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.
I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
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Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#62From 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.
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.
Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#63Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#64From 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.
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Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#65That he felt need to include such blatant political statements in a letter like this is telling.
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…
> 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.
Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What blatant political statement?
The political organization of my local region of Earth wouldn’t be top of mind for my last letter to my family, personally.
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.
Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#67> 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?"
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.
Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#69From 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.
> Hey babe, I am not coming back
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.
Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
What blatant political statement?
GP may be referring to this: > Raise them as people who will deserve to live a new communist society. > I wish to dedicate this flight to the people of the new communist society... Would it seem political if someone wrote: > Raise them as people who will deserve to live a new capitalist society. > I wish to dedicate this flight to the people of the new capitalist society...
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.