Cosmonaut’s Day
Yesterday Sultan, one of our staff, wished me “Happy Holiday”, which took me a little bit by surprise, because it wasn’t a public holiday and I couldn’t think what he was talking about.
I shouldn’t have been that surprised, because it happens quite a lot and I should be getting used to it. The locals enjoy a good celebration and seem to seek almost any opportunity to have one.
So, I asked, “What holiday?” I thought the answer might have been that is was “Roditelskiy Dehn”, “Parent’s Day”, the ninth day after Easter, (the Tuesday in the week after Easter), when people go to the cemetery to visit the graves of their deceased parents and relatives. However, that is an Orthodox tradition, and although Sultan is Kyrgyz, he belongs to a Baptist Church and I wasn’t sure if they keep the same tradition. The answer I got, however, was something totally different, and caught me off guard. It was: “Cosmonaut’s Day”.
That took the mystery of the occasion. After almost fifteen years in Kyrgyzstan, I have experienced several Cosmonaut Days, and I had simple forgotten the date this year amidst the upheavals of the last week or so. (See: A sense of deja vu – 7th April 2010).
Actually, in Kyrgyzstan, the day is not really marked in any special way, although people do sometimes refer to it in greeting each other, as Sultan did, and people may drink a toast at dinner in honour of the cosmonauts. As I said, any excuse for a celebration is eagerly embraced.
Cosmonaut’s Day was a holiday, (but not “a red-letter day”, not a public holiday), which was celebrated in the Soviet Union on April 12 to commemorate the first manned earth orbit.
On April 12th, 1961,the spacecraft Vostok 1, (“East 1″), was launched from Baikonor spacedrome in Kazakhstan with the 27 year old, Senior Lieutenant Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin on board and into the history books.
In fact, although the spacecraft carried enough supplies for ten days, in case the retro rockets failed to fire and the spacecraft had to relay on a natural decay of its orbit, the flight actually lasted just 108 minutes and completed just one orbit of the earth. In that orbit, however, it reached an altitude of just over 200 miles and so earned for Gagarin his place in history as the first man in space.
There are some “conspiracy theories” which suggest that he wasn’t the first cosmonaut that the Soviet’s had sent into space, but that he was the first to return. There is no concrete evidence to support such theories.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the flight was without it’s controversies. There are two in particular that are worth noting.
First, under the rules at the time, to be considered a successful space flight, the astronaut was supposed to land in his craft. The Soviet scientists, apparently, were not certain about many aspects of the proposed flight, including whether the pilot could survive a landing, and so Gagarin actually ejected from the craft before the landing, about 25km south west of the city of Engels. Gagarin actually landed some 10 minutes after the capsule. The Soviets insisted that he had landed with the craft in order to comply with the rules claim the record as the first manned orbit of the earth, and the truth was reveled only years later. This shouldn’t take away, however, Gagarin’s place in history as the first man to fly in space.
Secondly, Gagarin is reputed to have said during his flight: “I don’t see any God up here.” This phrase does not appear in the transcript of the flight communications. The origin of the phrase is sometimes traced back to a speech made by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev at a Communist Party rally where at one point he said: “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any God there”. Gagarin was, apparently, baptised into the Orthodox Church as a child in keeping with the tradition of the times.
The flight was a great success for the Soviet space programme, marking another first over their Cold War rivals, the Americans, and was proclaimed around the world. Gagarin became a hero and lionised everywhere he went. His one regret, according to some accounts, was that he was considered so valuable a person that hid flying activities were extremely restricted and he was never even considered for a repeat flight.
It was decided to commemorate the event annually by making the day of the flight’s anniversary a holiday, which was established by a government decree on April 9th, 1962.
Cosmonaut’s Day is still marked in many of the former Soviet countries – especially in Russia where celebrations are centered on the city of Korolyov, (formerly Kaliningrad) and Gagarin’s tomb in Red Square, in Moscow.
Bishkek