5 ms·
> I fully trust the technology. It should not fail. But it sometimes happens that a man falls and breaks his neck with no reason at all. Something may happen he
by floren 4y ago
> I fully trust the technology. It should not fail. But it sometimes happens that a man falls and breaks his neck with no reason at all. Something may happen here too. I do not believe it will happen.
"How do I write a letter to tell my wife I died because the rocket blew up, without sounding like I doubted the glorious Soviet rocket?"
- ctrlp 4y ago"I wish to dedicate this flight to the people of the new communist society, which we are already entering, to our great Motherland, and to our science" And make sure the secret police have no reason to suspect you
- wpwpwpw 4y agoWhat makes you think he didn't mean what he wrote?
- chx 4y agoOf course he didn't. I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, no one, not even high level party members took this bullshit seriously enough to write it truly in the farewell letter of their families. He wrote this to protect his family, if the state believes Yuri was not a true Soviet man they might take away their pension. The reason it's laid down so heavily because the risk was very great as he might be blamed posthumously for a failure. It's easy to understand the desperation from this if you know how to read these... In books, it was called the "red tail" where you added a section sounding like this to appease the censors.
- bee_rider 4y agoDoesn’t it seem possible he’d have a different view of the Soviet Union than you? He was born near the beginning, spent most of his formative years in the Soviet Union that had just made a big contribution to taking down the Nazis and was now launching a him, a former farm-boy, into space. It seems like a pretty compelling story from his point of view! Unless you are 90 years old, I guess you were born in a Soviet Union on a more obviously bad trajectory.
- noduerme 4y agoA cursory reading of the history of Stalin's mass murders and deportations puts paid to this. No one living through the Terror mistook this bullshit for a Captain Kirk Iowa boy in space fantasy. And his usefulness isn't lost on the current FSB animals who wear Yuri pins inside their jackets.
- bee_rider 4y agoThat is a good point. People can compartmentalize or be surprisingly shielded from some pretty horrifying things, though…
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoAlmost makes you want to go vegan, doesn't it?
- chx 4y agoHe was but a small child then, being born in 1934 and they were very good at hiding the worst atrocities which was not exactly hard those years given the rather limited mass communication. No one was posting a Tiktok about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars.
- noduerme 4y agoEven with modern communications, most Russians publicly deny knowing that their government is committing atrocities against its own citizens. Of course, they know just as well as people knew throughout the Soviet era. Hence the degree of phoniness in a letter ostensibly to one's spouse that is only intended to satisfy the politburo. Could Gagarin possibly have been unaware of recent history or of what happened to heroes who failed?
- splitstud 4y ago[dead]
- 4y ago
- rodary 4y ago> no one, not even high level party members took this bullshit seriously enough Don't know when you were born (I was in the 1960s). You're wrong. A lot of people, especially Gagarin's generation, took what you call bullshit seriously and believed in it. Hence, were willing to lay down their life for the cause.
- kortilla 4y agoIt was the USSR, nobody did. But there was a vast institution dedicated to ensuring that everyone maintained the doublespeak. A country can achieve great things and be built on a greater lie that everyone pays homage to but doesn’t really believe.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoIt launched on top of a "Vostok-K" rocket, which ultimately launched 13 times, 11 successfully. I don't know if an ~85% success rate is actually good, but given that this was the very early days of the exploration of space, I'm willing to accept that it's not bad.
- noduerme 4y agoyeah, the whole letter sounds like it was coded with a gun to his and his wife's head.
- FpUser 4y agoNope. It does not
- noduerme 4y agoReal letters to wives don't include patriotic and political phrases about children being raised in a new paradise to come, except those written by cult members and those (in this case) written under duress.
- RedCondor 4y agoA farmboy going to space praising communism makes a whole lot of sense. Just compare to the average nonsense you hear even impoverished American peasants say about "freedom."
- noduerme 4y agoSo your argument is he was a brainwashed peasant?
- RedCondor 4y agoI think "brainwashing" is a nonsense, racist concept invented by the CIA in the 1950s, by agent Edward Hunter passing himself off as a "journalist," in order to superciliously rationalize away the powerful appeal of communism to working class people. So, depending on how you look at it, yes and no. https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/ https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
- noduerme 4y agoSurely brainwashing as used now can describe any type of system. Weren't the nazis brainwashed? Aren't you implying that the American peasants are brainwashed? How could it be that the only people who were truly free and doing what they wanted were the ones living in a dictatorship featuring show trials and a gulag system?
- bilqis 4y agoWhat he means, that accidents happen. Same accidents that took so many American astronauts’ lives with a very sophisticated hardware, not something done first time in the history. It’s bizarre how you invent stuff between the lines to support some bias.