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- [00:01]
Asif Siddiqi
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- [02:01]
Danny Byrd
Yuri Gagarin's journey from a Nazi occupied Soviet village into outer space would make him one of the most famous people on Earth. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, historian Asif Siddiqi speaks to Danny Byrd about the life behind the legend, revealing how Gagarin came to embody the USSR's post war Amb and why his winning smile still evokes the optimism of humanity's first steps into the cosmos. Asif when we think about Yuri Gagarin today, he almost feels mythic. But who was he really before the fame? Can you tell me about his childhood growing up in Soviet Russia during the Second World War?
- [02:41]
Asif Siddiqi
Yes, absolutely. He had a childhood typical of that generation who grew up in the early and mid-30s, which is that they were children during World War II and World War II for Soviet citizens in general was, you know, massive trauma because of the Nazi. The German invasion. And Yuri Gagarin was about 10 years old when he experienced that invasion. And he had three siblings, two brothers and a sister, and his parents. So the six of them were quite close. But they also, as I mentioned, directly experienced a Nazi invasion which began in 1941. And it affected their family. They had to move out of their house. They lived in a dugout for quite a bit of the war because the soldiers basically kicked them out of their house. And there was also an incident with his brother in which a German soldier tried to essentially kill a young boy by hanging him. Luckily, they were able to save him. So all of these things, I think, marked Gagarin. He was. From contemporary sources, we know he was a very joyous, happy kid. But I think after the war, he became a bit more reticent, if you will. So I think that's also not uncommon of that generation.
- [03:54]
Danny Byrd
And could you tell us a little bit more about his parents, what their backgrounds were?
- [03:58]
Asif Siddiqi
So his father, Alexei, was a carpenter and was quite resourceful, basically made his livelihood in this village called Bushino, which is roughly about 200 kilometers west of Moscow. So this was a rural town. It was a small village. They were essentially living in an agrarian household. His mother, we know, was somewhat educated and much more into, shall we say, the finer things, if you will, encouraged Gagarin to read, which he did voraciously as a child. All the greats of Russian literature and so forth. So I think they brought different things to Gagarin. The father, a much more sort of hands on, tactile experience than the mother, perhaps a bit more intellectual worldview to his life.
- [04:43]
Danny Byrd
How did this young man from a modest background end up finding aviation? And what was it about flying that seemed to unlock something in him?
- [04:49]
Asif Siddiqi
I think the larger context of Soviet Russia here is important to understand his interest and obsession with flying. Again, a generation of Soviet kids, especially those who had come up, born in the 1930s, after the war, saw flying as both literally and metaphorically, as kind of an escape from their particular context of life. And so I think Gagarin was one of those kids who, you know, dreamed of being a pilot. We also have to understand that in the Soviet union, beginning the 1930s, there was a kind of celebrity cult, if you will, of pilots. Soviet pilots had said many world aviation records in the 1930s. They had gone to the North Pole, the Arctic, they had crossed the oceans and all of this stuff. And they were quite famous they were in some ways the analog to Hollywood stars in the west. And the pilots were household names. So Gagarin grew up in this environment. He worshiped many of these aviators, and I think he wanted to emulate them. So he took his chance after his secondary education to essentially leave home and go to flight school.
- [05:59]
Danny Byrd
Now, looking ahead slightly to the early Soviet space program, it still feels extraordinary to look back on it, because nobody back then really knew what sending a human being into space would do to that person. How did Gagarin get swept up into the first generation of cosmonauts? And what was it like for those involved in the program during those years?
- [06:17]
Asif Siddiqi
The story of Gagarin's entry into the space program is not a simple one. Partly the story is complicated by the fact that. That so much of the space program was secret. So initially, of course, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, which inaugurated the space age. That was the world's first artificial satellite, which also introduced the Soviet Union as a global technological superpower. And there were further firsts in space after that. The first dog in space, the first probes to hit the moon and so forth. And all of these things provided a source of inspiration for a generation of young people, including Gagarin. There were parades in Moscow. There were lots of educational programs across cities across the USSR about the cosmos. And Gagarin was certainly caught up in all of this. Of course, he had no idea that he would have an opportunity to go to space until the sort of very secretive space program started to scour the files of the best pilots in the Soviet Union at that time, in 1959. And unbeknownst to him, one of his file was also tapped in that original. I think there were about 3,000 of them that made the first cut. And Gagarin's file was one of them. And then that number was brought down to a few hundred who were then brought to a hospital outside of Moscow to run through some tests. And even at that point, the candidates were unsure of why they were going through these physical tests. They weren't actually told that they were being essentially selected for a future space program. And it's only when the absolute core 20 are selected that they're then informed. You have been selected to participate in the Soviet space program. And that's the point at which she realizes what's going on. When they were going through these medical tests, I think many of them understood that's probably what was happening. These tests were rather strange and spinning in centrifuges and things like that. Which, if you were somewhat smart, you kind of figured out what was going on, but officially they had no idea. And so I think Gagarin, I think, began to get excited, from what we know during these medical tests, that, oh, this is something much bigger than I thought. When he does learn, of course, he's very excited, like his comrades. The other 19 candidates are very excited by this possibility.
- [08:37]
Danny Byrd
And as you've just alluded to there, there were other highly capable candidates who were just as eligible as Gagarin.
- [08:42]
Asif Siddiqi
Yes.
- [08:43]
Danny Byrd
So when the Soviet leadership and engineers were deciding who would become the first human being into space, why did Gagarin emerge as the choice? What did he represent to them beyond simply being a skilled pilot?
- [08:53]
Asif Siddiqi
Right, so that's a very interesting story. Why Gagarin? And that's. There's no simple answer to that, because it's not like there was a table of criteria and he checked off all the ones at the top level. That's partly true. He was, by all accounts, one of the best pilots of that initial cohort. But he had other. Some other aspects, I think, that can't be ruled out. He was extremely personable, affable, charming. He was funny. He got along with everybody. So he was not sort of dour or anything like that. I think his personality immediately, even early accounts, contemporary accounts, when people are writing their impressions of this inner cohort unanimously, all of them rank Gagarin as one of the best because he's also very, very intelligent, he's very smart. All their engineering classes he's doing, you know, he's coming out at the top. So I would say probably there's about five or six of them that were absolutely top notch, and he was one of those. Now, within that five or six, it's hard to know. At that point, the criteria becomes much more subjective, and I think that's where his personality stepped in. And I should add one more criteria, which was, of course, his loyalty to the state and to communism. And he was not overtly, I think, slavishly devoted to this. This ideal of communism, but he knew when to invoke it in public and to his superiors. And we, of course, don't know privately how he felt, but he was able to, you know, negotiate the apparatus of the Communist Party and all the things he had to do ideologically to say the right things at the right time. He was definitely that man also.
- [10:33]
Danny Byrd
And I think what's quite striking when you look at photographs and footage of him is that he is also a very photogenic person.
- [10:39]
Asif Siddiqi
Yes, absolutely. I agree with you. There's one story that they sent the photographs of a couple of the best candidates to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and he was taken by Gagarin's handsome nature. So I think these things are also part of the story of Gagarin, that he was just the perfect package for that moment.
- [10:57]
Danny Byrd
Absolutely. Can you take us inside Vostok 1 itself? Because many will be aware of the 108 minutes that changed history.
- [11:05]
Asif Siddiqi
Right.
- [11:06]
Danny Byrd
But what actually happened during that flight? And how close did things come to going wrong?
- [11:10]
Asif Siddiqi
So Gagarin's flight was quite risky. I would be reluctant to put a number on it, like how risky, But I would say he's lucky to have made it alive out of that flight. That doesn't mean that they didn't try to make it as safe as possible. Nobody had done this before, so obviously there's a lot of risk. You also don't know how a human being will react in outer space. None of these things are known at the time. But because it had never been done before, it wasn't like they could access a manual or Google something. They were just literally making stuff up about how to design things. There was nobody to really copy from. And even on the United States side, they were both sort of figuring out, trying to do these things, although they came to very different solutions in some of the same problems. So they have this ship called the Vostok ship, which has two modules, what looks like a ball, a very big sort of beach ball almost, in which they sort of cram the cosmonaut. And he has a seat, and he sits in it. It's almost. It's an ejection seat, actually, and they built a ball around it. And he has controls and everything. And then there's another module, which is the instrument module, which looks a little bit like two cones bolted together. And so these two modules operate in space. And they tested a whole bunch of them before Gagarin. Some of them weren't successful, some of them were. They put dogs on them and so forth. So they had some confidence that, okay, we've tested it out, now we can put a man on it. And at the very end, as I mentioned, there were a few different candidates, and Gagarin is chosen to be the first one. During the flight itself, there are a number of instrument failures, most of them minor, but. But nevertheless, cumulatively, I think they made his flight quite hazardous. But he circles the Earth for one orbit, and he's feeling quite good. He's not feeling anything negative or anything like that. But at the end of it, his engine has to fire to bring him back to the Earth. And the engine fires. And then the two modules are supposed to separate on time. There's a kind of timer that's supposed to separate the two modules so that the little ball that he's in can re enter the Earth's atmosphere. And its heat shield can work well a lot of time, the two. And so this is very dangerous because the instrument module has no heat shield. It will literally burn up as a fireball. So that fireball can then envelop the thing that he's in, which is his capsule. So it's sort of tumbling through the atmosphere as it's sort of entering the atmosphere. And at this moment, I would say this was the most risky moment of the flight because he was probably very close to being killed. Luckily, the two modules separate just before there's a big fireball. And then even past their separation, they're kind of held together by straps for a few seconds, and then they completely separate. So that was really the crucial moment, I think, the most risky. There was another thing that happened on the flight that was also quite risky in retrospect, which was when this happened earlier in the mission, actually. So during launch, his rocket puts his spaceship into a much higher orbit than they had planned because the engine had essentially overshot and worked longer than had planned. Now, in and of itself, that's not a problem. But what that means is if the retrorocket engine doesn't work, he's going to be stranded in this very high orbit for about a month. And then naturally, re enter. Now he's got enough food and air in his spaceship for the 10 days. So if the retrorocket engine doesn't work, and it has only one chance to work, he's going to die in space, essentially. Fortunately, of course, as we know, the retrorocket engine did work and brought him back to it. So there were these other points of risk.
- [14:52]
Danny Byrd
Before we go on, I wondered if, for the benefit of listeners who may not know when the actual launch happened, and also if we know anything about what Gagarin observed or said about what he saw when he was up orbiting the planet.
- [15:04]
Asif Siddiqi
Yuri Gagarin was launched on April 12, 1961. This was a morning launch from Soviet Kazakhstan in Central Asia, which they had a massive launch base there named the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which was essentially a military base. And he spent about, I would say, one hour and 50 minutes, the whole mission roughly. And he circles the Earth once and then he returns. During the flight, he did communicate with the ground. He Also recorded himself on a tape recorder. And he also took. And all his contemporary observations are really full of joy, I think. You see, oh, the flight's proceeding marvelously. The feeling of weightlessness is wonderful. I feel fine. And he also has incredibly vivid descriptions of the Earth and the horizon as it marks off into outer space. So he's looking at, he describes all the colors of the Earth's horizon as it transitions into outer space. And so he's quite chatty actually throughout the mission. And he mostly very precise observations about his instruments and so forth. And occasionally being more impressionistic, of course, his mission begins with this ebullient exclamation of let's go, which is in Russian. That's the first thing he says as the rocket takes off. It's like, you know, let's go. And so I think that indicates his kind of excitement. It was a joyous sort of excitement. I think in my view you've already
- [16:30]
Danny Byrd
touched upon how dangerous it was for him re entering the atmosphere. But I wondered if you could then talk us through what happened when he finally eventually landed, where that happened and the immediate situation.
- [16:40]
Asif Siddiqi
So the Vostok spaceship was designed to separate into its two modules and the capsule that he's in plunges through the Earth's atmosphere. And then once it's past the worst sort of burning aspects, his ejection seat is supposed to be ejected out of the capsule while he's in the air, still plummeting down. And then his parachute would then deploy and the seat would land separately and he would just land like with a parachute. And that's basically what happened. There were a few glitches in there, but basically all of these things work. And the capsule plummets through the atmosphere. The ejection seat is ejected out of the capsule. He then separates from the seat and lands by parachute a little bit of distance away from the capsule, which lands separately. And as soon as he lands, he sort of collects his senses. He doesn't know where he is because he's landed a bit off course. And he sort of looks around, it's sort of farmland. Some people approach him. By this time the radio in Moscow, Radio Moscow has already announced that the Soviet Union has launched the world's first man into outer space. Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, 27 year old major in the Soviet Air Force, is now in space. These people who had approached Gagarin, including a woman who, you know, wasn't sure what was going on because they've never seen anybody. And he was also completely garbed in his spacesuit, and they've never seen such a thing before. So I think they were a bit scared of who he was. There were some perhaps, was he a spy? Was he not even human? All these things later on, she recalled. But Gagarin tried to reassure them. I am a Soviet citizen. My name is Yuri Gagarin. I just came from outer space. I did this mission. But I think the more he talked, the more it probably also scared her. Eventually, there were others. The actual rescue team from the Soviet space program arrived, and they collected him and took him. One little sort of post facto aspect of the landing was that in order for Gagarin's spaceship to count as a world record, like by, you know, by the Guinness Book of World Records and by the international organizations, a person had to have been launched within his spaceship and landed in his spaceship. Now, as we know, Gagarin parachuted out of his spaceship separately, so his spaceship landed separately. So when they went back to Moscow, they made this sort of fictional story that, oh, no, I actually remained in my capsule all the way down to touchdown and then I climbed out of it. So in order to claim that record, I mean, the requirement for that was rather silly anyway. But just to maintain that fiction. They maintained that fiction for almost a decade or so.
- [19:19]
Danny Byrd
Yeah,
- [19:23]
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- [20:53]
Asif Siddiqi
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- [21:23]
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- [21:52]
Danny Byrd
Gagarin instantly became a global celebrity, arguably one of the most famous people alive overnight. What was the reaction inside the Soviet Union and internationally when he returned? And how did he himself cope with that sudden adoration?
- [22:06]
Asif Siddiqi
This is a moment that is hard to imagine or even overestimate. The moment after Gagarin's flight. Gagarin returns to Moscow. He's flown into Moscow and then he has a motorcade into Red Square. He's brought there tens of thousands of people are coalescing, assembling in Moscow to sea. This young man, he becomes an instant hero. This is a moment for those who live through that day and those weeks after. They compare it to victory in World War II over the Nazis. They say this is a kind of celebration and jubilation that's comparable to the end of World War II. This is a moment tinged with optimism. People are excited, people are inspired within the Soviet Union that we we're a nation destroyed by war. In just 15 plus years, we've achieved something that nobody thought we could do. We put the first person in space. So he represents that he, this young man who's 27 years old has the weight of all this put on his shoulder. The first thing the Soviet state does well, first they, I think, allow him a little bit of a vacation. But soon after the vacation, they send him off on these sort of international trips to advertise the glories of socialism and communism because they link the fact that we are first in space because we are communist. And so that link is made manifest in the figure of Yuri Gagarin, who grew up a communist and so forth. So he represents that. He sent to dozens and dozens of countries on these missions to all over the developing world, in South Asia, Africa, Latin America. He becomes a global superstar. And I think probably it's hard for us to imagine how familiar everybody was with the name Yurika Garrin. I mean, he was. It's hard to compare with anybody right now, but I don't know, somebody like Taylor Swift or something. It's somebody whose everybody knows their name, like it doesn't matter who you are. So I think Eureka Garden was literally a global superstar. And certainly that had an effect on his personal life.
- [24:09]
Danny Byrd
Yeah, I'd like to focus a little bit more on that world tour, if we could, because he obviously becomes this Persona of a smiling public face of the Soviet future, as you've alluded to.
- [24:18]
Asif Siddiqi
Right.
- [24:19]
Danny Byrd
What was the international tour actually like? Who was he meeting? How was he received in different countries? And are there any revealing or surprising moments from those travels that tell us something about him and that moment in the Cold War more broadly?
- [24:31]
Asif Siddiqi
The countries that he visited, he would spend about, depending on the country, maybe two days to four days, and they would sort of be country hopping in some sense. But he came to Great Britain and one of the stops, you know, very charming trip, he met with Queen Elizabeth II and other members of the royal family who wanted to meet him. I think Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Princess Margaret. And also they went to the Highgate Cemetery in London to pay homage to the last resting place of Karl Marx. So I think all of these things were very much in line with what kind of bringing the history of communism together with the future of communism, which was him, you know. So I think that was an interesting. He wanted to go and visit the factories in Manchester because they had this sort of mythic view of the Industrial Revolution where Marx and Engels had written about the factories in Manchester. And in fact, Engels father was an owner of a factory in Manchester in the 19th century. So he wanted to meet regular workers. So one of the interesting things about Gagarin, well, he was very bored with meeting the sort of high dignitaries, the politicians, you know, just didn't find it very interesting meeting the Prime Minister of here, the President of that and so forth. He really wanted to meet regular people. And I think to the extent that was possible, they tried to arrange it, but it was very difficult because he was mobbed everywhere he went. But he met some factory workers in Manchester, in places like India, he was unable to really meet people. So some places where it was more possible to do so, Baldo, he did sort of, you know, because there were so many functions one after other. So I think it was a combination of fatigue because there were so many places, so many things, a kind of blizzard of things, if you will. But I think there were also moments of genuine connection. And his tour itinerary took him to places also in Eastern Europe. And there are accounts where he would step out of like a procession or something and walk over to some regular people on the side and chat with them. And so there are many sweet accounts like that where he would just say, how are you doing? And he would try to have a conversation with regular people. As I said, he was very charming and disarming. Also. He was able to, I think, reach into the hearts of many people. And it sounds like a cliche in some sense that he was like that, but I think he was to some degree quite adept at public events and things like that. But there are accounts, one of his handlers, if you will, General Nikolai Kaminin, we have his diaries actually from. Because from one of these trips. So he would, at the end of the day, he would write what they did that day. And so there are these sweet accounts of Gagarin and wanting to meet regular people and not being able to. Also accounts of Gagarin being exhausted and being bored by elaborate ceremonies. And the other thing was, whenever he went to a country, everybody wanted to meet him. So it would be 10 o' clock at night and they would say, well, the minister's wife wants to meet you. Can she just come by for 10 minutes? And so he would come down from his hotel room and meet the minister's wife. And he would willingly do all of that. So I think it was kind of an exhausting tour. It lasted several months.
- [27:43]
Danny Byrd
I should ask you, what was the reaction? Because this is obviously very much within the Cold War context. What was the reaction in Washington to this flight?
- [27:51]
Asif Siddiqi
The reaction in Washington was one of shock. Again, beaten to space because the Sputnik had already been a blow to American self confidence. And there were many other firsts that the Soviets claimed. The first dog in space, the first probe to hit the moon, the first pictures of the far side of the moon. So the first man in space was really the zenith, the peak of that level of shock. And Humiliation. And retrospectively, we now know that that shock energized and mobilized America, because the President at the time, President John F. Kennedy, immediately gathered his advisors and said, what can we do? We've been humiliated again, and this is not good for us in the eyes of especially the developing world, which was the audience, right? These newly deemed decolonized nations that were seen to be trying to figure out a way past the terrible years of colonialism were seeking ways to develop now. Should we become socialist? Should we become capitalist? And if you see the Soviet Union developing as a technological superpower, there was a feeling that these countries would eventually become communist. It was never spelled out in this way, but I think that was an anxiety. So Kennedy gets his advisors together, which included his Vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, as well, Werner von Braun, who was the transplanted German scientist who ran a missile project at NASA and said, what can we do that we can beat the Russians? And so there was a lot of discussion about this, and the consensus eventually was that maybe we set the goal to go to the moon. This happened in the immediate weeks after Gagarin. So this is a direct result of Gagarin that Kennedy then decides that, okay, and let's go to the moon. So he announces this about six weeks after Gagarin's flight on May 25, 1961, to a speech to Congress. He says, we are going to set the goal of sending a man to the moon and bringing him back to the Earth, and we're going to do this before this decade is out, meaning the 1960s. So the direct result of Yuri Gagarin is the mobilization, the harnessing of American technological Know how to go to the moon.
- [30:05]
Danny Byrd
Now, we've already touched upon it. But of course, when one thinks about Yuri Gagarin, it's usually his smile that comes to mind, because it was such a winning smile. Publicly, he was endlessly charming and optimistic. But what do we know about Gagarin in private? His marriage, friendships, ambitions, insecurities, even the strains that fame and the political symbolism place on him caused.
- [30:25]
Asif Siddiqi
As one might expect, all of this pressure took a toll. In public, he was quite charming and affable and continued to be so. But for sure, privately, this took a toll. There's some indication that he developed, you know, a weakness for alcohol. So he began drinking quite a bit. He often got dep by the prospect that he might never fly in space again, because he was considered so precious that there were edicts from the top down to say, we must protect this person as much as possible. He can never fly in space, which is so risky. Also, flying in space involves flying an aircraft and so forth. So all of this stuff he took badly, if you will. He was generally very loyal to his wife and family. He was a very doting father. There is an incident that happened in 1961, soon after his mission. They were on a vacation together with a bunch of cosmonauts and their families. And he and his wife and their children were also staying in a hotel or a hostel, really. And one late night, they were all drinking and everybody was a little bit tipsy. They were, I think, playing cards or something. He sort of disappeared for a while. And they were like, where's Yuri? And so they knocked on some doors. It turned out Yuri Gagarin was in the room of a nurse who had been staying in that hostel. And so they knocked on the door and I think he panicked and he climbed out of the window and fell very hard. I mean, it was a second floor window, but he fell in an awkward manner and hurt his forehead. And so this left a permanent mark above his eyebrows, which is very visible for the remainder of his life. He claimed that he was playing hide and seek with his children and so forth. But some people suspected that he was perhaps trying to become more friendly with this nurse. Either way, I think the accident also shook him up because he was. First of all, he had to explain why his face looks all beaten up. But more to the point, I think by the mid-1960s, he was given a desk job. He became deputy director of the Cosmonaut Training Center. And he didn't like that very much. It's clear he wanted to get back into training and fly airplanes and eventually fly a space mission. So, yeah, this was a tough time for him. I think privately, publicly, I think he maintained that Persona. He still traveled quite a bit and took on managerial positions. And he was. There are many TV clips of him. You know, he was on talk shows and things like that. And so. But I think privately it was a bit of a struggle. He gained, put on a little bit of weight because he had stopped training, so because he was very fit during his mission.
- [33:05]
Danny Byrd
What do you think it was about the Soviet Union at that particular moment in history, the war generation, its society, the politics of the Cold War, and also the obsession with scientific prestige that created the conditions for somebody like Yuri Gagarin to become the first person in space?
- [33:21]
Asif Siddiqi
That's a good question and a difficult one, not easy to answer very quickly. But I think there's a number of factors here. I mean, the Cold War context is really important. They needed to. Or they sought a way to counter what they thought was American hegemony. The United States had nuclear weapons. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had really scared them. So there was a massive campaign to build atomic bombs, but also to deliver them, because it's no good to have such things if you can't deliver them. And the next step was to engineer what was called the intercontinental ballistic missile, a very long range missile. So that's what they built. And then eventually they used one of these to launch Gagarin into space. Because these were dual use things. You could just replace the bomb with the spaceship and use it to launch something into orbit. But. But the question remains, how did they do this in such a short period of time? And I think they had enormous resources, but they had a lot of smart people. This was a society despite all the, I think, ills of the Bolshevik Revolution. What they did was they educated an entire nation into some basic level of education and they inspired people to learn. This generation of engineers who designed the vostok and the R7, the rocket were extremely smart. They were able to find solutions to problems in a very quick way. So they had a lot of funds, they had smart people, they had enormous motivation to do this. And Gagarin was really, I think, a small part of that puzzle. But he was, you know, in some ways he was of course lucky because there's a little bit of luck involved. Why him? And know somebody else, he was a personification of this post war optimism of the Soviet Union that he, in so many ways, I think his whole figure, his dispos, his achievements, are a perfect distillation of that brief optimism, the brief moment of Soviet optimism in the post war era, because it begins to stagnate after that, a few years after. But there is a moment and he captures it. One of my now deceased colleagues and former professor Loren Graham, who was a professor at MIT, happened to be in Moscow in 1961 at the Red Square parade. He was like, this is an unbelievable moment of optimism. And later on in his life he recalled that it's hard to imagine that level of optimism and that we're going to overcome all the hardships of the war. And Gagarin was literally the physical manifestation of that. Like, okay, this guy is what we are all about. It's not the dull potato farms and the dismal collective farms, it's this guy. And so there was a moment of transformation, I think that was manifest in him.
- [36:06]
Danny Byrd
Wow. I mean, that must have been quite a moment to witness. Thing in Red Spur, seeing that parade, you've mentioned, of course, that he then enters this strange second act after his mission, where he's unhappy and unfulfilled, but he's also indispensable and almost too valuable to endanger. How did his relationship with the Soviet leadership and the space program evolve after 1961? Especially, as you've said, he was still so desperate and wanting to fly.
- [36:32]
Asif Siddiqi
I think his life and career in the mid-60s was torn in two directions. Well, multiple directions, really. First and foremost, he wanted to get back into the rotation so he could fly in space again. He was watching, watching all his comrades fly in space with longer, more complicated, more ambitious missions. And he wanted to do that. But secondly, he understood that he also had a public obligation to the Soviet cause. And he was the face of something. He resented it at some level, I think it's clear to being trotted out at every public function, having to smile and that sort of thing. And some people say even his smile looked tired after a while because he was sort of phoning it in, if you will. And the third thing, of course, was he wanted to be part of raising his children. And his public duties also interfered with that, often because he couldn't spend as much time as he wanted. He was an incredibly devoted dad and spoke about his children all the time in public. I wouldn't say his marriage suffered, but they were probably not in the same spot they were before there was maybe a little bit estranged. So I think all of it was, I think, happening in the 60s. Finally, 1966 or so, he's allowed to return to training, and they're planning this big, complicated mission with a new spacecraft called Soyuz. So he's allowed. He gets back in his shape, he begins exercising, he starts training. So he was made an understudy for another fellow, Vladimir Komarov, who was launched into space. The understudy essentially operates as. Just like any other theatrical production, if the main person becomes indisposed, you step in. So you train just like the real person. But the main person, Vladimir Komovov, is sent in space and unfortunately dies. There's a crash at the end of his mission. His capsule crashes onto the ground. And Vladimir Komarov was, if you will, I think probably his best friend. Their families were close. That really shook him up. And I think that was in April of 1967. After that mission, he stops making too many public appearances. There's a noticeable difference. But he cycled back. And then they also immediately, the Communist Party says, all right, we've lost Komarov. We cannot lose Gagarin. So we'll ground him even from flight training for a bit. But there's a big argument that ensues, and he's like, no, you can't do this to me. I'm gonna get back to training. So eventually they say, okay, fine, you can start flying jets again. So there we are in early 1968.
- [39:02]
Danny Byrd
And of course, later that year, Gagarin dies at a very untimely age, age 34. And a lot of that still feels quite shrouded in mystery. What do we now understand about the 1968 crash that killed him? And why has that event remained such a powerful subject of speculation for decades, do you think?
- [39:19]
Asif Siddiqi
So in March of 1968, Gagarin is training with another fellow pilot, Vladimir Seryogin, and they're both in the same jet, MiG21. And as we now know, the jet crashed, killing both of them. Gagarin was 34 years old. Tragedy. So one of the things that immediately happens is there's a lack of clarity as to the official position and why this plane crashed. What happened? Was it pilot error? Was it weather? Was it something else? And I think that lack of directness and clarity by the state fed an industry, a cottage industry of conspiracy rumors, and they still persist today. And Google search will send you to many different websites from, you know, that the state had him killed because he was becoming too famous to that Gagarin was drunk or all sorts of other things. The probable real reason was something a bit more mundane. It's possible and more than likely that there were other aircraft in the area that had created some confusion for the two pilots, Gagarin and his comrade. And combined with poor weather, they were trying to avoid these other jets, or at least a single one, and they made a maneuver, but in maneuvering that they went below a cloud deck and didn't realize how low they were and crashed into the ground. So it's a combination of pure, just bad luck, maybe some pilot error, and it was a very violent impact and crash. And they had to identify Gagarin's body through other ways. And so eventually he becomes now in death, a kind of martyr. And I think that's his. The next life, if you will, of Yuri Gagarin.
- [41:02]
Danny Byrd
How did the Soviet Union respond to his death and where was he buried?
- [41:06]
Asif Siddiqi
So, like most people of the great Soviet citizens, his ashes are interned in the Kremlin wall. So they're like in an urn. There was a national state funeral for Gagarin, and the whole nation was in mourning for a while. And I don't think that in many Ways, the optimism that I spoke about before died on the day that he died. Because everything after that moment, after Gagarin's death, at least in the Soviet space program, it was already now a kind of a moribund, lackluster version of its earlier self. And there were other failures and other deaths and nothing ever matched what they did in those early 60s while Gagarin was alive. So in a way, the death marked that turning point. But Gagarin did become a kind of saintly figure in the Soviet imagination. His birthplace was renamed Gagarin. Many, many things in Soviet Russia were renamed after Gagarin. There are statues and museums, and it became a kind of industry, of memorial industry for Gagarin. And to this day, I think even many years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Gagarin is still a saintly figure. And every Russian person knows who Gagarin is. It's like somebody in the usa, everybody knows who Neil Armstrong is because he was the first man on the moon. In Russia, it's Yuri Gagarin. Everybody knows who that is. And I will also say that to many Russians, they feel like they won the space race because in America it's like, well, we won the space race because we got to the moon first, Neil Armstrong. But to a lot of that generation of Soviet citizens, we won the race to space because we put the first man in space. So the goalpost is different. And I think Gagarin represents that. But he's now a massive saintly figure. The mythology around him is much bigger than the reality. I think people are less interested perhaps in what he really did than what he represents.
- [43:11]
Danny Byrd
Do you think he's the one figure from Soviet history who's perhaps survived all the travails since the collapse of 1991? Do you think he's that one person?
- [43:19]
Asif Siddiqi
I think you may be right, because everybody else has some problematic past. There's nothing particularly troublesome or odd about or anything. I mean, he just lived. He lived as best as he. He flew, became the first man in space. He tried his best after that to be devoted to his country, his family, to the public, as much as he could. And as I said, he was also not vapid. I think you can be charming and vapid. He was actually quite smart and intelligent. He was extremely perceptive. He was self aware. Sometimes he spoke up the absurdity of his fame because he understood that it could have been anybody, but he was so. He was all of these things, I think, which makes him an ideal fame of kind of veneration in this post communist era.
- [44:03]
Danny Byrd
It's interesting actually, because you Know, he's obviously aware that it is a vapid thing, but there has to be somebody who does it first, right?
- [44:09]
Asif Siddiqi
Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes, yes.
- [44:11]
Danny Byrd
Finally, Azif, when you step back from the mythology, where do you think Yuri Gagarin truly belongs in history? Was he primarily a Soviet icon, a pioneering cosmonaut, a carefully constructed political symbol, or does he ultimately represent something larger about humanity entering the space age for the first time? Time?
- [44:27]
Asif Siddiqi
I think all of the above. In a book that I wrote, the book Challenge to Apollo, the Soviet Union and the Space Race, I make a little bit of a comparison, maybe I overstated it, that when life forms first moved from the seas to the land, you know, there was a kind of transition, right. And Gagarin is the very first human being, and will always remain so, who breached the Earth's atmosphere and went out and peaked out for the first time in all of human history, he was the guy who did that the very first time. He was a representative of all of humanity and perhaps all of life. And so I think in the grand evolutionary term, I actually think his place is very secure. I mean, it'll be hundreds, centuries from now, we'll still remember the first person, if you will, in the smaller political stage, of course. And then this is a national stage in Soviet history. And now in Russian history, he's a central figure. His legacy today is also secured by his daughter, who takes care of all the different projects and foundations in his name. And his wife died recently, actually, I can't remember when, but a couple of years ago. And I was able to meet and chat with his daughter a little bit. And she's quite interesting and she understands all the different ways in which people can use and misuse his legacy. So I think, yeah, it'll be interesting to see where the future lies in of terms, in terms of the memory of Gagarin. You can't tell the story of 20th century Russia and the Soviet Union without Gagarin, because as I mentioned, he's a distillation of a moment of success for Soviet communism. And his successes are inextricably linked with Soviet communism. They're not linked with any other ideology, for better or for worse. So if you want to tell the story of the first ban in space, you have to talk about the communist state and what they were doing. So in that way, it's also a story of Soviet Russia. And I think the third part of it is that it's a story also of space exploration. It shows how in the 20th century, as nations started to mobilize, and I would put probably the top three events of the history of space Sputnik, the first scientific Yuri Gagarin, and then the Apollo moon landing. Those are the three really big ones. And I think the moon landing is made possible by the earlier two. So in that sense, I think Gagarin is a step to the moon and out beyond. So I think all of these things are true. His place is secure. I think he's less well known in the west, but not completely unknown. But, yes, I think in terms of his history and posterity, his name is secure.
- [47:17]
Danny Byrd
That was Asif Siddiqui speaking to Daniel. Asif is professor of history at Fordham University in New York City, where he specializes in the history of science and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the author of the Red Rocket's Glare, Spaceflight and The Soviet Imagination 1857-1957.