Cold War Cosmonaut

Stephen Walker - Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space

The Wall Street Journal - April 19, 2021

VDNKh, Moscow, USSR, February 1991 © Andrew Stuttaford

Readers of Stephen Walker’s fine new account of how Yuri Gagarin, a 27-year-old Soviet air-force major (he was promoted from lieutenant while circling the Earth), became the first man in space will discover quite a bit about Gagarin the man, but a great deal more about the program that put him into orbit 60 years ago, on April 12, 1961.

Vasco da Gama, Gagarin was not. For all his skill, toughness, unflappability and courage, he was no explorer. In a way, he was merely the most important of all the fauna that the Soviets shot into space. The first astronauts had relatively little control over their capsules; the first cosmonauts had far less.

Gagarin’s value was primarily symbolic. He was not only the embodiment of humanity’s scientific progress, but a living demonstration that the Soviets offered a better, faster path to the future than the U.S. His mission was to return alive, uninjured—and sane. To that end, during his training Gagarin, like other aspiring cosmonauts, was subjected to almost every brutality—physical and psychological—that his doctors could think up.

Like their American counterparts, the first Soviet spacemen had to be advertisements for the system in which they were raised, but more so. They had to fit, not just literally (Gagarin, at 5-foot-5, was two inches shorter than the maximum height allowed), but politically and personally. With his dazzling smile, charm, cheerfulness and peasant background, Gagarin was picked as the first to fly, over his friend Gherman Titov, who was more cerebral, more of a loner, more independent-minded, the son of a teacher. As Mr. Walker notes in “Beyond,” “Gagarin knew how to cast iron. Titov knew how to recite Pushkin,” a “suspiciously bourgeois” display of erudition. What’s more, “Gagarin had two healthy daughters. Titov’s only infant child had recently died and now he had no children, a bleak narrative for a would-be supreme representative of the Soviet state.”

That said, the runner-up was, on balance, the stronger character, and thus Titov, though only 25, was thought more suitable than Gagarin to cope with the next mission—17 orbits rather than one (Gagarin’s flight was over in under two hours, Titov’s took more than a day). This may, however, have been a lesser ordeal than the one that Mr. Walker describes well: Titov’s lifelong burden of only having been second into orbit, forever Buzz to Gagarin’s Neil.

The story of the early space race (and particularly, perhaps, to a Western audience, its lesser-known Soviet side) is of such intrinsic interest that it would be difficult to make it dull, and Mr. Walker, a documentary filmmaker as well as a writer of nonfiction, does not. On the contrary, he tells his tale with verve, and he includes a mass of detail, some technical, much of it—the depiction, say, of “Cape cookies” in Florida hoping to meet an astronaut at the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn bar—decidedly not. And then there’s the saga of the “creepily lifelike” Ivan Ivanovich, the first mannequin in orbit . . .

Switching his attention back and forth between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., Mr. Walker chronicles the Cold War contest to be the first to master manned spaceflight. The result is not exactly a surprise, but “Beyond” unexpectedly maintains the suspense. Similarly, Gagarin’s flight is transformed into a cliffhanger, even though we already know that “Yura” made it back home. Just how close it came to disaster was not revealed until after the Soviet collapse.

That Gagarin’s orbit was also a triumph for a totalitarian empire is not something that Mr. Walker stresses, but he does not need to. The oppressive, paranoid style of the Soviet regime is evident enough in his narrative, as are the strange twists that it created. Sergei Korolev was, more than anyone else, responsible for the astonishing series of early Soviet successes in space—and is, in many respects, the most intriguing individual in this book. The Kremlin considered him of such importance that his identity was shrouded in secrecy so deep that very few knew who he was.

Some 20 years before, Korolev had been a different kind of nonperson. He was working on rockets, but after his arrest during the Stalinist terror, confessed, after torture, to “sabotage” and was sent to mine gold in Kolyma, perhaps the worst of all the Gulag’s hells. Korolev’s life was almost certainly saved by his transfer to a sharashka, a laboratory within the Gulag, where his engineering expertise could be deployed in the service of the state. He was eventually released and given a new job in a department dedicated to developing missiles for the military. Among those freed with Korolev was someone who had denounced him to the secret police. That man now became, for a time, his boss: The Soviet Union was what it was.

In captivity, Korolev had, Mr. Walker relates, “learned to compromise where necessary, to exploit others if required, and sometimes to lie, cheat and deceive to get his own way. He learned to be pragmatic and political.” As “the chief of chief designers” of the U.S.S.R.’s strategic missiles, Korolev explained that his R-7, the first ICBM, could also be used to launch a satellite into orbit ahead of the Americans. He knew that Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, would take delight at the prospect of humiliating the U.S., and Khrushchev agreed to support this effort as long as it did not detract from the work on missiles. Korolev performed this balancing act brilliantly, piggybacking off a military program to pursue his dream of space travel. This led to Sputnik, and then, after a remarkably brief period, to Gagarin.

By comparison, NASA, a civilian agency, handicapped by U.S. shortcomings in rocketry as well as the pressure of being in the public eye, was more cautious. It struggled to keep up, and achieved too little, too late. That changed after Gagarin circled the planet. Less than two months later, President Kennedy committed the U.S. to putting a man on the moon. A new race was on.