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On August 5 Gagarin’s entourage arrived in Canada, at the invitation of the financier Cyrus Eaton. From Halifax they travelled 200 kilometres to Pugwash, Nova Scotia, where Eaton kept a substantial residence. He and the philosopher Bertrand Russell had convened a famous nuclear disarmament seminar known as the ‘Pugwash Conference’ at this house back in 1957. Not surprisingly, Moscow was delighted to receive an invitation for Gagarin to visit, but Eaton’s star guest quickly became distracted. Late on the evening of August 8 he learned that Gherman Titov had gone into orbit. He asked if he could send a congratulatory telegram, and this was arranged for him by Nikolai Kamanin. Titov heard Gagarin’s message during his sixth orbit, relayed to him by ground controllers. Cyrus Eaton politely eased a foreshortening of the festivities so that Gagarin and his colleagues could set off back to Russia immediately. All of a sudden the Russian delegation felt very cut off from important events at home. Kamanin remarked, ‘While we’re busy making speeches, the Americans are preparing spacecraft. We have to move ahead.’

Gagarin’s tour resumed within three weeks. His arrival in Cuba on August 24 was a politically charged event, an important gesture of Soviet solidarity with Fidel Castro’s two-year-old regime. Gagarin and Kamanin stepped off the plane into sweltering heat, dressed in dazzling white summer uniforms. Seen from their end of the political telescope, the Bay of Pigs had been a triumph, not a defeat. Castro’s aides happily told Gagarin, ‘The “beards” repelled the enemy,’ and Gagarin replied, ‘People who believe deeply in the rightfulness of their cause can never be brought to their knees.’ As so often, he knew exactly what to say without prompting. At a mass public rally he declared, ‘All two hundred and twenty million of us Soviet people are the true and devoted friends of Cuba!’14

By 1967, the last year of his life, Gagarin would not be so quick to praise the Soviet regime, or to take its every triumphant proclamation so much on trust.

8

THE SPACE RACE

Yuri Gagarin’s short journey through space was one of the most important events of the twentieth century – not for Russia, but for America, where an industrial shake-up of colossal proportions was unleashed in response. It was not just Velcro fabric and the non-stick frying pan that emerged as a result of the Space Race, but the entire fabric of modern technology. Microchips were developed because 1950s’ circuitry was not small enough to fit inside rockets and missiles. The Internet emerged from an attack-proof communications network laid down by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (a pre-NASA government department that planned, among other things, for America’s future in space). Modern diagnostic medicine owes an incalculable debt to the research conducted by the space doctors. The development of the global communications industry – for so long a science-fiction dream – happened with incredible speed after the invention of satellites. In all likelihood these technologies would have come along of their own accord, but probably nothing like as fast as they did. And all because a farmboy from Smolensk laid down a challenge to the most powerful nation on earth.

Dr John Logsdon, who heads the Space Policy Institute in Washington, DC, and has advised a succession of Presidents, explains the impact of Gagarin’s flight on the American psyche. ‘It was a sudden rebalancing of our power relationship with the Soviet Union, because of the clear demonstration that – if they wanted to – they could send a nuclear warhead across intercontinental distances, right into the heart of “Fortress America”. There was an uproar: how did we get beaten by this supposedly backward country?’

President Kennedy had not taken space particularly seriously until now, but on the evening of April 14, 1961 he was deeply agitated at the global response to Gagarin’s flight. He paced his office at the