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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

>"A lot of people, especially Gagarin's generation, took what you call bullshit seriously and believed in it."

This is true. Many people did believe back then.

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.

That is a good point. People can compartmentalize or be surprisingly shielded from some pretty horrifying things, though…

Almost makes you want to go vegan, doesn't it?

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.

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.

You don't see plainly from the language of the letter that he had internalized the terror his parents and society experienced? It's obsequious.

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.

Were we reading the same letter? It’s a sweet and innocent letter, no fear to be seen, not in English translation, nor in original Russian.

It seems that you superimpose your own beliefs on everything, twist the meanings so it would fit in your world view.

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