Issue #1498      20 April 2011

Culture & Life

The First Man In Space

Rob Gowland

The year 1961 was a turbulent one for imperialism (but then, what year isn’t?).

The year began with the murder of the man who had led the Congo to independence from Belgium, Patrice Lumumba. He had been treacherously seized by soldiers in the pay of the CIA and handed over to the forces of Moise Tshombe, an imperialist stooge intent on breaking away the mineral-rich province of Katanga.

A couple of months later the CIA launched an invasion of the revolutionary island of Cuba, landing a force of 1,500 CIA-trained and armed anti-Communist Cuban mercenaries at the Bay of Pigs. The invaders were assured their task would be a doddle: news of the invasion would be greeted by a general uprising and life in Cuba could go back to the good old days of vice, gambling and gangsters.

To the CIA’s evident surprise, the people took up arms against the invaders and in defence of their revolution. The invasion was crushed in two days.

On the whole, it had been a bad week for the CIA. Only five days before, the Soviet Union had excited the whole world by sending a human being into orbit around the Earth.

The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, had taken off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 9.07am Moscow time on April 12, 1961, orbiting the Earth in one hour and 29 minutes and landing in Russia at 10.55am.

Gagarin was the son of a carpenter on a collective farm. He trained as a moulder at a trade school near Moscow then went on to an industrial college at Saratov. While there, he also took flying lessons. After graduation he joined the Soviet air force.

His 4.75 ton Vostok 1 spacecraft was only 2.58 metres in diameter. His flight proved that humans could survive the rapid acceleration and deceleration of take-off and landing and paved the way for all subsequent flights into space.

Gagarin’s flight brought him immediate world-wide fame. He received the Order of Lenin and the USSR’s highest decoration for valour, the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

Across the Soviet Union, monuments were raised to him and streets named in his honour. He was never sent into space again but took an active part in training the cosmonauts who followed him.

He became a deputy to the Supreme Soviet in 1962 and was a frequent good will ambassador to other countries. In 1968 he was killed, together with another pilot, in the crash of a two-seater jet aircraft on a training flight. He received a state funeral and his ashes were interred in an honoured place in the Kremlin wall.

A worker, and the son of a worker, through the achievements of Soviet science and technology Gagarin literally scaled heights never previously achieved by any human being.

After his death, the town of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin.

Also after his death, the propaganda mills of imperialism tried to besmirch his name with baseless claims implying that he was “secretly anti-Soviet”. That a dead cosmonaut would be made the subject of this kind of innuendo and rumour-spreading testifies to the stature of his reputation in the world.

However, despite the best efforts of the rumour-mongers of imperialism, Yuri Gagarin’s reputation stands unsullied, a true son of the Soviet Union.

It may seem strange now, but prior to Gagarin’s flight, many people doubted whether humans could actually travel into space other than in science fiction. That was why his flight was so important.

Sputnik had put an object into space but Gagarin’s flight blasted man into space. The way to the stars had truly been opened.

The political effects were curious. My cousin Larry, an auto mechanic, was working on a Czech-built Skoda at the time and a passer by in the street plucked up the courage to ask him “That’s from over there, isn’t it?”

“Over where?” said Larry. “You know, from where they make the Sputniks.”

Larry had an interesting chat with him about different social systems.

Not all that long afterwards, I walked into the home of the parents of a university friend. They were democratically minded but certainly not left-wing. They were watching the news and my friend’s father looked at us triumphantly and declared: “They’ve got three of them up there!”

No need to ask who “they” were or where “up there” was. It was the first multi-cosmonaut flight (another Soviet first, like the first woman in space).

In May of 1961, subsequent to Gagarin’s fully orbital space flight, the US sent their astronaut Alan Shepard in a successful sub-orbital flight. Later in 1961, the socialist GDR surprised imperialism by building a 45 kilometre wall across Berlin in less than a week to seal its previously open border with the West, a running sore for espionage and sabotage, especially economic sabotage. After the Wall was built the economy of the GDR went ahead by leaps and bounds.

And a month later, in September 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld the Secretary General of the UN was killed when his plane blew up and crashed in Rhodesia. Hammarskjöld had approved the use of UN forces to prevent Moise Tshombe from establishing an “independent” puppet state of Katanga in the Congo.

The assassination of the Swedish diplomat was widely held to be the work of the CIA.

The assassination plots and other dirty tricks of imperialism that have been revealed over the years make the security precautions undertaken by the USSR seem only too necessary.

Think what might have been achieved if such precautions and secrecy had not been necessary. But imperialism dreamed then of world domination – and still does.

The working class and their allies dream of a world at peace, but they need at all times to carry the wherewithal to defend their dream – if necessary.  

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