Full Script

INTRODUCTION

This episode is a story of contrasts, of different paths to a similar goal.

In the late 1980s, I visited the Soviet Union, not knowing that this empire was in its final moments of life.  There was a veneer of modernity, but it was so thin that a single scratch revealed the vacuum inside.  Despite its riches in an educated population and natural resources, the USSR was surprisingly and sorrowfully impoverished.  Just like the more recent example of Venezuela, communism destroys, converting everything it touches to ash.  Yet, the people were kind and genuine, if cowed by the fear of being seen too close to westerners.  We’d taken a train from Helsinki Finland to Leningrad – now St. Petersburg.

Jetlagged, we awoke the next morning…hungry…to a breakfast of a cucumber and a hard boiled egg.  Of course we’d be warned of the food situation and everyone had packed peanut butter as instructed.  It was easy to complain at the time, but upon reflection, it’s another reminder of how blessed we are, how unique our living condition is today in the entire history of the human race.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.”  - Robert A. Heinlein.

A week or so into the trip, we joyfully discovered a store that sold Pepsi.  At some earlier point, the Soviets had allowed Pepsi to build a plant in the country to bottle the sodapop.  As everyone had exchanged dollars for Rubles on the black market, the real cost per bottle was about a nickel.  Everyone bought as many glass 12 oz bottles as they could carry.

It WAS Pepsi, but it wasn’t.  Even setting aside the lack of refrigeration and ice, it was just different.  Whether the taste difference came from the fact it was a different recipe, different ingredients, or different processing – it was different.  We grew to appreciate it, and enjoy it.  The shock of the unique flavor passing into appreciation.  In this episode, we’ll cover something unique – the Soviet Right Stuff.  

John Glenn. Alan Shepard. Scott Carpenter. Gordon Cooper. Gus Grissom. Deke Slayton. Wally Schirra. These are the names of the members of the Mercury Seven— America’s first astronauts, charged with the task of being the human faces of a massive collective effort to beat the Soviet Union in a race to space. And, of course, charged with the task of actually manning the rockets that could take them higher than man had ever flown before.

The Soviets had their own astronauts, or more accurately, cosmonauts.  Their story, especially the most famous among them, Yuri Gargarin, is fascinating, in part, because their story has many parallels to our own American astronaut program, but also because of the differences.  Some subtle, some glaring.  But like that Soviet era Pepsi in Leningrad, the differences make their story poignant, something to be understood and appreciated, if only to understand what is true about the human condition.

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Hi, my name’s MF Thomas; I’m an author and a lifelong fan of strange stories from the dark corners of the world. Growing up, I was enthralled by any hint of exciting, forbidden knowledge that waited behind the names and dates we learned in school.  And these days, as I travel the world, there’s nothing I enjoy more than to get off the traditional tourist map and find a place or story that has been overlooked, dismissed or ignored.

This is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal.  What’s unique about My Dark Path?  Every topic, every destination is a place I’ve explored in person during my travels.  This podcast isn’t a retelling of a Wikipedia article.  Instead, we will explore unique topics that will intrigue and excite; and every once in a while, send a shiver down your spine. So, if you geek out over these topics…. you’re among friends here at My Dark Path.  We’re going live with our Discord server so please visit My Dark Path.com!  Questions

1. Explorer’s Society Dosisse.

2. Sneak Peek at the Full YouTube version.

Lastly, thank you for listening.  You have more choices than ever about where to spend your time.  I’m grateful that you’ve chosen to spend time here, with me, walking the Dark Paths of the world, together.  Let’s get started with episode 7, the Soviet Right Stuff.

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PART ONE

The story of America’s earliest astronauts is well known and often told— in history books, in The Right Stuff, in oral narratives, and more. From their selection, to their training, to the moment Alan Shepherd became the first American in space in May of 1961, the story of the Mercury 7 has captured the collective imagination of America, and come to represent its side in the technological and ideological contest of the space race. 

This was the idea from the start. The seven men were not chosen solely to become astronauts. They were chosen to become celebrities. Heroes. Symbols, even. What they learned in real time, with their country and the rest of the world watching, was that their job was not just to go to outer space, but to do so as representatives of a country’s way of life, of its values. They had a mission to give hope and instill patriotism; to join a long list of American folk heroes and mythical legends, to be spoken of in the same breath as The Wright Brothers. 

But before all that could happen, they had to be chosen.

Spurred on by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1, the newly-formed NASA launched Project Mercury on December 17th, 1958. Fittingly, it was the 55th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. The objective of Project Mercury was to send a human into orbit around the Earth. A panel was launched to find candidates for a brand-new job title: “astronaut.” They scoured the ranks of military pilots with over 1,500 hours’ flying time, looking for perfect physical specimens in excellent health – with one catch: they couldn’t be taller than 5 feet 11 inches, or else they couldn’t fit in the capsule. From an initial pool of 508 pilots, the Mercury Seven were chosen after a long series of intense physical and psychological tests.

NASA was looking for something extra beyond the test results. There was feeling that America’s first astronauts needed to reflect American values. After all, they were to be the face of the country for much of the space race. 

When these seven men were first presented to journalists and the American Public, they didn’t wear their pilot’s uniforms, they appeared in civilian dress. They were depicted as average, Middle-class Americans. Family men. The audience loved it, greeting them with thunderous applause and standing ovations. Journalists didn’t ask many questions about flying or space, they asked about the astronauts’ wives, their children, the religions they practiced. At the press conference, John Glenn spoke directly and honestly of the men’s need to volunteer, the sense of duty and service they each felt they owed to their country. 

But as the project got underway, it was easier said than done to balance that image of poster-perfect, God-fearing family men with their official responsibilities, and the added pressures of fame. America badly wanted their ideal of heroism, but behind the scenes, the private lives of our first astronauts were rife with turmoil. Deke Slayton’s wife had to hide the fact that she was a divorcee. Gordon Cooper’s wife, Trudy, had initially left him after discovering an affair, but had to return to him for the sake of his image. At Cape Canaveral, a culture of partying overwhelmed the astronauts with drugs, alcohol, and groupies. Any of these potential scandals had to be swept under the rug. And while all of this occurred, the Mercury Seven went through the rigorous training necessary to actually enter space. 

We know the highlights of that story. But as the Mercury Project developed in America, the Soviet Union was selecting and training its own cosmonauts. How were the cosmonauts of the Soviet Union chosen? In a nation that was ideologically opposite, would those ideological differences lead to a different type of astronaut? Would they lead to a different idea of a hero? How would two global superpowers find, select, and train unique human beings to represent their unique homes? In other words, was the “right stuff” to get into space subject to influence by politics, religion, and ideology? Or was “the right stuff” universally right?

The Space Race was, ultimately, as much about ideology as it was technology, as each Nation raced to prove that their system of economy and government was best to push mankind to its greatest heights. 

In a previous episode, we discussed Germany and Peenemunde’s influence on American Rocketry, with former Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun spearheading America’s rocket program. While von Braun may have gone to America, Peenemunde was located in East Germany and, as such, Soviet rocket engineers were able to go to it and salvage equipment, systems, and more for their own research. If much of the American rocket program was built on the intellectual work of Nazis, much of the Soviet program was built on the Nazi’s hardware and work. And, though von Braun went to America, there were many other former Nazis who went to work in the Soviet program. In what we now call Operation Osoaviakhim, over 2,000 German scientists and their families, more than 6,000 people overall, were taken out of Germany at gunpoint, and transported to the Soviet Union. Some 170 German rocket specialists were taken to a special island Northwest of Moscow, where they became involuntary consultants for the Soviet rocket engineers. 

The Soviet Rocket program after World War 2 was headed by a Soviet scientist named Sergei Korolev. Korolev led the Soviet’s transition from missile technology to rockets geared for outer-space. And he notched the first victories in the Space Race for the Soviet side, although they didn’t yet involve human passengers. The first satellite, Sputnik 1, had no passengers; and Sputnik 2 housed a non-human passenger. We’ll talk more about them later. But even these first, unpiloted launches were considered defeats for the United States. After Sputnik 1’s ground-breaking orbit, American economist Bernard Baruch wrote in the New York Times:

“While we devote our industrial and technological power to producing new model automobiles and more gadgets, the Soviet Union is conquering space. ... It is Russia, not the United States, who has had the imagination to hitch its wagon to the stars and the skill to reach for the moon and all but grasp it. America is worried. It should be.”

There was no doubt that the Soviet Union had a head start in the Space Race. While NASA launched Project Mercury in late 1958, a year after Sputnik, Sergei Korolev had already formed a commission with the express goal of putting a man into orbit back in August of 1955. Its name was the Vostok programme, and it was already searching for cosmonauts.

What did the Soviet Union think was needed to create the perfect cosmonaut? Just like the U.S.A., the Soviets started their search with military pilots, who were used to highly-technical and physically-demanding challenges. The Vostok programme didn’t require as many flight hours as the Mercury Project – a Mercury candidate needed at least 1,500 hours of real flight time. The most experienced pilot looked at by the Soviets had only logged 900 hours. Astoundingly, this was a consequence of actual Soviet military policy during and after World War II, they limited the amount of experience their pilots gained, out of a fear that they might defect and take their experience with them. 

The Vostok programme put some 200 candidates through a battery of tests and challenges, gradually whittling the field down to twenty; and then from there, to a final six.

These six were not introduced in any press conference. And here is where the differences between the two programs start to become clear. The Soviet Union did not want them to become overnight celebrities; it did not even want their names known at this point. Perhaps, in part, it was because the idea of communism was to celebrate the collective rather than individual achievement. But it also meant that if any of the cosmonauts died before reaching orbit, it could be kept quiet. To this day we don’t completely know how many Soviet pilots died during the quest for outer space.  In fact, we’re already mapping out an episode about the missing cosmonauts.

 But when one pilot got there, and got there before anyone else in the history of the world, fame and celebration was coming and the Soviets couldn’t stop it. The name of their great hero was Yuri Gagarin and on April 12th, 1961, he became the first human in outer-space. But who was he? What made him the one?

***

PART TWO

A note of caution as we dig into the life of Yuri Gagarin. Some of the details of his life, especially of his childhood, can be difficult to verify. When he became a hero of the Soviet Union, he was introduced with a hero’s biography, and some of the experiences and incidents that have been repeated and reprinted over the years show telltale signs of having, let’s say, an extra coat of drama applied. Much in the way that the Mercury Seven found their life stories edited and oversimplified to better fit the narrative of American heroism, there may have been pressure to make Gagrin’s childhood even more of a model of the ideal Soviet citizen. We’ll try to point out where the record becomes a bit suspect; but rest assured, what can be verified is impressive in its own right.

Yuri Gagarin was born on March 19th, 1934. His family was a successful one – or, as successful as a communist system allowed them to be. His mother, Anna Timofeyevna, was a voracious reader, while his father, Alexei Ivanovich, was a skilled craftsman who taught little Yuri machining and carpentry. The family worked together on a collective farm in the small Russian village of Klushino, and Yuri was the third of ultimately four children. Although the family was reasonably well-off, Yuri was always undersized – one theory is that the Soviet’s disastrous communist agricultural policies meant he was growing up without the proper nutrition. He couldn’t have known it, but this would give him an advantage later in life. 

Even before World War Two, Klushino had a history of occupation, invasion, and warfare, dating back as far as 1610, when it was the site of an important battle in the Polish-Muscovite War. That legacy continued, tragically, on the 18th of October, 1941, when the Nazis began an occupation of their own. Villagers were taken from their homes and shot; others were gouged by bayonets. In some cases, they were burned alive, locked in sheds that were then set on fire. A Nazi officer picked the Gagarin family home to serve as his personal billet. Yuri, his siblings, and his parents, were forced to live in their own backyard, digging out a mud hut measuring just 10 feet by 10 feet. And the Nazis took more from Yuri than just his home. On the first day of the occupation, they burned down his school. He had just begun his education earlier that year.

Now this officer in Gagarin’s home is likely the one referred to in many biographies about Gagarin. His nickname is “The Devil”, and many stories are told about his cruel and violent rule over the village. But this is where history can spill over into legend; we don’t know if this nickname was ever applied to him during the actual occupation. But we know that he was living in the Gagarin family house; and that, all through the occupation, young Yuri was making this officer’s life miserable.

Although he was less than ten years of age, Yuri and his siblings, became a persistent thorn in the sides of the Nazi officers. They would shatter glass bottles and scatter the shards, forcing German supply trucks to either swerve off the roads or pop their tires; or pour water and mud into fuel filler caps. They would stuff potatoes into the exhaust pipes of Nazi cars – do it well enough and you immobilize the car. This story seems somewhat unlikely.  It sounds like a clever trick when you can buy 5 pounds of potatoes for a dollar like you can today – a far cry from the communist and then war driven starvation that crushed so many of the people under Soviet rule.  Still, Yuri showed early signs of an ingenious mind with an aptitude for science – one of his favorite tricks was to ruin supplies of German tank fuel by mixing chemicals into them. 

In one terrifying incident, the Nazis caught Yuri’s younger brother Boris, and blamed him for one of the incidents of sabotage. Later stories claim that the officer known as “The Devil” lured the boy with promises of chocolate, but we think that’s probably a tall tale as well.  What’s not a tall tale is that they hung little Boris from a tree branch, using his own scarf as a noose. He would have been only six or seven at the time. But in their haste, the Nazis hadn’t done a thorough job, and parents rescued him from death. 

While Boris and Yuri spent all of the occupation in Klushino, in 1943 their teenage siblings, Valentin and Zoya, were seized and put on a “children’s train”, bound for a work camp in Poland. They were eventually rescued by the Red Army, but it didn’t mean a homecoming; they were forced to serve out the rest of the war. Yuri’s father spent much of his time injured and sick in the hospital, and Yuri’s mother was often confined there as well.

Once, Yuri witnessed a dogfight in the sky between Soviet pilots and German ones. It ended in a draw, but one of the Soviet pilots made an emergency landing near the village. Villagers rushed to help, and when a rescue plane arrived to pick up the downed pilot, Yuri scavenged additional fuel to help them make the return trip. He watched as they set the downed plane on fire to keep it out of Nazi hands, and then took to the skies to get away. It may be that was the moment that a fascination with flying was ignited in the boy. It’s of a piece with his response to the Nazis – where others saw fear and disaster, Yuri Gagarin saw an opportunity to study, to learn, and to conquer.

The German occupation of Gagarin’s village finally ended on March 4th, 1944, two and a half years after it began. Yuri was just days away from his 10th birthday, and had spent a quarter of his life resisting Nazis and evading capture. He celebrated their removal by helping the Red Army locate and disarm mines that had been buried in the roads by the retreating German forces.

It would be hard to imagine a more heroic, poster-perfect beginning for the man who would become the face of the space race— for either America or the Soviet Union. While John Glenn had enlisted in the military during World War Two, as did many of the American astronauts, nothing on the American side could truly match the spectacular narrative of a little boy thwarting and provoking Nazis on behalf of his family and hometown.

This uplifting narrative continued for Yuri even after the war, when he moved with his family to Gzhatsk. A formal school no longer existed there, so the villagers constructed a rough building, and one woman volunteered to act as teacher to all the students, including Yuri and Boris. They learned to read using a discarded Russian military manual. They learned geography from maps that had been recovered from the burnt-out cabins of tanks.

Eventually, a former Russian airman joined the “staff” at Yuri’s school, effectively doubling it. His specialty was math and science, and these subjects quickly became Yuri’s favorites. Later on, Yuri Gagarin would describe the man (and his wondrous in-class science experiments) as a “magician.” In his spare time, Yuri built and flew model planes with his friends. 

At 16, he began an apprenticeship as a foundryman at a steel plant outside of Moscow, while taking evening classes at the seventh-grade level. After graduating the evening classes, he went to an industrial school, to study tractors. He filled his spare time volunteering at a local flying club, and learning to fly a biplane. Later in life, Yuri said, “The first flight filled me with pride, and gave meaning to my whole life.”

If Yuri’s resistance to the Nazis was the first chapter on the road to flying for the Soviet Union, this was the second chapter, and in 1955 Gagarin was accepted to Air Force Pilots School in Orenburg. His initial training was turbulent — Gagarin nearly failed out after struggling to land a two-seater plane. He was granted a second chance, and successfully landed the plane after making one, small adjustment: He brought a cushion with him – he was too short to see properly the first time. As an adult, Yuri only reached 5’ 2” in height.  But by 1957 he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Forces and began a two-year assignment with the Northern Fleet.

There’s a saying which was credited to Yuri’s foreman back at the steel plant, though we have reason to believe this was another case of the Soviets polishing the narrative of their hero. The saying goes, “fire is strong, water is stronger than fire, earth stronger than water, but man is the strongest of all.” Whoever coined the phrase, Yuri Gagarin was proving it true throughout his service in the air force.

He was already dreaming of greater destinations – telling his superiors that he was interested in space exploration. Starting in 1959, “Mysterious recruiting teams” started to appear at air stations across the Soviet Union. Doctors conducted informal interviews with large groups of pilots. The process was vague and confusing, but the large groups of pilots gradually got winnowed down to smaller groups; then, finally, individual interviews. In this time, Gagarin recalled undergoing seven different eye examinations. He took a challenging test in mathematics, where a voice constantly whispered incorrect answers and solutions to him through headphones.

This test was the one that stuck out most to me. I can’t help but feel some sympathy for that image of a solitary test-taker, willing themselves to tune out the voice trying to lead him astray. It gives me a visceral sense of the mental fortitude these pilots possessed. They had the abilities not just to excel, but to block out the noise.

A psychological profile of Gagarin was prepared. This is how it described him:

“Modest; embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuri; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends.”

From the original, anonymous group of 200 candidates, Gagarin passed all the tests and training to become one of the final twenty. These twenty finalists were put through even more grueling ordeals. They were deprived of oxygen and instructed to write their names over and over, the words turning to gibberish as the oxygen levels dropped. They were forced into solitary confinement, to see how they would hold up in total isolation. And, in one of the most terrifying training exercises I’ve ever heard of – they were made to jump out of a plane, sabotage their own parachutes while plummeting through the air, and then fix the problem before hitting the ground. Gagarin excelled at every challenge put in front of him – including, apparently, this parachute self-sabotage test as well.

Ironically, the would-be Communist heroes were given a democratic choice – the twenty cosmonaut trainees were asked to vote on which of them should be the first to fly. All but three of them voted for Yuri Gagarin. He was officially selected to be the first person in all of human history, to fly into outer-space.

***

PART THREE

Yuri Gagarin’s heart, however, was not the first living heart to beat in orbit around Earth.

For years, both the Soviet Union and the United States (as well as other space-hopeful countries) had been testing space’s effect on living bodies using animals as subjects. The first animals sent into space, in fact, were fruit flies— launched on a US rocket in 1947 in order to test radiation levels. The fruit flies were followed up, within two years, by Albert II, a rhesus monkey, who entered space (but not orbit) but died when the parachute failed on reentry. His predecessor, Albert I, hadn’t made it into space alive as his breathing system failed.  Interestingly, both rode into space aboard V2 rockets.  The fact that these rockets, captured from the Nazi program from WWII, were usable sheds light on how far the Nazi rocketry program had advanced in Peenemunde.  And supposition that the Amerika Rocket program could have been a real risk to America. If you haven’t already, listen to episode 2 of My Dark Path.  

While the United States continued testing on primates, the Soviet Union conducted its primary tests with dogs. “Space dogs,” they were called. In 1951, a pair named Tsygan and Dezik became the first dogs to enter space (though, like Albert II, they didn’t reach orbit). Both of these dogs even survived the flight— Desik eventually died on another mission, while Tsygan was adopted by a Soviet physicist. 

The most famous of these space dogs, however, and now one of the most famous dogs who ever lived, was a scruffy stray that was found wandering the streets of Moscow. Her name was Laika. When it came to human space travelers, both the Americans and Soviets looked for perfect physical specimens. But when it came to space dogs, Soviet scientists specifically looked for strays; there was a belief that dogs who had learned to survive the Moscow streets would have developed to ability to endure extreme cold and hunger.

Since both projects met their goals of putting people into space, we take it for granted that the selection criteria developed by the Vostok Programme and the Mercury program were the best for finding and training potential space travelers. But I wonder if there’s anything to be learned from how Laika was chosen. She didn’t have to represent a nation’s ideology, didn’t need to be a heroic, and inspiring figure. All she needed was grit – the ability to endure all the brutal trials and frightening unknowns that lay ahead on this frontier. 

Maybe when you first looked into the eyes of Alan Shepherd or Yuri Gagarin, you had a sense you were seeing someone special, someone with the rare quality this mission needed. I wonder if the scientists of the Vostok programme got the same impression from Laika. Did they see a hero, or a test subject? Perhaps we get one clue of how the scientists felt based on the nicknames they showered her with – they tried Little Curly, Little Bug, even Little Lemon, before landing on Laika. When they took custody of her, she weighed just eleven pounds.

Regardless of how the physicists, scientists, and engineers, viewed these animals, they got right to work preparing their bodies for outer space. To get the dogs ready for the tiny cabin of the Sputnik 2 satellite, they were kept in progressively smaller cages for long periods of time. They were placed in machines that would simulate the speed of take-off, machines that would simulate the noises of the launch, and more. They learned to eat special gels high in nutrients.

Just as Gagarin was chosen from the Vanguard 6, and Alan Shephard was chosen from the Mercury 7, Laika was chosen from a group of other space dogs to fly in Sputnik 2. For the dog, however, there was no sense of ceremony or celebrity. This wasn’t an honor – it was a death sentence. Another dog, Albina, was chosen as her back-up, and a third dog, Mushka, would be used as a control in testing life support.

Before the flight, one of the mission scientists took Laika home to play with his children. One brief taste of home for the dog from the streets. Later on, the scientist wrote:

“Laika was quiet and charming. I wanted to do something nice for her: she had so little time left to live.”

Laika was placed in the capsule of Sputnik 2. Technicians rubbed her fur with alcohol solutions and iodine, readying her body for where sensors would be placed. One of the technicians recalls everyone on the team kissing her nose and saying good-bye. 

Sputnik 2 launched, with Laika onboard, on November 3rd, 1957. The exact time of launch is disputed, but we know the exact timeline of Laika’s health. Before launch, her heart was beating at 103 beats per minute. That’s actually a bit low – small dogs typically have a resting heart rate of between 120 and 160 beats per minute.  But as acceleration began, it jumped to 240. At the peak of acceleration, her breathing rate was 3-4 times what it was before launch. It took three hours of weightlessness for her heartbeat to return to its pre-flight rate. In tests, it had only taken one hour.

Insulation was ripped during the ascent, and the temperature inside Sputnik 2 was climbing rapidly. Still, Laika was alive – she was even eating her food.

But approximately five hours into the flight, somewhere during Sputnik 2’s fourth orbit cycle, the scientists stopped receiving signs of life from the spacecraft. Laika had died, as was always planned.

For years, there was a dispute over the exact cause of Laika’s death. The original plan was that she would be euthanized by a poison in one of her food potions, but officials gave conflicting statements about whether it had been the food, or asphyxiation, which caused her death. Finally, in 1999, it was reported (and later confirmed,) that the cause of Laika’s death was actually overheating.

Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists who worked closest with Laika, later wrote:

“Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I'm sorry about it. We shouldn't have done it ... We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”

With Laika’s remains inside, Sputnik 2 disintegrated upon re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere on April 14th, 1958, over six months after its launch. It had orbited the earth four times with Laika alive, and then 2,566 more times after her death.

When Yuri Gagarin would eventually launch, much about what his flight would be like was unknown. What little was known, was thanks to the sacrifices of animals like Laika.

***

PART FOUR

Yuri’s moment came almost exactly three years after the re-entry of Sputnik 2—at 6:07 AM on April 12th, 1961. The Vostok 1 was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with Yuri Gagarin inside. His callsign was “Kedr”— that’s Russian for Siberian Pine. His final words before liftoff were reportedly “Off we go! Goodbye until we meet soon, dear friends.” He orbited Earth for 108 minutes. He claims that, as he re-entered the atmosphere, he sang the Soviet song “The Motherland Hears, the Motherland Knows”. Then he ejected from the descending capsule, and landed using a parachute.

“The feeling of weightlessness was somewhat unfamiliar compared with Earth conditions,” he wrote in his post flight report, which I have to believe is the first example of understatement ever written about space travel.

Vostok 1’s mission was an immediate and absolute triumph for the Soviet Union and communism, and now they couldn’t keep Gagarin’s identity secret if they tried. Overnight, he was vaulted into the roles of celebrity, national hero, and even international hero. His American counterparts were celebrities already, but there was one primary difference between them – he had flown in space, and they had not.

It’s tempting to speculate on what this says about the difference between the two countries at the time. When the Mercury 7 were first met with the standing ovation from the public, Deke Slayton is said to have whispered into Alan Shephard’s ear, “They’re applauding us like we’ve already done something, like we were heroes or something.” Indeed, America treated them like legends not based on anything they had done yet, but on what we wanted them to do, what we anticipated them doing.

Yuri, of course, had earned his heroic status. But those other cosmonauts who trained with Yuri Gagarin? The others who jumped out of airplanes and sabotaged their own parachutes for the Motherland? Their names weren’t released to the public until the 1980’s.  In large part, the reason for this was Soviet secretiveness and paranoia – they didn’t want any failures to be made public. They didn’t want to elevate these individuals who were making such an extraordinary effort, taking such extraordinary risks, only to have to explain why a cosmonaut was no longer visible to the public.

But back to Yuri Gagarin, the little boy from Klushino, now a global celebrity. The streets of Soviet cities filled with parades in his honor, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the end of the second World War. And his popularity expanded far beyond his borders, as Gagarin began a years-long world tour which took him to roughly 30 countries, starting with the eastern bloc countries but expanding to including Canada, Finland, and United Kingdom. Notably, though, his tour didn’t reach the United States, and that was no accident. President Kennedy refused to allow Gagarin to visit, afraid that his level of celebrity, even in the States, would hurt the country’s image. 

Afterwards, Gagarin continued his work for the Soviet Union. He even served in the Soviet of Nationalities; what you might call their equivalent of the Senate. He continued his work as a pilot, and trained future cosmonauts. He even went back to school to further his studies in aerospace engineering – the little boy whose school was destroyed by the Nazis still wanted to learn more.

He did have one thing in common with his Mercury 7 counterparts, though. A life of celebrity was taking its toll. He drank and partied excessively, and strayed from his marriage. In 1961, his wife caught him having affair with a nurse at a sanitarium on the Edge of the Black Sea. In an attempt to avoid getting caught, Gagarin jumped through a second-floor window, and landed face first; permanently scarring his left eyebrow and, probably, his marriage.

He had been exiled to the position of Deputy Head of Training, but was determined to get back on the flight roster. Some of his self destructive behavior has been attributed to the fact that Yuri wanted to continue his life of flying and achievement, not be relegated to the role of communist banner carrier.  The Soviets simply weren’t willing to risk their national hero to an accident.  Finally, succeeded, though it wasn’t in time to get aboard the next generation of Soviet spacecraft, the Soyuz 1. The pilot of the Soyuz 1 mission was a close friend of Gagarin’s named Vladimir Komarov. The mission was hastily-conceived, over-ambitious, and likely to be a disaster. We have reason to believe that Cosmonaut Komarov told Gagarin that he knew he was going to his death. He even offered to take Vladimir’s seat on the mission, he was so concerned about the quality of the engineering.  But the mission suffered a series of failures, and when the parachute failed to open on re-entry, Vladimir Komarov died – the first fatality to happen during any spaceflight.

Yuri Gagarin was morose, and became even more undisciplined. He threw a drink at a Soviet politician; spoke publicly about his anger about the mission, and what he saw as the unnecessary death of his friend. There’s no hero so high that they can’t be knocked off their pedestal, and Gagarin was quickly falling out of favor with the government which had been so happy to celebrate his achievement.

Then, on a routine training flight on March 27th, 1968, Gagarin’s plane crashed near the town of Kirzhach, killing him. He was just 34 years old. Immediately afterwards, there were many conspiracy theories about the cause of the crash and his death. The secretive nature of the Soviet government didn’t help. A medical examination found no trace of alcohol in his system – one leading theory is that another plane which was seen on radar nearby but never identified may have been a MiG jet, triggering a sonic boom in the air over him, and shattering his canopy in flight. Whatever the cause, space pioneer and Soviet hero Yuri Gagarin died, as so many cosmonauts would before and after him, in flight.

I’m cautious about projecting too much psychology or too much of a narrative onto the life of Yuri Gagarin, but it seems clear to me that he was a man who had been willing to fight and die for the country, for the solid ground he lived on, all the while dreaming of lifting up off of that ground. And soaring higher. I don’t know what to make of the fact that his death came, ultimately, mid-flight. I don’t know whether or not it would have brought him peace or if it would have done the opposite. It does, however, make me think of Laika, and the other, unreported deaths of test pilots and would-be cosmonauts, the way the Soviet government distorted or manipulated or hid the details about their deaths. In contrast to the affection and the guilt I read in those accounts from the scientists who took care of Laika, it seemed as if their nation was unwilling to acknowledge the fact that the heroes they created were, ultimately, mortal like the rest of us. It wasn’t enough just to put them into the sky – sooner or later, everyone comes back down to Earth.

Yuri’s meteoric rise, fall from grace and finally his surprising death makes this topic a terrific future episode.

There’s one more difference between the cosmonauts and the astronauts that sticks out to me. There’s an urban legend about Gagarin’s flight. It claims that, upon entering orbit, Yuri Gagarin observed, “I don’t see any God up here.” We have no way of confirming this, it appears in a propaganda speech made by Chairman Nikita Khrushchev. It was most likely invented for that purpose. But it’s hard to imagine an American astronaut in the 60’s saying that; and if they did, you can’t imagine NASA wanting to publicize it.

Ultimately, though, whatever Yuri did see up there would have been identical to what Alan Shepherd would see, to what John Glenn would see. All of them would look out and see the stars. They would look back and see the Earth, the same Earth, if maybe from a slightly different perspective. They would possibly even see their homelands, and how small they really were. 

Did they reflect on what it took to bring them to such heights? The individual scientists and engineers and technicians? Did they think about the ideological war that had divided the world, and that it was competition that provided the drive to get them into outer space? Did they think about Laika, or Albert II?  Did they think of each other— Gagarin of Glenn, Glenn of Gagarin?

In theory, they were rivals and enemies, on the frontline in the Cold War as two superpowers maneuvered for supremacy. But looking back, we can see that their front of the war only pushed both sides forward. The competition led to incredible innovation.  But at a human level, Yuri’s story also reveals a universal principle.  Success never comes from self-pity or from victimhood.  Yuri could easily have lived as a victim – of the Nazi occupation, of communism, of poor early education.  But he didn’t.  He seized the moment, controlled what he could and persevered.  Had little Yuri been a victim, he would have died in the war, given up after his first landing attempt or quit the taxing cosmonaut training.  But if he had, he’d never have been the first man in space.  He made a choice, day after day.  As does each of us.

What made the Gargarin’s and Glenn’s heros ultimately had nothing to do with their rivalries on Earth. In fact, it was that they transcended them.  Left them behind.  

There is an exhibit in Moscow called THE MONUMENT TO THE CONQUERORS OF SPACE. It was erected in 1964 to honor and celebrate the achievements of the Soviet people in the Space Race. Among the cosmonauts honored in the monument is Laika, the legendary space dog. A poem on the monument reads:

And our efforts were rewarded

once overcoming rightlessness and darkness

by forging blazing wings

 To our

       Nation

            And the age of ours!

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host.  This story was prepared for us by Sam French.  This has been his first project with us and it’s awesome!  Our senior story editor is Nicholas Thurkettle and our lead researcher is Alex Bagosy.  I’m also grateful to Emily Wolf, our producer and Dom Purdie, our sound engineer.  

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me, your host, MF Thomas. Until next time, good night.