The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin by Andrew L Jenks (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 927 improve state-sponsored entertainment options throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, as my research has found, and considered how this improvement impacted convictions for hooligan behaviour. LaPierre’s refusal to consider hooliganism as age related seems incongruous, since his own findings indicate that those in their twenties and thirties committed most hooligan acts: an analysis of age and life stage as related to hooligan behaviour would have strengthened LaPierre’s analysis. Moreover, when terming hooliganism an adult crime and not a youth crime, LaPierre problematically applies Western definitions of youthhood instead of Soviet ones, which ascribed youthhood to all citizens eligible to join the Komsomol, the mass Soviet youth organization, an age range that spanned 15 to 28 and sometimes even older by the late Khrushchev years. Using this Soviet definition of youthhood, the statistics on age breakdown provided by LaPierre indicate that young people aged 14 to 29 committed most hooligan acts in the early and mid 1960s: no wonder, then, that the Soviet state expressed such concern over youth hooliganism (p. 47). My criticisms should not detract from reader attention to this thoughtprovoking and high-quality book. LaPierre deserves praise for helping enrich our understanding of Khrushchev-era hooliganism. This well-written and affordably-priced book makes it highly suitable for class assignments, and constitutes required reading for anyone interested in post-Stalin Soviet history and in crime studies. Department of History Gleb Tsipursky Ohio State University Jenks, Andrew L. The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling: The Life and Legend of Yuri Gagarin. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2012. viii + 316 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $35.00. In this biography of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, Andrew Jenks takes the reader through Gagarin’s life and through Soviet history, indicating the importance of Gagarin for post-war Soviet social and cultural myths and realities about heroes. Jenks writes that Gagarin left the earth’s atmosphere a human being and returned to earth a national icon. Over the next years he became a motivational speaker, Communist Youth League activist, and son of the motherland. Yet he also enjoyed the fast and privileged life of a Soviet hero: he loved to dress up in costumes for masquerade balls, he was a great charmer and storyteller, and enjoyed driving fast cars. He preached sobriety, yet relished drink, presented himself as an ideal family man, yet his home life was far from ideal, and he may have been a womanizer. Gagarin was important as a new kind of hero — a hero of the potentialities of Soviet society under SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 928 Khrushchev and of reborn faith in the Communist future. Under President Putin, Gagarin’s heroism has been reborn to serve the state. As a provincial Russian of working class background, Gagarin arrived in space by good fortune and hard work. He joined the Pioneers, studied hard, played sports equally hard and did well in school and work. He was good at buttering up teachers and classmates. Having finished trade school, Gagarin enrolledinafour-yeartechnicaluniversityinSaratov.Hedistinguishedhimself as a leader. He developed a close relationship with the secret police and the political officers of his university. He joined DOSAAF (Voluntary Society for Aid to Army, Airforce and Navy) which enabled him to begin flight training — although with unsafe airplanes at crowded fields. He pursued a military career in office/pilot training at the Chkalov Military Academy. His determination and personal qualities led to his selection as the first cosmonaut. Gagarin’s life raises the issue of technological failure in Soviet society, something never covered in public. To celebrate Gagarin’s flight was to celebrate the technological glories of the Soviet space programme, but to hide the failures from view. A large number of personnel including cosmonauts died in accidents — as did many of the dogs used in space flight. Gagarin himself landed 500 km from the target and was not located by officials until thirty minutes later. He died in a jet training accident in 1968 — whose miserly two-page accident report was released only in 2011. Gagarin was the focus of a personality cult. His cult was born amidst deStalinization and joined the cults...