"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?"
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.
It’s bizarre how you invent stuff between the lines to support some bias.
And make sure the secret police have no reason to suspect you
In books, it was called the "red tail" where you added a section sounding like this to appease the censors.
Unless you are 90 years old, I guess you were born in a Soviet Union on a more obviously bad trajectory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems that you superimpose your own beliefs on everything, twist the meanings so it would fit in your world view.
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.
This is true. Many people did believe back then.
A country can achieve great things and be built on a greater lie that everyone pays homage to but doesn’t really believe.
Just compare to the average nonsense you hear even impoverished American peasants say about "freedom."
So, depending on how you look at it, yes and no.
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.
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.
Please edit out swipes like that from your HN posts. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your comment would be fine without that sentence.