Iurii Gagarin Flies into Space

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Subject essay: James von Geldern

The greatest Soviet victory of the Cold War lasted one hundred and eight minutes and consisted of a single circuit of the earth. On the morning of April 12, 1961, Iurii Gagarin was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome aboard Vostok 1, passed over the Pacific and Africa at an apogee of some 327 kilometers, and came down in a field in Saratov oblast to be discovered by a farm woman and her granddaughter. TASS announced the flight while he was still aloft, an unusual confidence for a state that ordinarily waited to see whether its ventures succeeded. What the announcement withheld was routine by comparison: that the Chief Designer responsible for the craft, Sergei Korolev, had spent the late 1930s in the camps and would remain nameless in the Soviet press until his death, and that Gagarin had ejected at roughly seven kilometers and landed under his own parachute, a fact suppressed for years because international aviation rules required a pilot to come down with his machine.

The rocket beneath him had been designed to carry something else. Vostok's launch vehicle was a modified R-7, the semerka (little seven), tested in August 1957 and the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. Foreign observers drew the obvious inference, that a state able to lift a man into orbit could lift a warhead across an ocean, and the inference was sound as engineering and false as strategy. The R-7 burned liquid oxygen, took hours to fuel, and demanded enormous fixed launch complexes that could be neither dispersed nor concealed. Only a handful ever stood on combat duty. By September 1961, working from Corona satellite photographs, an American intelligence estimate put the entire Soviet intercontinental force at no more than twenty-five missiles, and in October the deputy secretary of defense said publicly what Washington had privately known since February. Khrushchev had boasted that rockets were coming off the line like sausages. The boast rested on what the world could see going up from Baikonur rather than on anything standing in a silo.

Prestige of this kind was meant to be spent, and Khrushchev spent it quickly. Gagarin was dispatched abroad on what were called missions of peace, visiting more than thirty countries in the seven years left to him. The British government hesitated over an invitation for fear of offending Washington, so the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers issued one instead, claiming him as a former molder. He rode through Manchester in July with the roof of the car down because the crowds were standing in the rain, and was afterward received at Buckingham Palace. Cuba followed that same month, then Brazil, then India, where Nehru gave him a civic reception at the Red Fort. His biography bolstered the message. Son of a carpenter from Klushino, a village in Smolensk oblast that the Germans had occupied, trained as a foundryman at a trade school in Liubertsy and taught to fly at the Saratov flying club, Gagarin was evidence offered to newly independent states that a peasant country could reach orbit in little more than four decades.

Washington understood the loss in exactly these terms. The Bay of Pigs landing collapsed five days after the flight, and on April 20 Kennedy asked Lyndon Johnson in a memorandum whether there existed any space program that the United States had a chance of winning. Alan Shepard's answer on May 5 lasted fifteen minutes and did not reach orbit; on May 25 the president committed his country to the moon before the decade was out. At home the flight was put to other uses, above all by the anti-religious campaign, which took a man's flight above the clouds as refutation of God's existence. Khrushchev's remark that the cosmonaut had been up and had seen no God, was quickly accepted as Gagarin's own and is repeated as his still. German Titov's seventeen orbits in August and Valentina Tereshkova's flight in June 1963 kept the lead visible. The Soviet Union had converted a few dozen unusable missiles into apparent supremacy, and in doing so provoked the one competition whose expense it could not sustain.

17 Moments in Soviet History - Iurii Gagarin Flies into Space, by James von Geldern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.