airport with “as much magnificence as possible: radio, television, and brief speeches,” and then bring Gagarin to the Kremlin for a grand reception. Khrushchev also proposed organizing a welcoming mass demonstration on Red Square by assigning a specific quota of participants to 4 The Human inside a Propaganda Machine The Public Image and Professional Identity of Soviet Cosmonauts Slava Gerovitch 78  Slava Gerovitch various Moscow factories and institutions. Initially Khrushchev thought that the Red Square demonstration might pass without speeches, but an official joint resolution of the party and the government issued the next day specified that speeches must be given.1 Organizing “spontaneous” collective expressions of public enthusiasm was a routine Soviet practice. When foreign dignitaries arrived in Moscow, people lined the streets, greeting them with flowers and waving flags. To ensure that an adequate number of enthusiastic citizens would show up, the authorities assigned fixed segments of every street along the route to local industrial enterprises and institutions, which were responsible for hoarding their employees and “covering” a specific section between two designated lampposts. Employees, for their part, often viewed a daytime walk to their familiar lampposts as a welcome diversion from routine work duties.2 But the reception of the first cosmonauts turned out to be quite different. Instead of trying to induce public sentiment, the authorities faced the problem of containing the mass outpouring of emotions. On April 14, as the plane carrying Gagarin flew over Moscow, the cosmonaut saw thousands of people flooding the streets and squares of the capital. As soon as the plane touched down, a military brass band began to play the “Aviation March”: “Ever higher, and higher, and higher we direct the flight of our birds.” The song had been very popular in the 1930s, as part of the Stalin-era “aviation culture.”3 The public ceremony of Gagarin’s welcome evoked the mass celebrations of Soviet aviators’ feats in the 1930s. The new Soviet hero—the cosmonaut—took the baton from Stalin-era aviation idols and carried it ever higher. Red Square could not contain all who came to celebrate. The government had planned a two-hundred-thousand-strong demonstration and distributed the requisite number of passes to the square. Yet thousands of people without passes crowded the neighboring streets.4 After the demonstration Khrushchev hosted a lavish reception at the Kremlin for fifteen hundred people, including the entire foreign press and diplomatic corps. At the reception Gagarin thanked the party, the government, and the people. He toasted to the Soviet people, Lenin’s party, and Khrushchev ’s health. The text of the toast had been approved in advance by the Presidium of the Party Central Committee.5 After coming home from the Kremlin ceremony, Gagarin looked in The Human inside a Propaganda Machine  79 the mirror and saw a different person. A young lieutenant whose name had been known only to a narrow group of cosmonaut trainers and space engineers instantaneously turned into a recipient of the highest Soviet honor—the Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union—and a world celebrity . Barely hiding his embarrassment, Gagarin told his wife: “You know, Valyusha, I did not even imagine such a welcome. I thought I’d fly and then come back. But I did not anticipate this.”6 He did not fully realize the extent of the transformation yet. From that moment on, Gagarin became a symbol, and despite his hopes and efforts to the contrary, his whole life...