Despite the Cold War and the Space Race being in full force I like many in the West was shocked and upset to hear of his tragic death. Gagarin was not only a hero of the Soviet Union but for many across the world.
At 07:55 UTC, when Vostok 1 was still 7 km (4.3 mi) from the ground, the hatch of the spacecraft was released, and two seconds later Gagarin was ejected. At 2.5 km (8,200 ft) altitude, the main parachute was deployed from the Vostok spacecraft.[43]
Gagarin's parachute opened almost immediately, and about ten minutes later, at 08:05 UTC, Gagarin landed. Both he and the spacecraft landed via parachute 26 km (16 mi) south west of Engels, in the Saratov region at 51.270682°N 45.99727°E.
Anyone who hasn't seen "For All Mankind" should check it out. It depicts a future that might have transpired if the Russians had beaten the USA to the moon.
It's a great show and at times really makes you wish that's how things would have transpired (i.e., we would not have taken a collective ~30 year break from space travel). Fully seconding this recommendation!
I had occasion to write a letter like this. Being able to write it means you've made the right choice. If you cannot bear to write it, perhaps you shouldn't be taking the risk you are taking.
According to this random website, the letter was opened in 1968 on the actual event of Gagarin's death and declassified in 2011 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his flight.
The translation of the Gagarin’s letter in this article, which explains that it’s “translated by Yves Gauthier … author of a magnificent biography in French on Youri Gagarine” reads better than the translation in TFA, in my opinion
I love that he name checks and quotes Chkalov. Not that I expect anyone to know who Chkalov was, but there's a Chkalov Drive in Vancouver WA, and I went down the "how do I pronounce that, who is it named for" rabbit hole a few years ago, so his name always makes me smile. The Vantucky locals typically say Chuckalov or similar, and look blankly at anything close to ˈtɕkaləf
You don't need a t there (native Russian speaker), it's a clear ch like in check.
This is a common mistake when transliterating the Russian ч (ch), t doesn't add anything. In fact, t makes it more difficult to pronounce it while it's an easy sound for most people to say.
What’s happening here is that /tɕ/ is a single sound — I’d transcribe it /t͡ɕ/, with a little tiebar to make that clear. This sound is an ‘affricate’, meaning that it’s pronounced by starting with a /t/ and releasing it with the tongue so that it finishes with a /ɕ/ sound. /ɕ/ alone would be the sound written in Russian as ⟨щ⟩, which is of course different. Incidentally English ⟨ch⟩ is also affricated, although it’s pronounced slightly differently, as /t͡ʃ/ rather than /t͡ɕ/.
> This sound is an ‘affricate’, meaning that it’s pronounced by starting with a /t/ and releasing it with the tongue so that it finishes with a /ɕ/ sound.
I don't agree. I don't start with a /t/ when I'm about to say any Russian word that starts with ч (ch). The tongue is in a different place altogether.
With т, the tongue is closer to teeth than when I start with ч (ch). This should be true for all since we're talking about more or less the same sound – ч and /ch/.
Of course for French and English speakers /ch/ represents two different sounds.
I don't speak Russian so I'm somewhat reluctant to quarrel with someone who does on this point, but the phenomenon of <ч> being used to write an affricate sound that starts with a dental stop is super-well documented in linguistics literature -- on the basis of extensive studies with, and often by, native Russian speakers.
That dental stop might or might not be exactly the same sound as any of those that are written with Russian <т> or English <t> (which, per Wikipedia, are themselves slightly different in place of articulation). English-speakers might be misled into thinking the <ч> is a familiar English sound if it's transcribed as [t͡ʃ]; Russian Wikipedia, for example, suggests it's actually [t̠̪͡ʲɕ̪] (different in three different respects from [t͡ʃ]!). But /t/ is also the closest we can probably get in English to what may be actually be, say, [t̪ʲ], even though it does have a slightly different place of articulation.
I think it would be fair to say, considering evidence from both English and Russian Wikipedias, that the Russian <ч> does start with a "t-like" sound from the English perspective, yet that sound is at least not precisely identical to that written with English <t>.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a Vietnamese speaker about the word "đúng" which means "right" or "correct".
To my English ears it sounds like "doom" (Southern Dialect). The "ng" ending sounds like an "m". But to this Vietnamese speaker, they said "no, 'ng' makes a sound like the English word 'sung'"
And the vocalization you mentioned for the Russia sound is similar. "ng" in Vietnamese is the same "ng" sound in English but you close your mouth at the end and purse your lips like the "m" sound in English.
But I think we're both right, it's just that each person hears the same sound in different ways due to the language we grew up with.
> You don't need a t there (native Russian speaker), it's a clear ch like in check.
English can inherit some of its spellings historically from French, the language of diplomacy prior to the wars. In French the tch is necessary for pronunciation, like tchécoslovaquie. Also, American English gets various spellings from a number of different Slavic and German immigrant groups. There just isn't "a way" to spell many of these place names and terms, like borsch/borscht/borshch
That t is not entirely useless (non-native Russian speaker here). Even the pronunciation of 'check' has a starting t sound in it: tʃɛk. Without the starting t, you might end up with something that could be spelled sheck in English.
So I'd argue, that the t in transliterations helps people who don't speak Russian to get the ч sound right. Since the transliteration as 'ch' is ambiguous and doesn't appear to work for many of the inhabitants of Vancouver, WA. So ideally we should all use IPA or better yet, ask a Russian speaker.
> Without the starting t, you might end up with something that could be spelled sheck in English.
That might be true.
The truer thing though is, English speakers at least (unless they're a linguist or read IPA in the morning), go ahead and pronounce (or try to) the t and run into trouble every time because t-ch-kalof is a challenge they're not up to (Russians won't have a problem with it, even when drunk).
(Native Russian speaker here) I don’t really agree. The “t” and “ch” require very different tongue and jaw positions and combining them is awkward and would require a vowel in between when used in a real word.
English speakers are perfectly capable of pronouncing ch vs sh (e.g. chair vs share) whereas sh vs sh’ (ш/щ) might be more challenging.
Especially since there exist words in russian language that actually have "т" before "ч", and the sound it makes is different. Compare "отчёт" and "очки" (the closest similar word i could think of by the sound of the first half of it). If you try pronouncing the first word as if "т" wasn't there (or the second word, but as it "т" was there), it will sound both very different and wrong.
That (the IPA designations) could, and probably is, helpful for breaking down sounds on paper but taking that /t/ from what is a manual of sorts and dropping it into a foreign transliteration is the opposite of helpful.
Everybody expect the French won't have any problem reading out without stumbling Chkalov or Chmil. Supplying the /t/ is a copout to please the French and, as a bonus, to piss of the Russians (especially the Chekalovs ones).
I just cut and paste the IPA from Wikipedia! For actual pronunciation guidance I asked a native Russian speaker!
[Edit: I think it's possible in the IPA that the t is there to make it a harder ch sound like in check, rather than soft as in chagrin or chalet, kindof like the d in Django makes it the hard j common in English, as opposed to the soft j natural in French]
Don't know. When I think about it, all Russian ч (ch) pronunciations are consistent unlike some other sounds that vary depending who is talking. Not sure why they'd want to add anything to it. It's an easy sound from get go.
My personal pet hate is how Andrei Tchiml's[1] surname creates unnecessary difficulties for English (and other) speakers. It's a simple ch sound at the beginning and yet everyone stumbles on it trying to speak out a mouthful of consonants while they're not there to start with.
French, I think, are particularly having trouble with it.
I remember reading an SF story in which the Soviets think Venus is a relatively hospitable jungle, send Gagarin there, then come up with the plane crash story to cover up their mistake. Sadly I can't find it at the moment.
> 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?"
It 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.
What 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.
"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
Of 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.
> 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.
Doesn’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.
A 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.
The Terror has ended by October 1938, when Gagarin was 4 years old. I wouldn’t call that “living through”.
I’m not saying there weren’t political prisoners or executions later. There were, but the scale is incomparable. We can safely say Gagarin met a lot of people who had won the war growing up, but he had not seen someone familiar taken to prison for no reason every other day, and I would assume had not heard much about it.
I didn’t comment the letter, I commented your idea that he lived through the Terror and thus the letter. No, that wasn’t the case.
And once again: the terror the society experienced that was vivid to Gagarin was from the Germans and not from Stalin (although indeed it experienced both).
I don’t want to speak to the tone of the letter, you may interpret it as designed to do something and you may not. But to say that it is somehow influenced by the terror that happened before his time and not to someone in his family, the terror about which for all we know he knew nothing, and in society that had a major uniting experience since, is to put your thoughts in his head.
He 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.
Even 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?
Literally every single nation does that. It's a natural bias.
E.g. Americans don't lose sleep over Assange or the fact that Snowden is now a citizen of the evil Russia.
> Hence the degree of phoniness in a letter ostensibly to one's spouse that is only intended to satisfy the politburo
You really don't account for perspective. To Gagarin you'd sound no less phony if you'd said something like "I am proud to pioneer the advancement of our free democratic world". Also, consider that it was a modernist era back then - people hadn't yet really figured out being goofy.
"I'm proud to pioneer the advancement of our free democratic world" would be a completely weird and abnormal thing for someone to say in a private correspondence. To explain where I'm coming from in seeing the hand of tyranny and fear in this letter: If I ever said anything remotely like that, anyone who knew me would think someone was holding a gun to my head.
Politicians may talk like that. But normal people in ostensibly private communications don't speak in political slogans unless they're either afraid or suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Real 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.
I 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.
Surely 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?
Absolutely not. The Nazi project was extremely logical, and had massive conscious support from Germany, especially from its elites.
Germany explicitly argued they wanted to replicate the American expansion into the "Far West" but against the Eastern European "Far East" instead, and explicitly made positive reference to the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the "greatness" of America.
Hitler: "The struggle we are waging [in Crimea] against the Partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the Red Indians. Victory will go to the strong, and strength is on our side. At all costs we will establish law and order there. […] Saxony, for example, will enjoy an unprecedented trade boom, and we shall create for her a most profitable export market, which it will be the task of Saxon inventive genius to develop."
The Germans felt themselves as Americans. They weren't "brainwashed," they were just racist.
The Soviet Union built itself up through hard work and they had every right to be proud of what they accomplished, especially the defeat of Nazi (and more generally Western) efforts to enslave them, and especially since, unlike their Western counterparts, they accomplished it through hard work rather than through pillaging and looting the rest of the planet.
"Brainwashing" doesn't exist. It's a way for liberals—American liberals especially—to falsify history and to refuse to accept what people are saying, discarding it as nonsense in favour of more palatable and self-exculpatory narratives.
The "brainwashing" I refer to in nazi germany would be the initial racist belief in "aryans" and their supposed superiority. Sure, once someone had been indoctrinated with such state sponsored quasi-religious propaganda, one could say that the looting and pillaging followed logically. But it followed logically from an unprovable belief in a racist utopian future, which was only falsified by their defeat (at the hands of not just the USSR, but the western liberal democracies you seem bent on demonizing).
Likewise, the looting and starvation of Ukraine and the conquest of the Baltics under Stalin, and the subjugation of Central and Eastern Europe, the mass murder of Poles, the invasions to put down popular democratic movements in Czechoslovakia and Hungary were forms of expansionist pillaging, just as the looting of Ukraine is today, which follow "logically" from a total ideology once a population is properly indoctrinated. Of course not to "open markets" but to spread the communism which apparently everyone loves so much it must be enforced at gunpoint. If you object so strenuously to the term "brainwashing" then "propagandizing" and/or failing that instilling terror in the populace would work equally well. But let's not be ahistorical and pretend that the collectivization and industrialization of the USSR didn't come at the cost of tens of millions of lives and as a result of an expansionist, imperialist series of conquests.
You definitely have no clue about what happens in real life. You could easily find similar praises among the average Americans. I've encountered the same things in Canada as well.
From a modern perspective, it is a bit harsh to demand from one's wife ¨Hey babe, I am not coming back, please raise our two kids, oh and by the way please help our parents also!¨ - if she really was not at all informed.
But that is not at all what the letter says, isn’t it? It says he thinks everything will be all right, but he is writing the letter just in case something goes wrong.
> if she really was not at all informed
She surelly must have known that she married an air force pilot. She might not have known the exact details of this particular mission, but she also must have known that he was working on special stuff when they moved from Murmansk to Moscow when Gagarin was selected to the space program.
It is not like one day he went out for milk, but ended up in space.
> from a modern perspective, it is a bit harsh to demand from one's wife
“Take care of the kids” is one of the fundamentals of marriage. That is what marriage is for. Heck this is basic human decency. If you made a kid you are responsible to bring that kid to adulthood as safe and as sound as you can. Especially and even more so if the other person you made the kid with dies.
She is not responsible for taking care of his parents, not to the same degree she is for her kids. And you might notice he is putting on a very different level of emphasis on that one. He literally says “if you have an opportunity, help them somehow”
All in all I don’t find the requests harsh at all. Sad of course, but not harsh.
Yes, because asking your wife and the mother of the children the two of you created together knowing that they're a commitment of decades at least, to then take care of those children for as long as she can is just so old-fashioned and sexist? What's the "modern perspective" he missed out on here? That caring for one's own children is a circumstantial and fluid responsibility depending on convenience levels? Asking her to help his parents is also wrong how? What a sadly shallow concept of marriage one would have to have if making such requests is too much to ask.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I was arguing that there's nothing at all wrong with asking a wife (or husband) to take care of the kids or even asking either to try doing the same for your parents. Marriage shouldn't just be a passing transactional thing with responsibilities that completely end if one partner dies.
She was married to a jet pilot in the 1950s. It‘s not like he lived an otherwise safe life, as evident by his death in a plane crash 7 years after his space flight.
I am not sure about the 1950s in Russia. But to add some color to this patriotism, I have heard many stories from my grandfather in India who had fought for freedom against the British, where it was quite common for people to put country first, strongly identify themselves with the freedom movement and write letters to loved ones about missions/movements they are going to take part in where they might not return and how they hoped their sacrifice would lead to a better and free India.
Right now the politics is shit. And hence we aren't able to relate to this. And it would be insane for us to write a letter to loved ones with political statements. But at that time, when it was a national movement, maybe it wasn't that odd.
The fact that it surprises many is telling, actually. Used to be much more common to have strong political opinion, back then y'know?
Also the guy already abandoned said wife and kids and literally went to space for the government, sounds like a strong selection biais
I doubt they would make you a cosmonaut without being a convincing communist, the same way they wouldn't probably make you an American astronaut if you were one.
If he were a doubter, it would still make sense to include that to potentially make it easier for his family to obtain or preserve a decent position in the Soviet society. These sorts of heroes were supposed to be idols and demigods of the country. This wasn't a society that would respect you having a private apolitical part of life, especially for a man of such a position.
I almost wrote how people are clueless about living under totalitarianism, where there can really be no such thing as truth or honesty. Except maybe heavily drunk in a small company in a dacha, if you're feeling adventurous. But really I think people would often pay lip service to any social orthodoxy in such a situation (contrary to what you might think), because of the benefits of psychical comfort and fitting in.
> I almost wrote how people are clueless about living under totalitarianism, where there can really be no such thing as truth or honesty
Now let's apply this to the modern days, where declaring yourself as a conservative can kill your career and activists feel justified in screaming to your face on the street if you refuse to regurgitate their rally cries.
If you want to go there, being harassed by an opinionated mob is actually a mostly democratic phenomenon. In an autocracy, it would be a beating, either by the police, or thugs operating in agreement and probably paid by the police. You wouldn't even think of speaking openly of your views, or being beaten, as of things a sane person would do. Not condoning anything BTW.
Look, I think your career ending example would make a better case for what you are trying to argue. If you dig into history of longstanding democratic countries like US and Switzerland, you find plenty of rioting and chaotic infighting throughout centuries. Classic republican (as in, US founders) thinking would be that while unfortunate, this is preferable to a police state being able to establish a true monopoly on violence. Then you could have your "order" and "safety", but at the cost of naturally deteriorating toward thinking and doing only what the central power allows you.
I don't think we are disagreeing. Of course ideological and political conflict are to be expected in any healthy civil society. But my argument is that the threat of violence by the government is no longer what keeps people quiet, no matter how discontent they are.
Honestly yes. While I'm not going to comment on the behavior itself, the difference between individuals a acting as a group and the state is such an important distinction that it's written into our constitution.
Much of the bill of rights is about what the state can't do to you in a way that doesn't impact how private citizens interact. Not saying it's perfect, but I'm far less concerned about an internet mob coming after me than the US government
I'm sure he knew a party officer would read the letter and he wanted to ensure his widow's loyalty wouldn't be questioned. Such was life in the Soviet Union.
It’s not just a political organisation, it’s a political movement that completely reorganised and changed Russian society since 1917. One may argue, that it’s the reason behind accelerated economic and scientific development that lead to space exploration.
I think the America parallels to this statement would be God, democracy, "our way of life" and such, references to which would not at all be unexpected in a letter such as this from the 60's.
Americans think "communism" is an icky political thing that Soviets were coerced to like, unlike "freedom and democracy (TM)", worthy abstract ideals that all Americans (nay, all Humans) should rightfully worship naturally and organically.
It's pretty amusing watching you trying to lay a trap and then beating up a strawman with your sarcasm. This letter was meant for the masses to read, and not to be kept in private between him and his family. Not the regional flair of political messaging it contains is telling, but the fact that it contains political messaging at all.
If my wive went on a risky mission and died about it, and all I get from her was a letter about "freedom", "democracy" and maybe "our great nation" and stuff like this, it would break my heart even more.
The reason those seem starkly at odds is not likely to be a result of devotion so much as the tyrannical structure that typically surfaces around the former persuasion, compelling (usually by continual threat) such affirmations repeatedly.
