By Cam Scott
On April 12 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin exited earth’s atmosphere aboard the Vostok 1, completing one full orbit of the planet and securing his legend as the first person to travel into outer space.
In just under two hours, Gagarin’s flight expanded the scope of human experience, and a popular imagination spanning all sides of an escalating Cold War. And although the so-called “Space Race” of the era remains inseparable from US and Soviet military accumulations, Gagarin was correctly hailed as an international hero and a figure of both working-class power and scientific promise the world over.
A 1961 commemorative statement from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union explains the significance of the event for working people everywhere: “When the working class took power into their hands in October 1917, many people, including those who were honest, doubted whether the working class would be able to govern the country and to preserve at least the achieved level of development in the economy, science and engineering … The working class, the Soviet collective farm peasantry, the Soviet intelligentsia, the entire Soviet people are now demonstrating to the whole world their remarkable success in science and engineering. Our country has taken the lead over all other states in the world and is the first to blaze the trail into outer space.”
In the Soviet idiom, the honour of this milestone belonged to the whole people – not to a specialized class or profession in isolation of its many supports.
This vision of collective achievement considerably exceeds any narrow nationalism, as well as the familiar terms of Cold War military contestation. In fact, the CPSU used the occasion to repeat a plea for disarmament: “Let all people, irrespective of race or nationality, colour, religious creed or social status, spare no efforts to ensure a lasting world peace. Let us put an end to the arms drive! Let us carry out general and complete disarmament under strict international control! This will be a decisive contribution to the sacred cause of peace.”
Gagarin passed away in 1968 during a training flight, and would not live to see the jointly crewed Apollo–Soyuz mission in 1975 – often described as a symbolic “handshake” between Soviet and US cosmonauts. But Gagarin’s memory continues to resonate with working people everywhere, as a reminder of their own capacities and of the possibilities for research programs motivated by our common dreams rather than by profitable scheming.
As a symbol, the Soviet cosmonaut sits at the crossroads of poetry and science; urging technical innovation but calling us back to its imaginary complement, which is the property of all.
For this reason, April 12 (“Cosmonautics Day”) has long been observed as a politically secular event in cities across the globe. Though originated in the former USSR, the commemoration of Gagarin’s flight continues today by way of the International Day of Human Space Flight, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2011, or “Yuri’s Night” – a North American celebration of “the human aspects of spaceflight” launched by the non-profit Space Generation Foundation in 2001.
Yuri’s Night
In Winnipeg, the Manitoba Museum has celebrated Yuri’s Night since 2010. The annual event includes games and activities, a dance party in the planetarium, and presentations by astronomers and engineers including members of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. As a multi-generational and experiential evening, Yuri’s Night was a great success, continuing until the COVID-19 pandemic placed the event on pause for several consecutive years.
This April 12 ought to have been the first celebration of human space travel and of Yuri Gagarin since 2019 – until the Manitoba Museum decided to cancel the event under pressure from a small but influential chorus of Ukrainian nationalists, determined to see continuity between the present Russian government’s war in Ukraine and the achievements of the Soviet era.
The historical illiteracy of this lobby cuts two ways.
On one hand, the present Russian Federation is a direct outcome of the dismantling of the Soviet system and its social innovation. On the other hand, the Ukrainian nationalist movement and its allies clearly mean to launder a more fundamental anti-communism through their opposition to Russia’s current government. This misrecognition remains steeped in a seething Russophobia that transcends politics, even as it borrows ferocity from any number of historical vignettes.
The task of disentangling these complicated histories would be a fool’s errand in itself, but the premise that world historic feats of discovery should be disqualified from celebration by national origin smacks of a deep-seated chauvinism.
In this respect, the cancellation of Yuri’s Night marks a real concession to reactionary logic by a prominent educational institution.
“The Manitoba Museum values meaningful dialogue and believes it is important to listen, reflect, and take responsibility when our decisions fall short of the expectations of the people we serve,” reads a March 26 statement on the cancellation. But which voices should the museum serve? How, and when, are they heard? And which perspectives does this jarring cancellation omit?
Like so many public relations debacles, this controversy started on social media. “Celebrating such events, especially at a time when Russia – the self-proclaimed successor of the USSR – is waging an aggressive war against Ukraine, is incredibly tone-deaf and offensive,” reads one prominent comment beneath an online review of the Manitoba Museum.
While the museum responded to this non sequitur with cowed deference, many commentators leapt to the event’s defence. Several pointed out that by this logic, NASA’s integration with the US military industrial complex ought to discredit any mention of space exploration whatsoever.
Another post honoured the legacy of Sergiy Korolev, the Ukrainian engineer and fabled “Chief Designer” who oversaw the launch of Gagarin’s craft. In fact, the Vostok 1 program was a multinational effort at every moment, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and involving engineers from throughout Soviet Central Asia.
Both historical coherency and logical consistency are beside the point of this pressure campaign, however.
One can imagine any number of ways to defend this celebration, insisting on the scientific neutrality of Gagarin’s advance, or correcting the record as to the friendship and collaboration of both Russian and Ukrainian Socialist Republics in the era under consideration. Neither approach is likely to satisfy the demands of a Ukrainian nationalist diaspora that has forged its identity in contradistinction to their Russian neighbours on one hand, and their twentieth-century socialist counterparts on the other.
This reactionary movement has deep roots in Canada, where it seeks to obliterate all memory of the progressive Ukrainian identity that was instrumental to the construction of the Canadian socialist and labour movements.
It may in fact be naive to depoliticize Gagarin, who took flight bearing a ribbon from the Paris Commune into space. But we can say with certainty that he did not bomb Ukraine fifty-four years after his death simply by dint of his nationality. Such prejudice and narrative manipulation ought to have been ignored entirely, but these voices have been coddled instead.
This sets a disturbing precedent for all educational institutions in an era of soaring war budgets and corresponding racial jingoism.
Popular education for peace
The attempt by Ukrainian nationalists to backdate a present conflict and conscript the whole of Russian culture and identity in its cause isn’t only historically bizarre. Ironically, these spokespeople are themselves the more reliable conduit between the terms of twentieth-century Cold War and post-Soviet geopolitics, insofar as their attempt to dehumanize Russians and portray their very mention as tantamount to invasion authorizes Canada’s ruinous contribution to the war in Ukraine.
Canada has sent almost $22 billion to Ukraine since 2022, more than $8 billion of which has gone towards armoured vehicles, drones and munitions. Last December Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged even greater arms expenditure for Ukraine under NATO’s Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, and in January he signed a pact alongside NATO allies pledging to continue arming Ukraine, even entertaining the possibility of dispatching Canadian troops.
At this meeting in Paris, Carney was clear on Ukraine’s strategic priority and its benefit to his swelling war budget. In his words, “the largest military buildup in generations is coming over the course of the next five years, an additional $80 billion of investment, in part because of issues like this.” Bluntly, Carney’s resolve to use Ukraine as an investment outlet for financial capital is sure to forestall any possibility for peace in the region, which means more working class Ukrainian and Russian deaths.
This is the backdrop against which the Manitoba Museum finds itself under scrutiny from a hardcore anti-Russian chorus, determined to propagandize on behalf of this interminable war in every available venue.
The susceptibility of Canadian institutions to such propaganda is another problem, however, that threatens the very premises of public education. Although the Manitoba Museum is largely reliant upon private benefactors and provincial funding, all such institutions have been affected by serious cuts amid the sweeping austerity of Carney’s war budget.
The Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau and the associated Canadian War Museum in Ottawa are cutting permanent staff levels by 18 percent over the next three years due to a $2.4 million reduction in the most recent federal budget. In Winnipeg, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights – an ideological minefield and place of advocacy – faces $3.2 million in cuts over the next three years. According to a statement from the Canadian Museums Association, “the federal budget has abandoned Canada’s museums.”
These funding shortages are the flipside of a massive military accumulation, justified in large part by Canada’s undeclared war against Russia – a chiefly financial involvement at expense of Ukrainian life. Given this larger context, the capitulation of a Manitoba institution to war propaganda feels particularly bitter. If the teaching of science and history can be so easily distorted by national antipathies, then our movement for peace and disarmament must focus as strongly on the repressed past as on our endangered future.
If anything, Gagarin’s spaceflight defies the logic of narrow nationalism. Rather, his achievement belongs to an ingenious sequence that ennobles not just the entire species, but the working classes who compose its larger and most innovative part.
Though Yuri’s Night in its more recent conception has nothing to say about this lesson per se, its many organizers have nevertheless grasped the universalism in Gagarin’s lesson and the optimism of his symbol – everywhere except in Winnipeg, that is, where the forces of ultranationalism and anti-communism appear to have overpowered a scene of popular education and of scientific awe.
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