The Red Icarus

Four years after Sputnik, Korolev pulled off another perfect coup, putting a man into orbit. For this feat, with Khrushchev's approval, a military pilot with nerves of steel and unyielding communist faith had been chosen, Yuri Gagarin, a son of the humblest people, who, thanks to the opportunities the new social system offered to even the last of the last, would be the first to soar into outer space. What better ambassador for a triumphant communism? Carried out in great secrecy from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, far from prying eyes, on April 12, 1961, Voskod’s launch ended, after a few heartbeats and nearly two hours of weightlessness, with the cosmonaut's ejection from the spacecraft and parachute landing in a field in southern Russia, under the astonished eyes of a peasant woman. It was the triumph of the brave cosmonaut, rightly celebrated and pampered at home and abroad, and of Russia as a whole, but not of Korolev: to protect the man and his secrets, the great puppeteer had to remain in the shadows. The American reaction was a modest ballistic flight, a kind of giant canon shot with a projectile carrying an astronaut, Alan Shepard.