Articles
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Cadet Love13.01.2023
Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin’s main love from the time of the flying club was, of course, aviation. But, as we have already noted, he was not a monk and began to have relationships with girls quite early: one does not interfere with the other at all.
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Space as a premonition13.01.2023
Any book about Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin emphasizes his connection with space, which is logical and justified. But often biographers cross the line between fact and fiction so far that even the semblance of credibility is lost. Referring to teachers, relatives and childhood friends, it is proved that Gagarin from his childhood was going to fly between the stars, dreamed of meeting extraterrestrials, studied astronomy, studied Tsiolkovsky, lectured everyone around him about rockets, spacecraft, expeditions to the Moon and Mars. There are many examples of this kind, but I will quote here only one of his biographers, Colonel Victor Anatolievich Mitroshenkov.
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The Gagarin effect13.01.2023
The biography of Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin is usually divided into two parts – pre-flight (27 years) and post-flight (7 years), which is reasonable: the rights and opportunities that the first astronaut had following his orbital flight were incomparable with those he had as an Air Force senior lieutenant. However, his responsibilities also grew immensely: Gagarin was no longer his own man, his life schedule was written months in advance, he was to become in the shortest possible time a diplomat and orator, a politician and a propagandist – as we would say today, a media figure of the highest class.
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Space Initiative13.01.2023
Having flown into space and received worldwide recognition, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin found himself among the elite and immediately felt all the pleasures of life at the top of the Soviet social pyramid. The population was still only promised to build communism in twenty years, and the party leaders, in fact, got it by going beyond the traditional economic relations from the pre-war times.
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Star City13.01.2023
On April 9, 1962, a feature film called “The Very First”, directed by Anatoly Mikhailovich Granik at Lenfilm studio, appeared in the Soviet box office. It covered the astronauts’ training, their everyday life and even their relationships with girls, but, of course, without mentioning real people.
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Politics and literature13.01.2023
Once in orbit, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was transformed overnight from senior lieutenant to major and from third-class pilot to first-class pilot, a Hero of the Soviet Union.
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On the Question of God12.01.2023
For a long time a socio-psychological phenomenon has been known to manifest itself in ascribing to authority figures of the past ideas and beliefs which they did not share in order to strengthen the ideologies of the present. Above we discussed the example of how the pre-war Soviet ideologists wrote off any Russian nobleman as a revolutionary if he said at least once such things against the autocracy.
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Theme “Soyuz”12.01.2023
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev hoped that the propaganda hype surrounding the new record-breaking launches would help to reanimate his authority in the highest military and political circles, and he would be allowed to finally take on the program of sending spaceships to the Moon. Despite expectations, however, the situation remained uncertain.
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Victim of the race11.01.2023
Historians of cosmonautics consider Vasily Pavlovich Mishin, the first deputy chief designer of OKB-1, who took Korolev’s chair, to be less strong and purposeful person. They say that if he had been “punchy” like Sergei Pavlovich, if he had a holistic view of space expansion, he would have been able to avoid mistakes and would not have allowed the defeat in the lunar “race”.
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Topic for a dissertation11.01.2023
The fact that the members of the cosmonaut squad decided to obtain higher education became known almost immediately after their enrollment in the university. In fact, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin himself said it publicly in his short essay “Ready for new space flights” (magazine “Avia i Kosmonautika”, 1962, #4): “An urgent need for knowledge brought me and G. Titov to the auditoriums of the Military Air Engineering Academy named after Prof. N. E. Zhukovsky. In addition to excellent health, in-depth flight and engineering knowledge is necessary for the upcoming flights. A cosmonaut must be a pilot, a navigator, an engineer and a researcher.
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