Starman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin (50th Anniversary Edition)

Начало книги

The Soviet period of history is, for some, a time best forgotten. The massacres of the Purges, the horrors of the Gulags and forced labour, the fictitious Five Year Plans and the Orwellian lack of personal freedom hardly make for happy memories. The other side of the coin, however, is that many of humankind’s greatest achievements came from a nation that had to be almost entirely rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War. Twenty-seven million Russians died fighting the Nazis, and the entire infrastructure of their nation was disrupted – but after barely a decade, the Soviet Union was a global superpower, with new world-beating technology capable of reaching into space.

Yet, for all but a very few elderly die-hards, there are no great heroes from the Soviet era. Indeed, to be a hero at all under communism was itself an anomaly, for no individual could be greater than the collective whole. No, there were no great heroes… except for one.

Читать дальше →