Gagarin: Man and Myth (Гагарин: человек и миф)
by Lev Danilkin
Click here to read the author's biography
Click here to read a synopsis
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Sample translation by Andrew Bromfiled
Chapter 5
Having once escaped from the Earth’s gravitational pull, on his return Gagarin naturally found himself back in its power and he felt it just like everyone else. But the unique status that in reality was his for only one and a half hours was miraculously prolonged: in the eyes of virtually the entire population of the planet he remained a body free of the influence of earthly gravity. As if, from being a simple citizen of the USSR, he had been transformed into its satellite, a kind of Moon that had broken away from the Earth, famously provoking the irrational interest of quite ordinary people who could not possibly have been less concerned with the problems of conquering space.
It is not clear exactly who first decided that on the evening following “the dawn of the space age”, Gagarin should go travelling and pay a few visits but, in any case, all the countries of the world started vying with each other to invite him to come and see them. What exactly motivated them to send these invitations? Was it the idea that, since he had already flown over their territory anyway and could have seen any secret facilities there, they might as well invite him over on a more neighbourly basis? And what did they actually want from him? The most plausible answer to that question was given by a rapturous Cypriot gentleman who almost went down on his knees in the middle of a London press conference to beg a favour of the Russian major: “We will kiss our Gagarin if he comes to Cyprus”. Ah yes, at bottom that was what they wanted, nothing more: to kiss the “son of earth” who had made “a flight to the stars”. “Our Gagarin.” The question was, how far did this justify the issue of an exit permit to “our” – ah, yes, nonetheless OUR 27-year-old Soviet major, who had flown to the stars, but had not sprouted his political flight-feathers yet?
There is nothing surprising about the fact that the propaganda machine exploited Gagarin to the hilt to represent its own interests within the USSR and its satellite states; or that his first trip, made literally only a couple of weeks after his return to earth, was to Czechoslovakia, followed by Cuba, Poland, Hungary and so on: this was a well-planned “lap of honour”, a promotional road-show organised according to a straightforward model. But could our cosmonaut be allowed to exit his pre-planned diplomatic orbit and enter a distinctly hazardous “meteorite belt”?
Those who trusted to luck and authorised Gagarin’s first, less minutely controlled, initial sallies into the “genuinely foreign” (i.e. “capitalist”) world, apparently did not know themselves what dividends to expect – but they decided it was worth the risk of floating a redesigned ideological product at a moment when the political markets of the West were in a volatile condition (Britain was losing one colony after another; the USA was not yet fully prepared to take on the role of global policeman, which had previously been played by Britain and, in addition, the Americans were not sure what to do with a wildfire practically in their own backyard – Cuba). Essentially, with Gagarin, Soviet propaganda offered a world that was going through a global political crisis – the West, The USSR’s own allies and non-aligned countries – a kind of open platform. The concrete significance of the USSR’s ability to fly faster and higher than all other countries was not entirely clear (most probably some kind of military superiority) – but what was clear was the possibility of jumping on the bandwagon, chummying up, being friendly neighbours, concluding economic agreements and so on. The effect that followed the launch of this “platform” exceeded the very boldest expectations. Gagarin became the Soviet authorities’ most successful PR project of all time, allowing them to continue their political expansion from space into the territory of other states. The subsequent response of these opportunists was primarily not one of satisfaction, but boundless surprise. The stunned Soviet official Kamanin noted in his diary: “Observing the crowds of millions acclaiming Gagarin so passionately, I frequently recalled my youthful impressions of a popular print showing Jesus Christ meeting the people. My memory had retained the radiant face of the Divinity in the centre and fifteen or twenty astonished and questioning faces in the background”.
Subsequently explanations of the following kind became popular: Gagarin’s visits to the West were a kind of cover operation for the USSR’s political activities that didn’t make such good political PR – the erection of the Berlin Wall, the attempt to install rockets in Cuba. In hindsight, perhaps, this account appears to correspond to the reality, but in May and June 1961 nothing of the kind was required. A “Soviet” explanation is probably more plausible (in this case the country in question is Brazil, but that is not important): “A country that is extremely dependent, both politically and economically, on the USA wished to demonstrate its own significance by receiving a Soviet peace ambassador”. (16)
Anyone who ponders Gagarin’s life realises sooner or later that he actually has to think through, not only the biography of the man, but also the “biography of the idea”. Strange as it may seem, this “idea” is not identical with communism. When all of a sudden, out of the blue, the Soviet Union was transformed for a while from Mordor into a beacon of global good, it wasn’t because everybody suddenly took such a great liking to the idea of communism. The world was presented, not only with the marketable product of a highly competitive system, but with something else as well. The “idea” that “genuine” (“capitalist”) foreigners saw behind Gagarin could be described as the glamour of space – and the glamour of red. Which, you must agree, is not exactly the same as communism.
Gagarin’s odyssey of 1961-1962 was documented in detail by Soviet journalists who focused on the propaganda aspect of the visits (since, after all, that was what they were paid to do). Three entire travelogues were published on the basis of the material produced: Good, Good, Gagarin! (the cry – in Russian – with which Gagarin was greeted in Japan), The Orbit of Friendship and First Citizen of the Universe, by N. Kamanin. All three publications are undoubtedly documentary instances of the usual rhetorical format of the period, but their usefulness as a source for Gagarin’s biography is limited. For instance, mention is made of the fact that Gagarin was greeted at Tokyo airport by a crowd of thousands, but nothing is said about the group of ultra-rightists, also present, who were roaring “Gagarin go home!” through a megaphone. But then, who would have thought the author would let slip, for instance, that very late in the evening, when it was impossible to do any more work anyway, Gagarin accepted an invitation from “Arab friends” “to visit the music hall ‘Under the Pyramids’.” Naturally, any description is going to be extremely meagre, punctuated by ritual provisos (“‘We didn’t come here to have a good time, but to work,’ said someone, reminding us of the words Yuri had spoken: ‘Time is for work, with an hour for fun. Let’s go’.”). But the fact remains that we do learn Gagarin went to a performance by “the famous dancer Hoda Shams el Din, who danced for about an hour and danced with astonishing grace and elegance”. (17) A few observations can be found in Kamanin’s diary (fortunately for Gagarin and unfortunately for us, he did not go everywhere with the major). Something is revealed in the reminiscences of members of delegations of various kinds, in which Gagarin was often included – although on occasion the Soviet witnesses are clearly inclined to exaggerate the hostility of the context: thus, in describing the situation at the Helsinki Youth Festival of 1962, the secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, S.P. Pavlov, paints an entirely Boschian picture: “Drunk, yelling, chewing gum, they flung stones, bottles of Coca-Cola and dead rats at the festival buses. They howled like real demons, jerked about to the twist and rock’n’roll and shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’.”(23) Far more interesting, however, is the view from the outside, the opinion of disinterested observers. And since, inside the USSR, foreigners were only allowed anywhere near Gagarin with the greatest reluctance, the only way to learn the opinion of disinterested observers is to study the foreign press coverage.
Gagarin’s played his first away game in Czechoslovakia, at a time when that country was a satellite of the USSR, so the sceptics have good reason to write off the reported enthusiasm of the public to exaggeration by the official press, or claim that it was artificially inspired by the authorities, who wished to ingratiate themselves with the USSR. Let us accept – although there is good reason to doubt the fact – that in the spring of 1961 every radio speaker in Czechoslovakia was playing the song “Dobry den, Majore Gagarine” (“Good day, Major Gagarin”) and he was not swamped with carnations tied up with ribbons, but with lilac, which the Czechs had simply picked for themselves. Gagarin’s most exhausting, essentially nightmarish, journey was to India and Ceylon, during which he met Nehru and Indira Gandhi, visited Bollywood and spoke in public 18 times a day in a temperature of 40 degrees Celsius, when he was “sucked dry” (his own words) and not rewarded for it in any way (“I never even saw any elephants in India,” he complained to Kamanin). The most grotesque journey, even judging only from Soviet witnesses’ reports, was to Western Africa – Ghana and Liberia: unfortunately, however, the sources are limited to propagandist literature, which is not all that interesting. So, for “total immersion” we have selected a different journey, one that was short, but the most striking of all in terms of drama. An exemplary, model journey.
To England.
Firstly, this journey is better documented than all the others by various mass media, not only the pro-Soviet ones (for some reason, in fact, the Soviet newspapers did not place any particular emphasis on it; in some strange way, everything said about England in The Road to Space seems to be forced out through clenched teeth; for most of the incredibly boring five pages Gagarin retells his own replies at the press conference, which he thought were good.).
Secondly, the visit to England was made in “combat conditions”. Britain is a curious case of a country that has never demonstrated excessive enthusiasm for outsiders, especially if those outsiders arrive in the uniform of a competing military bloc. In view of England’s inherent scepticism concerning the technological achievements of others (this is essentially an irrational prejudice against other people’s ideas, a complex known in social psychology as NIH – Not Invented Here), it was hard to be certain that space would astound the country. And finally, England had Fleet Street, with its means of obtaining information and ways of presenting it that have not infrequently been described as tinged with yellow. These would seem to be the ideal conditions for the moment of truth: a sober-minded and wary audience, a brazen press, prepared to hound the very devil himself, pragmatically disposed politicians – now they’ll surely take out their very biggest magnifying glass and tell us who this vulgar vocational school graduate really was!
The context of this trip? On 25 May Kennedy gave his historical “moon speech” in Congress, demanding the allocation of 531 million dollars during the next financial year to prepare for putting an American astronaut on the Moon. No one had any doubt that this was an unscheduled appeal – and it was clear who was really dictating the agenda at that moment. Indeed, no room was left for doubt: “These are extraordinary times. And we face an extraordinary challenge ... It is a most important decision that we make as a nation. But all of you have lived through the last four years and have seen the significance of space and the adventures in space and no one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space.”
By the way, Gagarin was supposed to visit France before England, but the authorities there (or, rather, the Syndicat de l’industrie aéronautique) withdrew the invitation, when they realised that that the cosmonaut would be in Paris at the same time as Kennedy and took fright, not so much at the unforeseen consequences of this proximity, as at the wrath of America (as the Russian newspaper Izvestiya rightly pointed out: What are they afraid of – that the public’s attention will be attracted to the wrong man?).
The trip to England failed to go to plan right from the very start. Naturally, it was possible to count on a warm reception – within the limits of traditional English xenophobia and snobbism of the English. But to foresee that, three months after his flight, a Soviet officer would be greeted, in a foreign country that was a member of a competing military and political bloc, with almost greater enthusiasm than in his homeland? That crowds of people would wait to welcome him along the road from Heathrow and swamp him with bouquets of flowers – just as they did along Leninsky Prospect on the way from Vnukovo airport? That women would faint in ecstasy at the sight of this visiting representative of the USSR?
Much vaunted Fleet Street, with its inherent immunity to overly warm emotions, also behaved like an organism incapable of generating political antibodies to the Gagarin infection. The first round had effectively already been lost in Moscow. In early June 1961, Gagarin was yanked out of the Black Sea resort of Sochi to meet with Burchett and Purdy, two Australian journalists who had been given the go-ahead for an exclusive interview with “the most inaccessible man in the world”. A certain Moscow scientist told them in jest:
“Well, if it was Khrushchev, I’m sure you wouldn’t have had any problems. He talks to journalists every day. But this Yuri Gagarin…” and he shook his head. (3)
Nonetheless, they were lucky: Gagarin was preparing for a visit to England and it was regarded as politically expedient to let him talk to journalists. On the basis of their conversation and other materials they had collected, they promised to publish a whole book in England, a book to answer one of the most important questions on the world’s mind in 1961: Who is Mr. Gagarin?
“It was his first and only meeting with western journalists on a face-to-face basis. The only thing separating them was the table.”(3) The setting for this meeting looked very promising, but it can only be described as a journalistic fiasco. The Australians didn’t manage to get anything intelligible out of Gagarin – not even any vivid reactions that no one else had recorded before. With nothing to show for their pains, like all the rest of their colleagues, Burchett and Purdy merely bleat about the incredibly bright blue eyes, the disarming smile and – a roll of drums for an astounding intimate detail! – a mole on the major’s left cheek, instead of clarifying what any normal western journalist would have asked about: Why did he lie about the precise way in which he landed, how did he feel about the unmasking of Stalin’s personality cult and what did he think about the possibility of sex in space?
In essence, the same thing happened with Fleet Street itself: it succumbed to the same hysteria as the newspaper-buyers. Yes, of course, the English press observed the cosmonaut closely and tried its very best to uncover some aspect of his behaviour that did not correspond to the official dossier. Yes, they did observe that Gagarin was very short, that his hair was too shortly trimmed (for some reason they had shaved his temples almost naked immediately before the trip), that he applauded himself all the time, which was strange: however they were unable to dig up anything more criminal than complaints about his hand hurting after thousands of handshakes. The attempts to probe the depths of the cosmonaut’s psychology – his “soul” – were even less impressive; the conclusion that can be drawn from these intense observations can hardly be called original: He is a man of the heavens, not of the earth. And you really do get the feeling that they regard him as an alien from space – humanoid, but not entirely human.
We can only guess at what was going on inside Yuri Gagarin’s head during these meetings. It might seem to the outsider that the “work” he performed during his “second orbit” was no more demanding than his “activities” during his first. All he had to do was ride in an open car in all weathers, wave his hand in greeting, smile into the camera, accept all sorts of original gifts (anything from household electronics to a car), demonstrate a sound appetite (after all, they fed him not just from the heart, but with ingenuity: Vostok salad, Rocket soup, Orbit roast, Gagarin gateau and Yuri ice cream – that’s the actual menu from San Paolo and we can be quite certain that the Brazilians were by no means original), occasionally change into national costume (in Liberia the natives dressed him up in a striped robe, set a hat made of feathers on his head and stuck a spear in his hands, telling him to hold on to it tight), repeatedly reproduce mechanically, but with feeling, one and the same story about his flight, maintain the bare minimum of genteel small talk – and, well, kiss the girls, in whom he inspired a positive torrent of uncontrollable feelings.
In actual fact it was much, much more than that: it was being an icon.
We must realise that he was not prepared for this job. It was one thing to be the object of an indigenous Russian cult; he could discuss the peculiarities of that situation with Budyonny, Voroshilov and Maresiev. It was quite another to undergo conversion into a different currency and become the embodiment of a cargo cult for the circumspect and sceptically inclined western public. Possibly he was trained to be a hero, possibly he was even briefed on how to improve his manners by some Professor Higgins of Moscow– but no one explained to him how to be a pop star and a Hollywood celebrity. And who was there in the Soviet Union to explain that to him? Kamanin, perhaps? It’s one thing to stand on the mausoleum beside Stalin or Khrushchev, waving your hand and quite another to make conversation with the Queen of England and Brigitte Bardot. Who could they have hired as a consultant to explain how to answer when he was told: “The president of the US was here a month ago but ten times as many people have come to see you”. Or when a girl pointed at him and squealed in ecstasy: “Ooh, he’s got a shaving cut on his cheek!” Elvis Presley? Marlon Brando?
This rock star life was a kind of weightlessness too – an environment as ill-suited to a Soviet citizen as space itself; and naturally, Gagarin was obliged to tumble about in it and sometimes hold very awkward poses. What saw him through was his high tolerance of stress – much higher than the average – which allowed him not to recoil too obviously from the glaring flashlights. High stress-tolerance and the ability to adapt to complex circumstances. He could compensate for his ignorance of foreign languages with his perpetual smile, for his lack of high society graces with his discreet gallantry: his awkwardness at finding himself in an unfamiliar situation was usually smoothed over by unpretentious political humour (“Taking up the small, smoothly planed sticks that serve the Japanese as spoon, knife and fork, Yuri Alexeevich joked: ‘The finest weapon in the world!’ [13])
What he was not good at was answering questions. His press conferences – which we shall discuss later – produced a depressing and risible impression. At a pinch, he could just about deliver a talk on a set topic (usually “My flight and its significance for the party and the government”), or make a five-minute speech larded with a monstrous number of ideological and pseudo-futurological clichés (“The time is not far off when inhabited ships and laboratories will fly into space and to other planets of the Universe and as well as Russians in the crew there will be ...” – what came next depended on which capital city he happened to be in at the time). But at press conferences he often had to answer specific and frequently deliberately awkward questions – and Gagarin was disastrously bad at dealing with thatBut nonetheless – as the Russian saying goes, “simplicity outdoes robbery” – he doesn’t get embarrassed and carries on regardless, even if his technique is clearly inferior to his opponents’.
Stress-resistant, certainly, but there were far more stress factors than we could imagine. What sticks in his memory out of the insane whirligig of that first day in London? “A woman with pink hair.” Ye gods.
On the other hand, we should realise that his surroundings were by no means as hostile as we assume now, extrapolating the present situation to that period. Kingsley Amis had a novel – not read by many people nowadays – called Russian Hide and Seek, which describes England under Russian occupation: totally run down, mired so deeply in barbarity and ignorance that the English are even forgetting their own language. Strangely enough, the only ones who try to maintain them in a civilised state are the officers of the Russian occupation forces – who are more like the noble officers in War and Peace than barbarians. Of course, this is a grotesque satire, in which everything is back to front – but it is also a novel indicative of the psychological context in which Gagarin found himself. Gagarin did not come to the West as a poor relative who was lucky to have been invited to this great feast of life, but as a representative of a great power – a power with its own, perfectly competitive culture and also a power with too many people within reach of its nuclear arsenal. Moreover, in the early sixties, the West did not see the USSR as “Upper Volta with rockets”, it was more a matter of “The Soviet Juggernaut”. The USSR was a “fashionable” country, an opinion-maker among nations, which could certainly not be said of Britain itself – the Britain that was in the grip of a severe identity crisis (this is the period characterised by Dean Acheson’s sarcastic remark: “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”). The Britain that had realised the colonial system was collapsing before its very eyes and, therefore, the habitual model of development and economic growth was no longer fit for purpose. The Britain that was inclined to provoke its ally, America, which seemed too rich, too vulgar, too surfeited, too self-confident and too arrogant. Gagarin’s arrival was an excellent pretext to make the point that, if Britain wished, she could find other partners – more amenable and more polite. And the Russians had a good front man – better than the Americans, with their tedious astronaut Shepard and the good-looking, but slippery Kennedy, associated in people’s minds with the mafia, FBI and CIA.
It should be said that, as the visit proceeded, high-ranking officials and the British establishment, who had sanctioned the trip, suffered ever greater discomfort and confusion. And no wonder – imagine if in 1961 an American NATO officer had come to Moscow (well, all right, London’s not New York, say – to Kiev) and suddenly found himself greeted by crowds carrying flowers. Should we forbid the public unrest? Ask ‘who’s last in line’ and practice a wider smile in front of the mirror? In this sense the step taken by the queen, who sidestepped all the regulations and invited the Soviet officer to her palace for lunch, should be recognised as exceptionally farsighted. But then, in later times she would also demonstrate that she is a resourceful woman: the example of the flowers that she laid on the people’s memorial to Diana, whom she deeply despised, illustrates this same character trait of Elizabeth Windsor.
Gagarin in England is a play in which the main character is Gagarin, but it is first and foremost about Britain, which suddenly found itself in quite exceptional circumstances; a play in which the action feels strange to both parties.
***
Herald Journal
Newspapers throughout the world last week were filled with the sickening spectacle of Great Britain as she publicly prostituted herself for the benefit of Communism’s newest hero, spaceman Yuri Gagarin. The spectacle has been a slap in the face of Uncle Sam and the people of the world who are dedicated to the preservation of freedom. (42)
The Daily Mirror wrote: “This morning at 10.30, Major Yuri Gagarin arrives in London. Gagarin is a brave man. He is also the symbol of the greatest scientific feats ever achieved.” (53)
Francis Spufford, The Red Plenty
This was the Soviet moment. It lasted from the launch of Sputnik in 1957 through Yuri Gagarin’s first spaceflight in 1961 and dissipated along with the fear in the couple of years following the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. (It was already going, in fact, at the time of the 1964 election; it was a piece of Wilson’s appeal that was premised on a fading public perception and was dropped from Labour rhetoric shortly thereafter, leaving not much behind but a paranoid suspicion of Wilson among egg-stained, old-school-tie spooks.) But while it lasted the USSR had a reputation that is now almost impossible to recapture. (52)
It became known on Friday that he would come to England. Yesterday, after doubts about what the procedure for meeting him ought to be, the British government finally decided who will welcome the world-famous hero, who we will send to welcome Gagarin on behalf of the entire British people when he gets off the plane. He will be met, not by the Prime Minister Macmillan, not by the Foreign Secretary Lord Home, not by the Minister of Science’s Office Lord Hailsham, but by Francis F. Turnbull (Secretary of the Minister of Science’s Office – N.K.) The explanations offered for this consist in the fact that Yuri Gagarin is not a head of state. But no one believed that Yuri Gagarin was a head of state. However, it remains a fact that he has accomplished a heroic feat which dwarfs anything that Macmillan or any of his ministers have ever done ... (53)
On Tuesday 11 July the plane with Yuri Gagarin on board arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport. (53)
Exactly three months to the day after his flight in Vostok I (48)
Alexander Soldatov, Ambassador of the USSR to Great Britain
When there was about an hour left before the Soviet plane landed and we got into the car to drive to the airport and meet Yuri Alexeevich, the Queen of England’s Private Secretary phoned and asked me, on the queen’s behalf, whether, in our opinion, Major Gagarin could accept an invitation to lunch at Buckingham Palace, on Friday, 14 July? We replied that, in our opinion, he could, but we would give a definitive reply immediately after Yuri Alexeevich’s arrival in London. (54)
Time
Crisp and smiling in the olive drab uniform of a Soviet air force major, Yuri Gagarin bounced out of an Aeroflot turbojet at London Airport to help publicize Moscow’s Trade Fair and all Britain gave him a tumultuous welcome. Thousands lined the 14-mile route into London for a look at the world’s first cosmonaut, (44)
Since friends of the Soviet Union published the plan of Yuri Gagarin’s route from the airport to the Soviet Embassy in the Daily Mirror newspaper for several consecutive days, the population of London had the opportunity to line up in advance along the itinerary followed by our cars. (54)
Thousands lined the 14-mile route into London for a look at the world’s first cosmonaut, cheered and chanted “Gagarin” as his motorcade swept by. Standing in an open silver Rolls-Royce with a specially issued license plate “YG-1,” Yuri waved and grinned. (44)
Oleg Kudenko, The Orbit of Life
The number plate attached to his brand-new open-top silvery Rolls-Royce was: “Y.G-1” (“Yuri Gagarin – the First”). Journalist acquaintances of mine told me later that a special vehicle identification number had only been produced once before – for the arrival in London of the new American president, Kennedy. (17)
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff
Over the three weeks since the great Soviet triumph of Gagarin’s flight, one terrible event had followed another. The United States had sent in a puppet army of Cuban exiles to conquer the Soviets’ puppet regime in Cuba and instead suffered the humiliation that became known as the Bay of Pigs. This had nothing directly to do with the space flight, of course, but it heightened the feeling that this was not the time to be trying brave and desperate deeds in the contest with the Soviets. The sad truth was, our boys always botch it. (6)
The Miami News
Yuri Gets Blonde’s Number (27)
A curvaceous blonde singer let it be known today that Soviet spaceman Yuri Gagarin was riding around London in an automobile with her license number.
The Soviet cosmonaut was driven around yesterday in a Rolls-Royce with special plates numbered YG-1. “YG” for Yuri Gagarin and the “1” for the first man in space.
But “YG” also stands for Yana Guard, a bosomy blonde who sings under the name Yana. And she acquired the YG-1 auto registration five years ago for five pounds ($14) from the previous owner as a publicity gimmick.
When she saw photographs of the Gagarin welcome, she promptly got hold of a reporter and asked, “What’s he doing with my registration number?”
The official purpose of Gagarin’s visit to London was to visit the Soviet Trade Fair and the idea to ride him around behind YG-1 plates came from James Brewster, whose firm is doing publicity for the fair. Brewster refused to comment on the purloined number except to say that he does not represent Yana.
The London Country Council’s Auto Registration Authority, which approved the number for Gagarin, was embarrassed.
“Everything was done in such a hurry,” said an official. “The number isn’t a London one at all. It is a Yorkshire County number. There seems to have been a slipup.”
Yana, who used the registration on three previous cars, now uses it on her $11,000 Mercedes sports auto. She was not annoyed about Yuri using her number – or about the publicity for herself.
“I think he’s a wonderful and courageous man,” she said. “I would love to meet him. Then we could decide who has the best claim to the number.
“I only hope the police don’t take his number, or they’ll come looking for me.” (27)
When he turned into Kensington High Street, the crowd broke through the police barriers to surge into the street. Watching 100 yds. away behind the fence of Kensington Palace, a lone figure waved: Princess Margaret, who had waited half an hour to glimpse Yuri. (44)
The first cosmonaut had absolutely no idea that in turning towards the jubilant masses he was being “not entirely” gentlemanly. Princess Margaret and two of her close aides had been waiting for forty minutes in continuous rain for the hero to appear, but he took no notice of her. After all, she was on the side dominated by mansions and palaces. (13)
It should be said that Princess Margaret was no stranger to space technology. For instance, on 18 March 1960, she had visited Britain’s Jodrell Bank Observatory and transmitted a signal via the radio-command link to the interplanetary station Pioneer-5. The response signal was received 25 seconds later, after covering a distance of 1.67 million km, establishing a world record for remote space communications at the time. (62)
All day, while the press conference was going on at the Soviet Trade and Industrial Exhibition in Earls Court ... (53)
Ottawa Citizen
...a trade fair - reciprocating the recent successful British exhibition in Moscow and aimed at picking up as many immediate orders here as possible (47)
Models, human and plastic, would seem to be the latest Soviet gimmick in the peaceful co-existence competition.
The slinky blonde ones, dressed in the latest fashions from the Central Fashion House of Moscow, trip neatly and light-heartedly along the viewing ramp twice a day at Earl’s Court viewing hall, clearly the hit of the first Soviet trade fair to reach England. (47)
Ga-Ga Over Gagarin.
Ladies’ man Yuri Gagarin, who flew solo in space for the Soviet Union, finds himself surrounded by Soviet models during visit to a Russian exhibition in London. (32)
...this huge exhibition […] is the largest ever held by the Soviet Union outside the country.
And the message they bring, according to Soviet officials, is that this is a complete picture of Soviet life in the new Russia, land of the future.
And compared to the permanent Exhibition of Economic Achievement of the USSR, opened two years ago in Moscow to show visitors and the natives the progress of the Soviet Union, this London trade fair reveals almost capitalistic excess in expenditure and a clearly bourgeois flare in design and layout.
This appeal to the monumental is thus the cue for entry into the main or Cosmic Hall, where the visitor takes off into outer space. Aside from Major Yuri Gagarin, his space ship, the Vostok, seems to be the sun around which the universe turns as it swirls up into the domed ceiling of Earl’s Court. (47)
Times
Behind him, as a testament to space worship, a model sputnik tottered dangerously on its plinth and it took half a dozen men to keep it from falling. (29)
Francis Spufford, The Red Plenty
Give your imagination permission to engage with some unlikely facts: in the 1950s, the USSR was one of the growth stars of the planetary economy, second only to Japan in the speed with which it was hauling itself up from the wreckage of the war years. And this is on the basis not of the official Soviet figures of the time, or even of the CIA’s anxious recalculations of them, but of the figures arrived at after the Soviet Union’s fall by sceptical historians with access to the archives. The Soviet economy grew through the second half of the 50s at 5%, 6%, 7% a year. As Paul Krugman has mischievously pointed out, the USSR’s growth record in the 50s elicited exactly the same awed commentary as Chinese and Indian growth does today. Admittedly, “growth” did not mean exactly the same thing in the Soviet context that it did in, say, the American one (average for the period 3.3% a year) or in the British one (average: 1.9%; have a stale crumpet). Soviet growth was counted differently, was biased massively towards heavy industry and did not necessarily imply a matching growth in living standards. (52)
It is only when you get into sections dedicated to atomic power plants, synthetic rubber plants ...
Fashion show. The latter is not soon likely to worry Dior or Balmain, but it is the nicest visual evidence that Soviet clothing has finally begun to graduate from the overall and drabness of beige. (47)
At a press conference in the Trade Fair’s fashion hall, so many Yuri fans crashed in that Fleet Street newshawks, among the world’s most agile and aggressive, barely got in any professional questions. (44)
Following Gagarin’s comprehensive account of Vostok’s flight and the problems resolved during it, British scientists presented him with two volumes of the scientific correspondence of Isaac Newton and a photograph of the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, which had followed the Soviet spacecraft’s flight in orbit round the earth. Yuri Alexeevich, in turn, presented Howard Flory, the president of the British Academy of Sciences, with a book of his autobiographical notes, The Road to Space, thanked him for the books and remarked warmly: “They are especially dear to me, because the flight into space was achieved in accordance with the laws of the earth’s gravitation, first discovered by the hero of British science, Isaac Newton.” This allusion to Newton, so appositely linked with the latest achievement of Soviet science, delighted the scientists. (9)
While Yuri Gagarin looked round the exhibition, thousands of Londoners jostled outside the exhibition building. The only ones who could get in were the small number of fortunate individuals who had managed to obtain tickets the day before. The English people’s eagerness is understandable. Once inside the exhibition at Earl’s Court, they were immersed, as it were, in Soviet reality. Naturally, the space exploration hall attracted special interest, with its model of a starry sky under the dome. Young people and people of the older generation all strained eagerly to hear the voice of the presenter, telling the story of how Soviet man was making his way into space. And how many questions they asked the first cosmonaut when he spoke at the press conference! (53)
Instead, Yuri tactfully fielded such inane queries as whether he has nightmares (answer: no). (44)
No, he never had anything like that. He slept quite normally and he had never been much of a dreamer, anyway. (43)
Alexander Kamshalov in Gagarin’s Immortality, ed. Yuri Ustinov
Soon we went off to sleep. And suddenly there was a bloodcurdling scream. Yuri came running in, pale and frightened, in just his underpants;
at first he couldn’t even explain anything intelligibly. “Yura, what happened?” I asked. He kept repeating over and over again, as if he was struggling to get the words out: “Bats, bats” and he pointed upwards and at his own body. We went to his room and turned the light on: it was calm and quiet, nobody there. There was a crumpled sheet lying on the floor. And only then did he tell us what had happened. When Yura turned out the light, covered himself with the white sheet and tried to get to sleep, hundreds of bats, so he said, started swooping at him, they grabbed at the sheet, at his hair, it was terrifying ... But when we entered the room and switched the light on, there wasn’t a single bat there, the windows were tightly closed and there weren’t any cracks or holes in the walls. Where had they got to, had he dreamed the whole thing? He couldn’t stay in that room any longer, and we went to mine. He confided to me: “You know, I’m more afraid of bats than anything in the world, they’re unpredictable and there were lots and lots of them”. (16)
When Gagarin explained that he might visit Poland and Cuba next, a little man leaped on a chair to shout: “We will kiss our Gagarin if he comes to Cyprus.”
A woman asked about using women for space exploration. Yuri, his blue eyes twinkling, was all gallantry: It might be useful, since “a woman’s appreciation of beauty is more developed than that of a man. If a flight seems beautiful to a man, it would seem even more so to a woman.” (44)
Nikolai Nosov, Dunno on the Moon
Miga answered all the questions, and it must be said that he did this most resourcefully, that is, when it was possible, he answered the question directly, when he didn’t know what to say, he replied evasively, but not once did he say “I don’t know”. For instance, when one of the correspondents asked how long the cosmonaut would stay in their city, Miga replied:
“As long as necessary.”
When asked if he would visit other cities, Miga said:
“Yes, if he wishes to.”
When asked if the cosmonaut had any intention of purchasing any goods in their city, he replied:
“That will depend on what goods we are able to offer him.”
There were so many people asking questions that poor Miga started losing patience and barely managed to stop himself being quite rude to someone. (18)
How did he feel about becoming a celebrity? “I am still an ordinary mortal. My gold star, Hero of the Soviet Union medal, bears the number 11,175. That means 11,174 people accomplished something very notable before me.” (44)
Mr Kruschev [sic], for example, had three Gold Stars and was a hero of Soviet Labour. (43)
N.N. Denisov, Good, Good, Gagarin!
One of the many questions asked at the press conference ... was this: Who is the most important leader of all the work on studying space in the USSR? “Nikita Khrushchev,” Gagarin declared to general applause. “We Soviet cosmonauts call him the pioneer of the space age.” (9)
Khrushchev simply adored him. I recall that Yura once asked me to go with him to some function where the “big-shots” had got together. Nikita Sergeevich was the only one who was late. And then he came in, handed his hat to someone and straight away, paying no attention to any of the Politburo members, he dashed across to embrace Gagarin. (62)
Major Gagarin won over the crowds from the moment yesterday afternoon when he walked jauntily across the red carpet at Earl’s Court, holding a large bunch of gladioli. The crowds chanted “Yuri, Yuri”, the major smiled disarmingly and one woman, delighted to find a touch of human fallibility in the hero of space, cried out: “He’s cut himself shaving” (29)
Before the mob scene was over, a dozen women had swooned under the combined impact of the crush and Yuri’s sex appeal. (44)
One girl, braver than the rest, broke though cheering autograph hunters to plant a kiss on Gagarin’s sunburnt cheek. Said 23-year-old Olivia Brayden: “Now I have made history by being the first English girl to kiss him. I made up my mind as soon as I saw him that he was my new No. 1 heart-throb.” (45)
The Southeast Missourian
A pretty British dental nurse kissed Soviet spaceman Yuri Gagarin Wednesday night and pronounced him “the most kissable man in the universe.”
“Oh, it was wonderful, just wonderful,” said Olivia Brayden, 23. “I’m mad about him. I shall remember it always.”
Olivia ambushed the 5-foot-5 Russian as he emerged from the Soviet Embassy on his way to a reception. She flung her arms around his neck and gave him a solid smack on the cheek.
Yuri, a married man whose wife remained in Moscow, looked embarrassed.
So did his Soviet bodyguards. They grabbed the girl and pushed her back into the crowd gathered to see the spaceman.
Gagarin – who was kissed on both cheeks and the mouth by Soviet Premier Khrushchev after his space flight – quickly recovered his composure. He smiled, climbed into the car and rubbed at the lipstick on his cheek with his handkerchief as the car pulled away.
“Yes, I have a boyfriend,” Olivia told newsmen, “and I don’t think he’s going to like it very much.”(30)
Herald Journal
Gagarin is really nothing more than a soldier of Communism. That he would be willing to dump a hydrogen bomb on the free world with pride for the “cause” does not matter perhaps to the British.
That he would force the enslavement of the young British nurse who in her childish enthusiasm planted a kiss on his face should not be considered perhaps. (42)
Said columnist Winifred Carr in the Daily Telegraph: “This perception about us is the most appealing thing about Maj. Gagarin. When we turn a man into a hero, it is not enough for him to be brave, good-looking and good-natured. Being women, we also like to think he appreciates us as well.”
Olga Franklin, a Russian-speaking reporter for the Daily Mail, found Gagarin made her feel “like a queen.”(45)
Major Gagarin is the spaceman with sex appeal. The girls interviewed by the cameras could not have been more dewy-eyed and enthusiastic about even Elvis Presley or Marlon Brando. (26)
Like Gagarin, Lindbergh was a fresh-faced, boyish figure with modesty and a disarming upturned grin […] But considering that the Russian achievement was a deadly serious part of the propaganda war, Yuri Alexeyevich has managed to invest it with a surprisingly Lindberghian casualness and grace. (45)
What made British girls go gaga over Gaga? In his three-day visit to London, the Russian spaceman Yuri Gagarin set more hearts a-flutter than Charles Lindbergh did in 1927.
Housewives and bobbysoxers mobbed him in the streets. (45)
... literally swept the English people off their feet, not to mention the English girls, who even ran out of the hairdressers’ salons in their curlers and greeted him happily: Yuri! Yuri! (54)
The hottest-selling souvenirs were colored postcards of the cosmonaut. Any woman reporter who attended the press conference on his arrival was asked by friends: “Did you find him attractive?” (45)
…Roddy has a flash of inspiration.
‘I know!’ he says, seizing upon a pedal car and squeezing himself with difficulty into the driver’s seat. ‘I’ll be Yuri Gagarin, and this is my space-car and I’ve just landed on Mars.’
For like every other boy his age, Roddy worships the young cosmonaut. Earlier in the year he was even taken to see him when he visited the Earl’s Court exhibition and Mortimer had held him aloft so he could actually shake hands with the man who had voyaged among the stars. Now, crammed awkwardly into the undersized car, he starts to pedal with all his might while making guttural engine noises. ‘Gagarin to Mission Control. Gagarin to Mission Control. Are you reading me?’
‘Well who am I supposed to be then?’ says Hilary.
‘You can be Laika, the Russian space dog.’ (5)
When I wrote the novel What a Carve-Up!, I needed to find some event that was important for a boy born in the early 1950s. And it seemed to me that the most obvious thing was to make his hero Gagarin (64)
A near-exhausted Major Yuri Gagarin went to bed last night after a welcome by Londoners which left him with a hand painful from hands-shaking. The 27-years old Soviet cosmonaut went to bed at the Russian Embassy “nursing an aching right hand” after he shook hands with more than 2000 people. After 70 minutes of hand shaking and balcony waving at the first reception Gagarin went upstairs to his bedroom for a bath and a lie down. (34)
He skipped his last appointment in a jam-packed day – a dinner at the luxury Dorchester hotel given by businessmen trading with Russia. A spokesman at the Soviet embassy said: “Major Gagarin is tired and has gone to bed.”
But soon after 10p.m., the cosmonaut left in an official car with three companions, followed by another Embassy car with a party of fashionably-dressed women inside. It was announced: “Major Gagarin and the ladies are going dancing after a tour of the West End.”
The spokesman added: “It would be more than my job is worth to tell you who he is with and when and where they are going to dance.” (36)
Major Gagarin spent over an hour touring central London. … Nobody recognised him during his tour. At 11.15 his car swept back to the Russian Embassy where a spokesman said: “Major Gagarin is enchanted by London at Night.” (36)
The Times
A welcome that sometimes bordered on hysteria (29)
Nikolai Kamanin, “Fliers and Cosmonauts”
... I shall take the liberty of using the expression: “immersed in an ocean of universal adoration”. Let me remind you that in the early 1960s, no individual on the planet was more popular than Gagarin. (15)
Then a tall, gaunt middle-aged individual with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows appeared beside him. He held out a piece of paper to Yuri Alexeevich and said:
“Please, Mr. Gagarin ... Please, an autograph ...”
With a movement that had become habitual, Yuri Alexeevich took a pen out of the inside pocket of his uniform jacket in order to apply his signature. But when he looked more closely at the greenish piece of paper that had been handed to him, he shook his head. “Nou,” he said. “It is dollars ... nou autograph.”
The man with the rolled-up shirtsleeves was an American who was staying in the Britannia Hotel and the piece of paper he had held out for an autograph was a hundred-dollar bill. Many foreigners before that had asked Gagarin to sign on their identification documents or on money. But Yuri Alexeevich had stuck to his principles and never done this.
“Yes! It’s a hundred dollars ...” the American jabbered delightedly when he heard Gagarin speak English. “Please autograph ... It’s verry good!”
“Nou, nou,” Yuri Alexeevich replied even more insistently. “It is verry bad!” he tore a clean page out of his notebook, signed it, added the date and handed it to the American, together with the hundred-dollar bill. The American was not pleased with this turn of events. He looked regretfully at Gagarin, thinking that he did not understand the significance for its owner of a hundred dollar bill with Gagarin’s signature, put the money back in his wallet, bowed stiffly and headed for the exit. (9)
Valentina Gagarina, 108 Minutes and a Whole Life
We fly to England. We land in London. A warm reception at the airport ... After that it’s like a merry-go-round. A press conference, the presentation of the British Interplanetary Society gold medal, a conversation with Lord Droyd about the benefits of breast milk in raising a child ... Everyone wants to see me, touch me, slap me on the shoulder. My arm is actually tired from all the greetings ... At a reception I saw a woman with pink hair ... (11)
Yu. A. Gagarin was invited to visit the Union of Foundry Workers of England. (20)
On his flight from London to Manchester Major Gagarin for a few minutes held the controls of the British European Airways Viscount air liner, “Sir Isaac Newton” (33)
Exactly three months to the day after his flight in Vostok I had ushered in a new age of space exploration, the trim figure of Yuri Gagarin strode down the gangway of a British Viscount airliner and walked briskly out across the runway of Manchester airport towards a sea of expectant faces and flashing camera bulbs. Heavy banks of cloud had obscured the aircraft’s final descent and a ferocious downpour had lashed the tarmac, soaking the top hats and tails of the waiting dignitaries. However, what the rain could not dampen was the warmth of Gagarin’s smile and the raw enthusiasm of the crowds who thronged the concourse: pushing at the safety barriers and seizing every vantage point in an attempt to catch a glimpse of their hero. (48)
On a visit to Manchester in a driving rain, Yuri took one look at the waiting crowds and insisted the top be kept down on his Bentley convertible for the drive into the city. “If they can stand in the rain,’’ he said, “so can I.” (44)
But as soon as Yuri saw the cheering crowds gathered at the very first street corner to welcome him, despite the rain, he asked that the car be stopped and the top pulled down. “If all those people,” he said, “are getting wet to welcome me, surely the least I can do is get wet too!”
We arrived at the headquarters of the Foundry Workers Union wet to the skin, or “wet to the bone”, as they say in Russian, but warmed by the truly remarkable enthusiasm of the British people’s welcome for the world’s first cosmonaut, the first man in space. (51)
The presence of the Soviet air officer gave Manchester its most exciting day in years. Swarming crowds knocked down Gagarin’s interpreter and almost swept the spaceman off his feet. (28)
Small children dressed up in home-made space suits and stayed away from their lessons in order to wave at him from street corners. Teenage girls crowded the platform constructed for him at Trafford Park and surged through the police lines which surrounded Ringway airport and the union offices at Brooks Bar, anxious to obtain an autograph, to present a bouquet of flowers, or to steal a kiss. Seasoned factory workers rushed to shake his hand or to slap him on the back, stumbling over their words of praise, while outside their training ground the United team broke off their practice to wave at the “Magellan of the Cosmos”.
After the drab years of post-war austerity, there seemed something almost magical about the first human being to have broken the bounds of the earth and viewed ‘through the portholes [of his spaceship] ... a diamond-field of shining, bright, cold stars’. Mary McClellan, who had travelled up to the rally at the Metrovickers plant that morning, thought that in contrast to the grey suited businessmen and the dark overalls of the factory workers Gagarin cut an ‘unbelievable’ figure in his bright green uniform; and that he looked as though he had been filmed in ‘technicolour, thrown into a stark contrast by the monotone which surrounded him’. (48)
When they heard about this, many English people cancelled trips of various kinds in order to stay at home and see the first cosmonaut.
Then there was the meeting with thousands of workers at the Metropolitan-Vickers plant.
They say that before the meeting started, Yuri Alexeevich was taken to the foundrymen and he asked them to let him carry out a melt, in breach of the programme of the visit. The English foundrymen had misgivings about the cosmonaut’s idea, but Gagarin managed the melt successfully, winning the approval of the acknowledged masters of their trade. (20)
The Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers presented him with an honorary membership medal inscribed “Moulding Together for a Better World.” Replied onetime Metalworker Yuri graciously: “I am still a foundry worker at heart.” (44)
As both the product and expression of all that was best in the mature Soviet system, he seemed to represent the embodiment of the new ‘Socialist Man’ and delighted his audience at the union offices by declaring that he was ‘still a foundryman at heart’. Presented with the honorary membership of the Foundry Workers’ Union and a medal bearing the hopeful inscription ‘Together moulding a better world’, Gagarin paid tribute to ‘a union which ranks among the oldest in the world and has such fine traditions’, before wishing its members ‘every success in...championing working class rights and interests and working for a world of peace.
These sentiments were expanded upon during his address, later in the day, to the workforce at the Metro-Vickers factory: then the largest industrial plant in Western Europe. Skilfully circumventing many of the most intransigent problems created by the Cold War, Yuri stressed the need for arms reduction and peaceful co-operation in pushing forward the boundaries of science and technology and in pursuing a policy of understanding the detente. He explained that ‘Although only one person was aboard the spaceship, it took tens of thousands of people to make it a success. Over 7,000 scientists, workers and engineers just like yourselves were decorated for contributing to the success of the flight’ and concluded to the sound of thunderous applause that ‘There is plenty of room for all in outer space ... I visualise the great day when a Soviet spaceship landing on the moon will disembark a party of scientists, who will join British and American scientists working in observatories in the spirit of peaceful co-operation and competition rather than thinking on military lines’. (48)
The ceremony ended with the singing of for he’s a jolly good fellow.’ After the ceremony the weather cleared and several thousands shouted “We want Yuri” until he appeared at the office doorway.
After the visit ended Major Gagarin was entertained at a civic lunch at the Town Hall. He met Professor Bernard Lovell. Major Gagarin praised the great help Professor Lovell had given Soviet scientists in the tracking of satellites and space rockets – “a fine example of the scientific co-operation in the peaceful conquest of space.” (33)
In 2009, in an interview for BBC TV, Bernard Lovell claimed that KGB agents had tried to kill him. According to him, in 1963, during a visit to the Crimean Radiophysics Observatory, he was irradiated with a powerful beam of electromagnetic radiation. According to him, the details of the unsuccessful assassination attempt are described in a document that will be published after his death. Lovell links the attempt to his work in Britain’s military programme. The radio-telescopes at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, where the scientist worked, would have played a key role if World War III had started. Their antennae could pinpoint the launch of Soviet rockets, making it possible to launch a counter-strike. (58)
... The Soviet cult of cosmonauts was popular, not only within the country, but also in the international arena [...] They were the jet-propelled envoys of the Soviet global charm campaign and since they carried with them the good feelings of their country, they attracted the attention of the whole world. (12)
Nikolai Kamanin, “Fliers and Cosmonauts”
After the meeting, Major Gagarin was invited to Manchester town hall. The cars moved slowly.
There were tens of thousands of people standing on all the pavements.
At the central entrance to the town hall building a military orchestra played the Anthem of the Soviet Union. Mr. Biggs, who had donned his gold chain for the occasion, invited his guests to lunch. Even in this the Mancunians had decided to distinguish themselves. Lunch was served on the “coronation service”. (15)
N. Kamanin, ‘A Citizen of the Soviet Union’
Lunch was served on the “coronation service”, worth five thousand pounds sterling. (53)
Although Whitehall chose to remain aloof, the situation in Manchester was very different. Gagarin’s visit to the city had been organised in advance, under the auspices of the local trades councils and had received the blessing of the civic leaders who were only too happy to organise a lavish reception for him at the Town Hall. As the rain cleared, the Red Flag fluttered beside the Union Jack over Albert Square and a brass band struck up the national anthem of the U.S.S.R. to welcome the arrival of the first cosmonaut. In an age before the Beatles, when rock music stood on the flimsiest of foundations and the role of the pop singer was still ill-defined, the first man in space was guaranteed a status normally reserved for visiting royalty and Hollywood film stars. The young Martin Kettle [a future star journalist at the Guardian] plastered pictures of Gagarin on his bedroom walls, while in the pages of the Times one correspondent captured the feelings of many, for whom ‘space-men have been the wildest fiction’, the stuff of popular novels, comic books and radio programmes until suddenly ‘one morning, this fantastic fiction’ had become scientific fact. Who, he asked, ‘would not...walk a few hundred yards to see this incredible’ man, who ‘visits us and talks to us. (48)
Later the well-known English public figure Konni Zilliacus would say: “Those who believe that our country is inhabited by reserved, cold people who are not inclined to make a show of their feelings should have been with us when Yuri Gagarin visited England. He could have followed Julius Caesar in saying: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’.” (21)
If Gagarin’s popularity with the people of Manchester was undeniable, then the nature and long-term political significance of his visit was still in doubt and was to be hotly debated over the course of the next few weeks, in the pages of the local and national press. Commentators, from both the left and the right, were agreed that the tour had done little to alter the domestic political landscape, to remove deeply held prejudices, or to prompt a thorough-going reassessment of Britain’s Cold War alignment. However, the prestige of the labour movement as a whole and the Foundry Workers’ Union in particular, had been greatly enhanced by the presence of the youthful cosmonaut. Gagarin was a potent symbol of the power of organised labour and socialist thought. (48)
... A brief flight, and Yuri Gagarin is back in London again. (13)
In the meantime, the British popular press, which spent Monday agonizing over whether the British government would give Gagarin a VIP welcome or not, is giving him a “Hero of the United Kingdom welcome” at least. (24)
Alexander Soldatov, Ambassador of the Soviet Union to Great Britain
... a rather interesting fact and rather typical of the atmosphere in England then. Late one evening, I was informed that an elderly woman, already a grandmother, was waiting for comrade Gagarin at the embassy. She had come from Wales with her grandson in order to present Yuri with a bundle containing her family valuables, since she did not want these valuables to go to the fascists in a future war! She wished these valuables to be used for the cause of strengthening peace. We fed the old woman and her grandson and tried to persuade to go back home with their valuables. (54)
The Palm Beach Post
An 11-year-old cockney boy, dressed in a space suit, waited for him outside the Soviet Embassy during a stop off in the afternoon. When the Russian asked the boy his name, the lad answered: “I’d better not say. You see, I played truant from school to get here.” Laughing, Gagarin signed the boy’s autograph book. (35)
We didn’t have much time at our disposal. We decided to devote it to looking round the city. (13)
Yuri Alexeevich was interested in everything and he used every minute to see and learn as much as possible [...] In the Museum of the History of London, among the showcases with the coronation robes of the kings and queens of Great Britain, he spotted a modest case with items relating to the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova lying under the glass [...] a cast of her foot and a white ballet skirt with a large precious stone.
He visited Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Recalling a film that he had liked, WaterlooBridge, he visited that rundown, quite unremarkable bridge. (8)
It had been assumed that early in the morning, before the tourists came flooding in, the excursion would pass off relatively calmly. But it was not to be! The historical Tower of London, that ancient castle, which had only recently become a unique museum, was literally besieged by young people and schoolchildren. (13)
The expectation of peace and quiet was disappointed. A thunderous outcry: “He’s coming!” shook the air the moment the car with the red pennant appeared. It was a while before we could get into the fortress. Even Fieldmarshal Lord Alexander, who was supposed to greet the guest at “the Queen’s House” was powerless to force his way through the rows of excited, shouting people. Mounted police also failed to help. (53)
At one point he became a prisoner in the grim Tower of London because of the press of people. (35)
Then the visit to the town hall. The Lord Mayor of London, Sir Waley-Cohen, solemnly welcomed the Soviet hero at the “Mansion House”, located in the northern district of the City. (53)
He was received by the Lord-Mayor of London, which brought to a halt all work in the City offices, as everyone poured out to cheer the guest. “It’s a great privilege for the City of London,” the Lord-Mayor said at the reception, “to entertain one of the great pioneers of mankind.” (51)
Before meeting Macmillan, the astronaut was guest of honour at a luncheon given by the Fellows of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science.
“He was quite ready to reply to our questions,” said Prof. W. H. McCrea, president of the Royal Astronomical Society. “He did not stonewall (beat around the bush) and spoke spontaneously.
“The fellows were most impressed by him. He was able to answer questions in a way which only someone who knew about his subject could have done. He is a very good observer.”
Asked what question he put to the spacemen McCrea answered:
“I asked him about the clouds he saw on his flight.”(35)
Said Prof. Bernard Lovell, director of Jodrell Bank, Britain’s radio telescope:
“The major discussed technical matters in technical language. You can tell he’s the product of an extensive educational program in Russia.”(35)
Somewhat later, Gagarin was received by the prime minister of England, Harold Macmillan. This meeting had to take place, because the English people had already expressed their respect and admiration for the Soviet cosmonaut. (53)
The sheer scale of public enthusiasm for the visit, which came at the height of the Cold War, had elsewhere caught the authorities by surprise. The Macmillan government, which had initially been reluctant to invite the cosmonaut to Britain, hastily added an extra day to his schedule and offered a grudging official sanction to what had originally been conceived as a trades union- sponsored tour, aimed at promoting economic co-operation between the East and West. (48)
Macmillan asked the cosmonaut several general questions, enquired how he was feeling, invited him to look round the office and admire the views from the windows of the apartment. Yuri Alexeevich had brought the English prime minister a present – a signed copy of his book The Road to Space. On behalf of the government of Great Britain, Harold Macmillan presented the Soviet cosmonaut with a silver salver made by English craftsmen. The sixty-seven-year-old head of the English government accompanied the twenty-seven-year-old cosmonaut to his car and said goodbye to him warmly. (53)
‘Leadership and Change: Prime Ministers in the Post-War World – Macmillan’
Afterwards, Gagarin was driven down the Mall to see Macmillan at Admiralty House, where the Prime Minister was then living whilst Downing Street was undergoing renovations. The Foreign Office came up with a special Rolls Royce, registration number YG1 and Gagarin drew vast crowds, waving Union Jacks and Russian flags, as his cavalcade with outriders made its slow progress through the cheering throng. London was en fete. Macmillan watched the noisy spectacle from an upper window in Admiralty Arch. “Of course,” he observed to John Windham, “it would have been far worse if they had sent the dog!”(49)
REUTERS
YURI: A DELIGHTFUL FELLOW SAYS MAC. Macmillan described Soviet spaceman Major Gagarin as a “delightful fellow” after a 20-minute private talk with him at Admiralty House. The Prime Minister presented the Russian with a silver salver as a memento. (38)
Flight
Acknowledging our applause in the Soviet manner by applauding in return. (43)
Gagarin, who had endured the traumas of wartime as a child, inspired trust as a “peace envoy”. His genial expression contradicted the stereotype image of ferocious, fiendish Russians. With his youthful jollity and vivid style of presentation, he was able to charm people and win them over in every country. (12)
Gagarin was invited to a reception arranged in his honour by the English minister of aviation. Minister of State J. Emery, Air Marshal Ronald Lees and other high-ranking officers of the Royal Air Force congratulated Yu. Gagarin. Many famous English pilots, air commanders and figures from the world of aviation were present. In the general discussion, which was conducted in a friendly atmosphere, our rec ord-holding pilots were mentioned and due acknowledgement was paid to the achievement of Soviet aviation. The course of the discussion made it clear that the fame of our Tupolevs, Iliushins and Antonovs, which had been shown in the air parade at Tushino on 9 April 1961, had reached as far as England.
The conversation was about flying and the conquest of space. But not only about that. Every now and again they veered onto the most important, most topical subject – peaceful coexistence. (53)
Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at a reception in the Kremlin, 9 August 1961
Anyone who says that is clearly afraid, but we do not want war. We have been through it all. We did not submit when the Germans were outside Moscow; when they reached Stalingrad, we did not submit. So do you think if Adenauer tries to frighten us with his Bundeswehr, we could just put our hands up? We can say to him: If you organise an attack on us, the German nation will cease to exist in this thermonuclear war. These bombs will be detonated on German land. We will do everything to defend ourselves. We’ll try to use them, we won’t hold them back. (7)
The attempts of some to hide behind phrases like: “We are soldiers and our job is to obey orders, not to think,” appeared naive. When English pilots were fighting off attacks by the German Junkers, they didn’t just carry out orders, they thought about something, didn’t they? Yes, we were friends in wartime, when we had one common enemy. Why should we quarrel in peacetime? Now only madmen do not understand what war is.
“We have a strong air force,” the English fliers said in conversation with Yu. A. Gagarin.
“Russian fliers know how to flight. And our aviation technology is very advanced. And ... rockets. And ... in general ...” (53)
Nikita Khrushchev
We have said that we have a bomb equivalent to a hundred million tonnes of TNT. And this is true. But we won’t detonate that bomb, because even if we detonate it somewhere as far away as possible, we could still smash our own windows. And so for the time being we will hold back and not detonate this bomb. (57)
Such comments are pleasing to us, but we are talking about something else, about the fact that our peoples can come to terms on everything without brandishing the bomb. (53)
At the Air Ministry reception the Secretary of State for Air, Mr Julian Amery, presented the non-smoking major with a silver cigarette box and received in return a copy of Maj Gagarin’s new book on his flight into space. (43)
When Gagarin visited England in July 1961, there was much talk in Cabinet about the appropriate level of royal hospitality. Should it be a state banquet at Windsor? But Khrushchev in 1956 had only been given tea at Windsor. Perhaps a visit to the Queen Mother at Clarence House? The royal diary was very full at the time and it was a sudden request. Finally, Gagarin was invited to one of the Queen’s regular Buckingham Palace lunches, fellow guests including Bud Flannigan of the Crazy Gang and Lord Mountbatten. (49)
“Forward to Buckingham Palace” - with those somewhat mischievous words and with his by-then already world-famous grin, Yuri reminded us that the time had come for the main event of his visit to Britain”(51)
He was welcomed in accordance with a solemn ritual laid down two centuries earlier. It was the changing of the guard: guardsmen in gold tunics and tall hats of bear fur switched places, horsemen rode about impressively.
The grand entrance began with a broad staircase, flanked by narrow staircases, on which the people greeting us were standing, with a perambulator containing the Queen’s son Andrew.
Gagarin and his companions were led to a small sitting room. Lord Mountbatten, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, turned to Yuri Alexeevich and said:
“I’m a man of years now. I’ve seen a lot in my time and many things that I have gone through or experienced will remain in my memory all my life [...] But there is one event that made the deepest impression of all on my memory and I am proud of it. It was in my distant childhood: the Queen of Great Britain held me in her arms [...] Andrew will also remember for the rest of his life how he saw the world’s first cosmonaut from his pram.” (20)
Alexander Soldatov, Ambassador of the USSR to Great Britain
As if emphasising the great importance that they placed on Yu.A. Gagarin’s trip, the queen said that for the first time in history the royal family had allowed all the servants and court officials to line up in the hallway, so that they could welcome Yuri Alexeevich. Lord Mountbatten asked me if I had noticed a child in a perambulator on the right flank of the ranks of servants and emphasised that it was the queen’s youngest son, Prince Andrew, because when Andrew was an old man, the queen wanted him to be able to say with pride that he had seen the first cosmonaut in the world. (54)
N.N. Denisov, Good, Good, Gagarin!
In the reception hall, with its huge carpet in pale-pink tones and windows overlooking a park neatly trimmed in the English manner, about twenty ladies and gentlemen were already waiting for us. Each of these people muttered his or her name as they shook Gagarin by the hand, but I must admit that neither we, nor Yuri Alexeevich, remembered them. What point was there? It was clear enough anyway that they were members of London’s upper crust, accorded the high honour of seeing the Soviet cosmonaut, not somewhere out in the street, but in the royal apartments. (9)
The Queen had made up her guest list for the luncheon before she learned of Yuri’s visit to London. (36)
There were three of us who accompanied him to that memorable lunch at the Palace with the Queen: the Soviet Ambassador Alexander Soldatov, Lieutenant-General Nikolai Kamanin, who was at that time in charge of the cosmonaut unit and I, his interpreter (51)
The other guests included the comedian Bud Flannigan, the head wardress of the largest women’s prison in Britain (Mrs. Joanna Kelly) and the leader of the climbing expedition that had conquered Everest (Sir John Hunt). While waiting for the hostess of the reception to make her entrance, we sipped moderately on the drinks handed round by the footmen, exchanged meaningless phrases with those present about the weather, the beauties of London, the notable sights at places where we had already been. (9)
“Just then, without any warning, a pleasant-looking middle-aged woman entered the room, dressed very simply, without any jewellery or traces of makeup – it was the Queen of England. Walking beside her were her husband, Prince Philip and her ten-year-old daughter,” writes Kamanin. (20)
But then the butler swung the side door wide-open and announced in a loud voice: “Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second”. [Strangely enough, Helen Mirren, the actress who played Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears’ film The Queen is Russian in origin – Elena Mironova: and not only is she Russian, she’s from the Gagarin District of the Smolensk Region.] (58)
Everything went quiet. But some people there were unable to suppress a smile. First a small, paunchy dog of some undistinguished-looking breed appeared in the doorway. It ran into the hall on its short legs, sniffed at the air briskly, snorted, then spun round on the spot and sat down facing the door, as if it was waiting for its mistress and indicating with its entire posture that everything here was in order. (9)
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember ever having heard of such a rule at processions; ‘and besides, what would be the use of a procession,’ thought she, ‘if people had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they couldn’t see it?’ So she stood still where she was and waited.
When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped and looked at her, (4)
“How do you like London and its inhabitants?” the queen asked her Soviet guests.
“Until now I had always judged the English from the novels of Dickens and Galsworthy,” replied Gagarin. “To me they always seemed aloof and impassive. But here we have met people with open smiles and warm hearts.”
“You’re right,” remarked Elizabeth. “There are fewer and fewer Forsytes. Different times – different manners.” (10)
Alexander Soldatov, Ambassador of the USSR to Great Britain
Prince Philip enquired about a few technical details, in particular how the structural stability of the space craft was maintained. (54)
Pot Luck at Palace for Yuri... but Boris the interpreter may go hungry (31)
Alexei Leonov
In 1961 Italy awarded him a decoration. And he took me with him to the embassy on Vesnin Street. Gilded candelabras, curved feet on the furniture, everyone bowing ... Yura gives a speech. And that was the first time I heard words like: “Ladies and gentlemen!” And further on – “Honourable Mr. Ambassador!” He had never been in an embassy before! My jaw dropped, it was all so fine and beautiful! Then he walked up and kissed the ambassador’s wife’s hand. “Yurka, where did you get all that from?” I asked. He laughed: “I read it in Consuelo.” Later the English queen also wondered where he could have got an education like that. (55)
To get round the occasional speechlessness of her subjects when confronted with their sovereign the equerries would sometimes proffer handy hints as to possible conversations.
“Her Majesty may well ask you if you have had far to come. Have your answer ready and then possibly go on to say whether you came by train or by car. She may then ask you where you have left the car and whether the traffic was busier here than in – where are you from?” “long-standing lines of inquiry – length of service, distance travelled, place of origin”. (2)
... the Queen asked Gagarin:
“Will a girl fly into space in the Soviet Union?”
“Definitely,” replied Yuri Alexeevich, “we have complete equality.”
They had their photo taken as a memento, which according to etiquette, the Queen was not supposed to do. She explained to the journalists:
“I have been photographed with a man of the sky, not the earth, so I haven’t broken any rules.” (13)
“Yuri Alexeevich did not know how to use the cutlery,” said one of the journalists. “All the lords kept glancing at Gagarin curiously to see what he would do with it. The cosmonaut realised this and said to them: “Let’s eat Russian-style”. He took the biggest spoon and put some kind of salad on his plate with it. The Queen, as a well brought-up lady, said: “Gentlemen. Let us eat in the Gagarin manner”. She picked up her biggest spoon too. Later, in a moment of candour, she told Yuri Gagarin: “I don’t know how to use them myself. The servants hand me the right one”. (11)
But do you know what happened to me? Buckingham Palace, a breakfast meeting with the English queen. Ancient protocol, very strict. Very, very few people are honoured with breakfast with the queen. Two people at the table, the Queen and me – her guest: to the left and the right of me, a staggering number of items to be used, depending on the dish that’s served. I say with a smile: “Your Majesty, this is the first time I’ve had breakfast with Her Majesty the Queen, I’m a simple man, only yesterday I was just a flying officer, forgive me if I unwittingly offend against etiquette”. The Queen replies, smiling: “Dear Mr. Gagarin, I was born and grew up in this palace and, believe me, I still don’t know in which order to use all these knives and forks”. And she adds in a whisper: “Every time, take the knife and fork that are on the outside”. (16)
Gagarin, having finished his tea, fished the slice of lemon out of his cup and ate it – to the horror of all present: however, the well-mannered queen immediately followed his example, swallowing her own slice and saying with a smile: “Delicious!” (61)
Mikhail Veller, Samovar
Gagarin gobbled up the lemon from his cup when he was having tea with the Queen of England and she aristocratically defused the awkwardness by doing the same and since that precedent, etiquette allows the lemon from the cup to be eaten. (22)
Vladimir Lebedev, Supervisor of Cosmonauts’ Medical and Psychological Training at Zvezdny Gorodok
Later Gagarin told us the following story. As a village lad, all he knew about kings and queens came from fairytales. But now, after the official reception, the Queen had invited him to lunch. Yura told us he wanted so badly to make certain she was a real live queen, that he touched her under the table, just above the knee. She smiled and carried on drinking her coffee. At the time, Lyosha Leonov exclaimed: “Yura, you’re kidding!” Gagarin didn’t try to prove anything. When I started writing my memoirs, I recalled this story and I wanted to check if Yura was joking. In the English newspapers that covered his visit, they wrote that the queen expressed her admiration for Gagarin’s heroism and even violated the provisions of protocol. She walked up to the cosmonaut in delight and started squeezing him with her hands. And apart from that, the queen was photographed with Gagarin, which his status did not permit, because he was a commoner. But the queen got out of that situation by saying that Gagarin, having flown into space, was a man of the sky. (56)
Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph
With women, Gagarin has the traditional shy formality of the Russian. (45)
The Queen gave her wide smile. The interview was over. How the Queen conveyed the information had always been a mystery to Sir Claude, but it was as plain as if a bell had rung. (2)
“And how do you like our Gagarin, My Lady?” “Oh, he is quite charming ... I read in the newspapers that almost all our young London girls have already fallen in love with him ... And it’s no wonder. By the way, how old is he?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“What a pity that I am not as young as that brave person who gave Gagarin a kiss outside your embassy yesterday.”
“What do you mean, My Lady?” one of us said, clumsily trying to pay her a compliment. “Looking at you, you could be the same age as our hero.”
“Thank you. I had no idea that Russians could be so sweet.” (9)
... suddenly he held out his diary: “Look through that! It might come in handy. Meanwhile I’ll sort out the post!” The first thing to catch my eye was this entry, written in an almost calligraphic hand: “Had breakfast with the queen at Buckingham Palace. How about that! The Queen received me well. She was amiable and correct. I gave her the book The Road to Space ... She was really pleased ...” (59)
Headline in The Daily Mail: MAKE HIM SIR YURI! (44)
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Till We Reach the Stars Yuri’s London visit was, of course, very important for Anglo-Soviet relations, as for the first time so many Englishmen were able to see an ordinary Soviet young man who was not a politician or an ideologue and yet who had become a representative of his people. But no less important was the impact of this visit on Soviet people themselves. For the three days he was away, his visit to England was the subject of much animated conversation in Moscow. […] After all, apart from diplomatic visits by the leaders of the Government, it was for the first time that an ordinary Soviet man had gone among the capitalists, the aristocrats and the ‘gentlemen’ (the English word is used in the Russian language too) of England, to meet them as equals and to be honoured by them for this remarkable feat which was no less the proud achievement of his whole people. They were as happy about the generous and enthusiastic welcome that all sections of the British public gave him as they were gratified that their young man had held his own in those alien surroundings and had come out with flying colours. “Now they will know,” a young Moscow journalist told me, looking at pictures of Yuri’s London reception in The Daily Worker, “what we ordinary Soviet people are like.”(1)
From the palace, Gagarin went to the Soviet Trade Fair and made a surprise speech to 5000 British boys and girls attending the fair.
“I hope many of you here in this hall will be able to make space flights, perhaps as passengers, pilots, scientists on space missions, perhaps in another capacity, but most of all as passengers”.
“Space flying requires a certain amount of sound knowledge in the sciences, in mathematics and other subjects. I would like to wish you every happiness in your life, a good time, lots of fun and in general – everything of the best”.
He was enthusiastically cheered. (39)
When the programme of meetings, trips and press conferences had been exhausted, we devoted several hours to a visit to Highgate Cemetery, the resting place of the remains of the founder of scientific communism, Karl Marx. The road there runs through workers’ districts and although this trip was not listed in our plans, the working people of London realised that a Soviet cosmonaut could not fly out of the British capital without having visited the grave of Karl Marx. That is why on that day all the streets adjoining Highgate Cemetery were crowded with construction workers, dockers, metalworkers, electricians and railway workers ... (10)
St Petersburg Times
A crowd of 3,000 watched as Gagarin placed the wreath of red and white roses [on Marx’s grave] and saluted. He then stood stiffly at attention for two minutes in pouring rain before returning to his car. (37)
I was at school in Highgate in North London. Karl Marx’s grave was in Highgate cemetery, where every Russian dignitary had to come and pay their respects. We were given the afternoon off school: now most of my friends went off to play cricket or football, play with their Game Boys or whatever it was one did in 1961. But for some reason I decided to go to Highgate cemetery and see what was going on. […] I was bowled over by the experience: this man – who was very small, much smaller than I expected, he seemed to be dwarfed by this big army hat he was wearing – he’d been in space for 93 minutes and I couldn’t believe it. And that was the moment for me, I wanted to do something in space. I didn’t know what, but I wanted to have a part of it. (50)
Everywhere he went during his five-day stay, cheering crowds swarmed about him. Yuri invariably handled them with all the charm and poise of a professional diplomat (unlike Britain’s protocol department, which was put into such a blue funk by Yuri’s uninvited, unofficial visit that it sent only a minor civil servant to the airport to greet him). (44)
In reflecting these aspirations, Gagarin struck a chord with a workforce who lived under the constant threat of thermo-nuclear war and attempted to capture something of the spirit of Khrushchev’s new, more open and vibrant U.S.S.R. That the dreams of rapprochement and socialist advance, cherished by the Soviet premier and his protégé, were ultimately to evaporate amidst Kennedy’s blockade of Cuba and a return to the arms race, was by no means clear in the summer of 1961. The subtle manner in which Gagarin’s visit to Britain had been handled - as opposed to the heavy handed treatment afforded to his later and quite disastrous mission to Gomulka’s Poland - ensured that the reputation of the U.S.S.R. probably stood higher with the British public at that moment than at any point since May 1945, while the order books of the Soviet firms who exhibited at Earls Court were filled in record time by their anxious commercial rivals. (48)
Khrushchev had scored a valuable public relations success in the West, while for Gagarin himself, the visit had been nothing short of a triumph: confirming his diplomatic skills and conferring upon him a political role which had not yet become onerous. Yet perhaps the most durable effect of his visit to these shores and the one which Gagarin would probably have been best pleased with, was the sense of idealism and hope which he had inspired in the hearts and minds of British working people. This, at least, was enough to transcend the harsh realities of the Cold War era and to signal a better way ahead. (48)
By week’s end the spaceman’s boyish smile and unfailing modesty had conquered all Britain. (44)
Against the background of the Berlin crisis, the escalating conflict in Vietnam and the abortive American invasion of Cuba, this spontaneous outpouring of popular sentiment in honour of a Soviet airman, acting as an unofficial ambassador, may at first sight appear incongruous. However, upon closer inspection the reasons behind the genuine warmth of Gagarin’s reception are not hard to discern. In marked contrast to the ageing Soviet leadership, Yuri was young, dynamic and glamorous. Possessing an unaffected charm and an outgoing personality, his fame rested securely on his own bravery, skill and athleticism. As a result, he appealed equally to both men and women, the young and the old. (48)
The 27-year old air force major was besieged by a screaming mob of 2,000 when he left the Soviet embassy in London to drive to the airport. Women fought to get near his open limousine. Several fell to the ground screaming. Shrubs and bushes were trampled and the embassy’s lawn was torn up. But as always, Gagarin remained calm and imperturbable, smiling, waving and raising his cap to the crowd. (40)
Gagarin stood up in an open grey Rolls-Royce en route to the airport, waving and smiling as the crowds in the streets recognized and cheered him (41)
As his TU-104 airliner took off for home, the cheers of thousands on the roof of the airport building could be heard above the roar of the jet engines.
While he was climbing the steps of the plane, mechanics and others rushed forward to shake his hand, pat him on the back and embrace him.
His departure was a dramatic climax to one of the most enthusiastic receptions ever accorded to a foreign personality in Britain. (40)
During Yuri Alexeevich Gagarin’s stay, English propaganda already made efforts to impress on English people that they should not identify Yuri Alexeevich Gagarin’s “personal merits” with the politics of the USSR. (63)
Back in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev, musing on Yuri’s triumph, may well have decided that Gagarin’s first flight into space would be his last: Public Relations Master Yuri was obviously too hot a talent to waste in space. (44)
Soviet Astronaut Yuri Gagarin is the newest figure in the Tussaud waxworks. A model of Maj. Gagarin will go on display next month, close to the figure of Soviet Premier Khrushchev. (46)
Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph
He has brought a breath of personal daring back into an age dominated by machines. Somehow this, coming from a nation thought of as more dehumanized than most, is especially endearing. (45)
REFERENCES
English Books (Alphabetically by author)
Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Till We Reach the Stars: The Story of Yuri Gagarin, Asia Publishing House, London, 1961
Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader, Second Edition, Faber and Faber, London, 2007 (pp. 41-2, 99)
Rebel Journalism. The Writings of Wilfred Burchett, edited by George Burchett. Cambridge University Press, 2007
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Jonathan Coe, What a Carve-Up, Viking, London, 1994, pp.19-20
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, Jonathan Cape, London, 1979, p. 239
Russian Books (Alphabetically by author)
The Soviet Space Initiative in State Documents, 1946-1964 (Sovietskaia kosmicheskaia initsiativa v gosudarstvennikh dokymentakh, 1946-1964), edited by Yu.M. Baturin, Moscow, 2010
S. Borzenko, N. Denisov, The First Cosmonaut (Pervyi kosmonavt), Moscow, 1969
N. N. Denisov, Good, Good, Gagarin! (Khorosho, khorosho, Gagarin!), Moskovskii rabochii, Moscow, 1963
N.N. Denisov, Straight to the Issue: Recollections of a War Correspondent (Srochno v nomer: vospominaniia voennogo zhurnalista), Voenizdat, Moscow, 1978
Extracts from the personal diary of Yuri Gagarin, quoted in: V. Gagarina, 108 Minutes and a Whole Life, (108 minut i vsya zhizn’), Second Edition, Molodaia gvardiia, Moscow, 1982
Klaus Gestwa, “Gagarin, the Columbus of Space. The culture of memory and the cult of heroes in comparative perspective”, in The Trajectory into Today: A deposit of historical and biographical artefacts (Traektoriia v segodnia: rossyp’ istoriko-biograficheskikh artefaktov), edited by O.S Nagornaia, O.Iu. Nikonova, Iu.Iu. Khmelevskaia. “Encyclopedia”, Chelyabinsk, 2009
N.P. Kamanin, The Concealed Cosmos (Skrytyi kosmos), Infortext, Moscow, 1995-1997
N. P. Kamanin, ‘Ready. I’m determined!’ (“Gotov. Reshaius’!) in Iu. A. Gagarin (on the 50th anniversary of his birth) - (Iu. A. Gagarin (K 50-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia), Znanie, Moscow, 1984
N.P. Kamanin, Fliers and Cosmonauts (Letchiki i kosmonavty), Politizdat, Moscow, 197
A.I. Kamshalov, in Yuri Ustinov (ed.), Gagarin’s Immortality (Bessmertie Gagarina), Geroi otechestva, Moscow, 2004
Oleg Kudenko, The Orbit of Life (Orbita zhizni), Moskovskii rabochii, Moscow, 1971
N. Nosov, Dunno on the Moon (Neznaika na Lune), Moscow, 1964
V.I. Rossoshansky, The Gagarin Phenomenon (Fenomen Gagarina), Saratov State Economic University, Saratov, 2001
Son of the Earth: A Book about the Saratov Years in the Life of Y.A. Gagarin (Syn zemli: kniga o saratovskikh godakh zhizni Iu.A.Gagarina), Privolzhskaia, Saratov, 1985
Mikhail Veller, Samovar, Miry, Jerusalem, 1996 (21)
Maria Zaliubovskaia, Son of Earth and the Stars. A Lyrical Story about Gagarin (Syn zemli i zvezd, Liricheskaya povest’ o Gagarine). TsK LKSMU Press “Molod”, Kiev, 1980.
English Articles (chronologically)
The Ottawa Citizen, 11 July 1961
The Glasgow Herald, 12 July 1961
The Miami News, 12 July 1961
The Palm Beach Post, 12 July 1961
The Times, 12 July 1961
The Southeast Missourian, 12 July 1961
The Daily Express, 13 July 1961, p. 3
The Ottawa Citizen, 13 July 1961
The Glasgow Herald, 13 July 1961
The Age, 13 July 1961
The Palm Beach Post, 14 July 1961
The Age, 15 July 1961
The St. Petersburg Times, 15 July 1961
The Straits Times, 15 July 1961, p.2
“Yuri lunches with Queen, honors Marx”, The Washington Post, 15 July 1961, p. 15
“Gagarin home after wild British sendoff”, The Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1961
“Yuri given big sendoff by Britons”, The Washington Post, 16 July 1961, p. 16
“Britain plays foolishly with Communist Fireball”, The Herald Journal, 16 July 1961
Flight, 20 July 1961
Time Magazine, 21 July 1961
The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, 21 July 1961, p. 10
Edmonton Journal, 31 July 1961
The Ottawa Citizen, 31 July 1961, p. 6
John Callow, ‘Yuri Gagarin in Manchester’, Working Class Movement Library Bulletin, No. 10, 1990
Richard Thorpe, ‘Leadership and Change: Prime Ministers in the Post-War World –Macmillan’, Lecture given at Gresham College, 30 November 2005; transcript available at http://www.gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?PageId=45&EventId=445
John Zarnecki, Principal Investigator for the study of surface problems in the Huygens Project, Lecture available at http://www.open2.net/oulecture2007/yuri.html (12/6/07)
Boris Belitsky, interpreter, 2009: http://english/ruvr.ru/radio_broadcast/2248140/
Francis Spufford, “The Red Plenty: lessons from the Soviet dream”, Guardian, Review,7 August 2010
Russian Articles (Chronologically)
N.P. Kamanin, ‘A Citizen of the Soviet Union’, Aviation and Cosmonautics, (‘Grazhdanin sovietskogo soiuza’, Aviatsiia i kosmonavtika), No.1, 1962, pp. 70-77
Alexander Soldatov, Ambassador of the USSR to Great Britain in 1961; a document dated 9 March, 1990
Kommersant, 27 March 1998
‘Why was Gagarin Smiling?’ (‘Pochemu Gagarin ulybalsia?’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 13-20 April 2000
Cited in V. Gubarev, ‘Her Mighty Menacing Majesty’ (‘Ee Velichestvo kuz’kina mat’), Parlamentskaia gazeta, 3 November 2004
Rabochii put’, 2 August 2007
Izvestiya, 28 October 2008
http://interwiki.info/index.php?title=Бернард (4 June 2009)
Evgenii Kliuev, ‘A Slice of Lemon as a Sign of Culture’ (‘Lomtik limona kak priznak kul’tury’) http://www.tverlife.ru/news/19300.html (26 March 2010)
Georgii Mitasov, ‘Sometimes “Zhiguli” won at billiards’, Ogoniok: www.ogoniok.com/archive/2004/4839/12-62-63/
http://cosmosravelin.narod.ru/r-space
Interview with Jonathan Coe, afisha.ru