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

¹⁰ BACK TO WORK

To their mutual surprise, Russian and American space medical experts had discovered by 1963 that the hardships of flight into space amounted to no more than a collection of minor irritations: nausea, vertigo, a heavy feeling in the head, a dryness in the throat. All these symptoms were uncomfortable, but any conventionally fit human could survive a trip into orbit. From now on the emphasis was on training not just the right bodies, but the right minds and intellects for working aboard an ever more complex succession of spacecraft. Korolev, Kamanin and other senior figures in the Soviet manned rocket programme re-examined the personal files of sixteen promising cosmonaut candidates previously rejected by the medical boards in 1959. They decided to give them another chance, because their engineering and academic skills were now regarded as more important than extreme physical fitness. By May 1964 this fresh cosmonaut squad had been supplemented with ten non-pilot technical specialists from within the space community itself. They were, in fact, talented engineers from within Korolev’s OKB-1 design bureau. Meanwhile most of Gagarin’s old friends and colleagues from the original 1959 group of twenty, including Gherman Titov, Alexei Leonov, Vladimir Komarov and Andrian Nikolayev, were studying very hard to maintain their superiority over the twenty-six newcomers.[1]

On December 21, 1963 Colonel Gagarin was appointed Deputy Director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre, reporting directly to Nikolai Kamanin. To a large extent this new job was a means of promoting him without putting him in harm’s way. During the last three years he had fallen behind in every aspect of space training, and he had not been allowed to fly jet fighters because of the risks involved. Unlike a normal combat pilot, he was not expendable, but had to be preserved in one piece as a diplomatic and social symbol; even if he had been able to return to space-flight status at a moment’s notice, the qualities that had made him so ideal for Vostok were no longer so important. It was not enough just to be a fit young pilot with the right attitude and background. If Yuri wanted to board a spacecraft again he would have to study orbital mechanics, flight systems, computer control and space navigation, then convince his superiors to put him back on the ‘active’ flight list. Korolev certainly wanted him back in the fold, but he had long ago warned his favourite ‘little eagle’ that he would have to get back into academic training as soon as possible.

As far back as June 1962 the Chief Designer had lost patience with the endless foreign trips and had complained, ‘We’re losing Gagarin and Titov as far as space is concerned.’ He criticized Kamanin for failing to look after them properly. As so often, Kamanin deflected his own faults onto others, noting in his diary, ‘Looking into his complaints, one can see Korolev’s bitterness at having to keep his name under cover.’[2]

Korolev was already thinking beyond Voskhod, with plans for an ambitious new spacecraft capable of extraordinary feats: changing its orbit on command, adjusting its pitch and yaw attitude with millimetre accuracy and, most startling of all, making a rendezvous with another craft and docking with it to form a larger aggregate assembly. The new spacecraft was to be called ‘Soyuz’, meaning ‘Union’. Of course this was a direct response to America’s Apollo ship. In fact, Soyuz’s general layout, with a rear equipment section, a re-entry capsule in the middle, and a dropaway docking compartment at the front, seemed suspiciously similar to an early proposal for Apollo drawn up by the General Electric Company in a failed bid to win a NASA contract.

Soyuz was a key element in future lunar plans, but it would not be ready for another two years at least. In the meantime, Konstantin Feoktistov, one of Korolev’s most trusted engineers and a close colleague of Oleg Ivanovsky, was developing Voskhod as fast as was humanly possible, so that Korolev could fulfil his private ‘deal’ with Khrushchev. Feoktistov was also training to fly in Voskhod as the first specialist engineer-cosmonaut, along with the nine other engineers from OKB-1 who had passed the (by now much simpler) medical qualifications. Either this was Feoktistov’s way of showing faith in his own work or it was Korolev’s gesture of thanks for developing Voskhod so quickly. Feoktistov was the only person within OKB-1 who never gave ground to the Chief Designer on technical matters. In their stubborn fearlessness, the two men were remarkably alike – the world having already done its worst to them. While Korolev came come close to death in a Siberian prison camp, Feoktistov fought for the Red Army and was captured by the Nazis. After a brutal interrogation, they lined him up against a ditch and opened fire. He fell onto a pile of dead bodies and hid under them until nightfall, until he could limp away. The Voskhod capsule cannot have held many terrors for him.[3]

As Feoktistov and other highly skilled and experienced men like him began to rise in the cosmonaut hierarchy, so the chances were lessened for Gagarin to catch up with his studies and earn another flight into space.

In between his foreign trips, Gagarin had attended cosmonaut lectures as often as possible, but on many occasions he took his seat in the classroom only to be called away at short notice for some diplomatic function or other. When Khrushchev’s administration ran into trouble from 1963, Gagarin managed to extend his academic work because he was not required to be quite so much in the limelight. In March 1964 he came to the Zhukovsky Academy in Moscow, a renowned school covering all aspects of aviation and aerodynamics, housed in the elegant Petrovsky Palace on Leningradsky Prospekt. Catherine the Great built Petrovsky Palace as a rest-stop for royal travellers, and Napoleon sheltered within its crenellated walls during the fire of Moscow in 1812. Now it was a necessary stop for cosmonauts on their way up into space. A special course had been established for the new science of space flight: the ‘Pilot-Engineer-Cosmonaut Diploma’. Candidates would have to study all aspects of space and contribute a thesis in a chosen field of specialization, which they would then defend before their tutors in written and oral sessions at the end of the course. The cosmonauts were becoming more like their American counterparts, who also undertook diploma work to qualify themselves for space flight. (In a notable thesis, NASA recruit Buzz Aldrin outlined the mathematics for orbital rendezvous, thus earning himself a secure ranking in the astronaut corps.)

With every intention of making his mark at Zhukovsky, Gagarin selected for his thesis nothing less than the holy grail of manned space flight: a practical design for a reusable winged space plane. Alexei Leonov, who studied with him for several months, recalls, ‘He was very strict with himself. I was always amazed how conscientious he was about his studies, how thoroughly and painstakingly he prepared his work, and how hard he tried to keep up with the others. Somebody who was full of airs and graces wouldn’t have put himself through all that.’

Obviously a spaceship with wings could come home in an orderly fashion, landing at an airbase instead of falling down into a ploughed field or splashing into the sea. The wings would slow and control the final descent, so that the ship could touch down softly on wheels. Unlike the clumsy space capsules, a winged craft could be refurbished for another flight. The difficulty was to balance the aerodynamic usefulness of wings with the need for bulky re-entry heat-shielding. NASA had already started work on so-called ‘lifting bodies’, experimental craft that were neither capsules nor aircraft but something in between. They were dropped at great altitude from beneath the wings of B-52 bombers, and most of them landed successfully. However, it was impossible to send them into space because the addition of rocket engines and fuel tanks would have made them too heavy; and there was the intractable problem of the heat-shielding. At that time no sufficiently strong and lightweight material seemed capable of protecting the lifting body’s stubby wings against melting away during re-entry. The ‘ablative’ heat-shielding of conventional capsules was thick and heavy, and it burned away irretrievably, leaving terrible scars on the capsule’s flanks. The bulky resins and fibres used for the shields were completely unsuitable for wings.

In all, the spaceplane presented the most complex technical challenge. Even the current NASA space shuttle is a flawed design, consisting as it does of heavy components and throwaway tanks, with clumsy ceramic tiles to protect it against the heat. The search is still on for a genuinely efficient design. For Gagarin to research into these issues in the mid-1960s was proof of his great seriousness in attempting to re-qualify for space flight. Today few people remember his engineering skills; only his simple farmboy’s smile. His painstaking and disciplined diploma work at the Zhukovsky Academy has been entirely forgotten except by his closest colleagues – in particular Sergei Belotserkovsky, the Deputy Director at Zhukovsky and the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the cosmonauts’ academic skills in space flight and orbital dynamics (while Kamanin and the specialists at Star City taught them how to operate the hardware).

One of Gagarin’s most significant achievements was to understand that, for safety reasons, his spaceplane had to be capable of an unpowered landing. Some of his tutors insisted that this was not technically possible. Gagarin argued that the spaceplane was useless if it could not make a ‘deadstick’ descent. After all, how could the crew get back if their engines failed? Just as for the Vostok capsules, a small braking motor should be enough to nudge the spaceplane out of orbit, he insisted; after that, it should be capable of reaching the ground without engines. His first solution was to bring the plane down by parachute, but of course that idea missed the point. Eventually he decided that it should glide to its landing. NASA’s modern shuttles do precisely that, with no use of engines during their final approaches.

In some crucial aspects, Gagarin’s thinking on the spaceplane concept outstripped that of his tutors; but on matters of strict aerodynamic science they pushed him hard. How would his spaceplane react to tail winds, head winds and cross winds? What about sudden, brief gusts? Had he calculated the drastic change of airflow as the ship neared the ground? Time and again Gagarin ran complicated mathematical simulations on primitive analogue computers (alongside his friend and collaborator Andrian Nikolayev), attempting to mate the airflow numbers to his ideal design. He revelled in the cut-and-thrust arguments with his tutors and collaborators, constantly striving to improve his ideas.[4]

Gagarin’s spaceplane work was considered top-secret – in fact, all of the diploma work conducted at Zhukovsky was highly classified. Just as for Korolev, Belotserkovsky’s identity was a secret and he was never acknowledged in public. He was not even allowed to take snapshots of his favourite pupils, in case Western spies should identify them. Even so, he used a hidden camera to obtain his keepsakes. ‘We hid all the films in a safe, and developed them a long time later. I don’t think we did anything wrong. Thanks to our unofficial action, we have an important and historical collection of photographs today.’

Gagarin became so absorbed in his work that he spent long periods staying at the Academy’s hostel, instead of with Valya and the children. But the pursuit of academic excellence was not the only thing keeping him away from home.

Gagarin also spent a good deal of time at the Yunost Hotel, just outside the western perimeter of Moscow’s Garden Ring road. The Yunost was associated with the official communist youth movement, ‘Komsomol’. Gagarin was always welcome there, and room 709 on the seventh floor was kept in reserve for him, funded on a semi-permanent retainer by the Komsomol. On frequent occasions, banquets and receptions would be held at the Yunost for Komsomol delegations visiting Moscow from other republics in the Union, and Gagarin would be expected to attend and give rousing speeches. Often the parties would drag on until the early hours of the morning, at which point it seemed best for Gagarin to sleep at the Yunost, instead of struggling home through the freezing Moscow nights. In the relative informality and privacy of the hotel, he could relax and entertain his friends. An excellent billiards player, he seldom lost, except on one notorious occasion when he surrendered a game to ‘Nona’, a young chess champion noted for her attractive appearance. Gagarin’s male companions could not understand how he could bear the humiliation of losing to a girl, but he had another game in mind.

Gagarin was a fit and handsome young man, who also happened to be the most famous and desired star in the world, with the possible exception of the ‘fab four’ young lads of the Beatles pop group; but it would be a mistake to think of him as a heartless womanizer. He was neither more nor less a sexual adventurer than any other superstar might have been in his circumstances. By all accounts, he loved Valya and was utterly devoted to his two little children. But Valya was not content for her husband to take his wedding vows casually. A single act of adultery was sufficient to upset her, let alone the ‘several’ that must certainly have occurred throughout the couple’s married life.

On one occasion Valya decided to visit her errant partner at the Yunost Hotel. Gagarin’s favourite barber at the Yunost, Igor Khoklov, blames lax security at the front desk for what happened next. ‘It was a different era in those days. Any woman would have jumped on Gagarin, walked with him, slept with him, even. He had a few opportunities at the Yunost. After a party when he was tipsy, a leading sportswoman, a ski champion, took an interest in him. He didn’t seduce her, she seduced him, but around six o’clock his wife arrived. Perhaps she’d had some kind of premonition? I would say the military police [at the front desk] were at fault, because they could easily have telephoned up to Yura’s room to warn him, but they didn’t. And she created an uproar, she really tore Gagarin apart. The other girl just picked up her clothes and ran. I’d say that sportswoman really cost Gagarin dear.’

For Valya, this must have seemed all too familiar – the bang on the door, the arguments, the wounds to her husband’s face (this time caused by her own nails, rather than by a jump from a balcony). Next morning Khoklov had to disguise the scratches on Gagarin’s cheeks prior to a meeting with Khrushchev. Khoklov recalls, ‘I did his make-up. I was licking his wounds, so to speak. He was the kind of a man who had a taste for women, but I wouldn’t say he was throwing himself around left and right. Valentina loved her husband very much, but because of all the things that had happened, she was very jealous. Plus the fact that she caught him.’

Gherman Titov says, ‘It was very difficult for Yura’s wife to get used to the fact that he didn’t really belong to her any more.’

One of the restraining influences on Gagarin’s behaviour after Foros was the bodyguard assigned to him, on Khrushchev’s orders – a tall, sour-faced man nicknamed the ‘polecat’, who immediately dampened the mood of any room he walked into, although he was apparently very nice, once one got to know him. By 1962 Gagarin had persuaded Khrushchev to withdraw the guard, but he had merely replaced him with three rather poorly disguised undercover followers. Khoklov says, ‘If Gagarin liked a woman he couldn’t go with her. You can’t put the bodyguards in the same bed. If you want a drink, it’s just the same. You have to buy a drink for the bodyguards.’

The other major factor was sheer pressure of work, not only at Zhukovsky but also at Star City, and during official ceremonial and propaganda functions. These were reduced in the Brezhnev era but by no means eliminated. Khoklov recalls Gagarin arriving for a haircut one day and commenting about a drunken tramp lying on the street outside, who had soiled his trousers. Exasperated by his relentless schedule, Gagarin joked bitterly, ‘That’s an intelligent fellow over there. He finds an opportunity to rest and do all the other stuff at the same time.’

Igor Khoklov was often despatched to the Kremlin to cut Khrushchev’s hair. The wily old barber retains an unflattering memory of the endless KGB staffers and secret policemen he encountered in those days. ‘I was in the room with Khrushchev and his special bodyguard, who kept his hand in his pocket where he hid his gun. I was thinking, “Who’s faster, you with your gun or me with my razor?” A senior manager then came in, a good bloke, Armenian I think. He saw the guard and said, “We trust the barber. With Igor here, a guard isn’t needed.” So the guard had to go and wait outside the door.’

And it wasn’t Igor the barber, but Khrushchev’s closest political colleagues who eventually cut his throat.

Khrushchev demonstrated that the Soviet Union was a modern technological nation, a powerful player on the world stage, with its missiles, space rockets, satellites, computers, jet planes, aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. His weak spot – as for so many Russian leaders before or since – was providing the people back home with the most basic necessity of life: food. In the autumn of 1963 he was forced into an embarrassing series of emergency measures, buying wheat from America to make up for the poor harvests yielded by his over-ambitious and under-planned ‘Virgin Lands’ grain-planting programme.

In a similar manner to President Kennedy in the US, Khrushchev looked to the glamour of space to divert attention from his failures. On October 12, 1964, Korolev made good on his promise, successfully launching Voskhod I with three crewmen aboard. Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov were denied ejection seats in the cramped cabin, and there was not even room for them to wear spacesuits. Instead, they had to make do with simple cotton coveralls. However, the Voskhod incorporated some useful improvements on the old Vostok design. There was a back-up retro-rocket pod at the front of the craft, just in case the primary unit failed, and the re-entry capsule had a slightly flattened underside with a cluster of small rockets to soften its impact with the ground, thereby allowing the crew to stay aboard all the way to touchdown. Soviet spokesmen proudly heralded this new ‘soft-landing’ concept, obviously forgetting all the stories they had told about Gagarin’s very different homecoming technique in 1961.

Voskhod I flew too late to benefit Khrushchev. The capsule came home on October 13, and on the very next day the First Secretary was deposed. In fact, he was called away from his retreat at Foros even as the flight was in progress. In Moscow a special meeting of the Politburo informed him, much to his surprise, that he had just resigned due to age and increasing ill-health. Khrushchev’s deputy Leonid Brezhnev took advantage of the unresolved grain crisis to take over as First Secretary. Khrushchev’s faithful aide Fyodor Burlatsky says today, ‘Never mind the coup which happened recently during Gorbachev’s time. This was a real coup, prepared by the KGB and Brezhnev against Khrushchev and against anti-Stalinism.’

Almost immediately Gagarin’s status was affected. His foreign trips were curtailed and his lines of communication with the Kremlin severed. Brezhnev did not care to be reminded of his predecessor’s space triumphs. Burlatsky, who knew Gagarin very well, noticed an immediate change in the young cosmonaut’s mood. ‘I’m sure that he became unhappy. It wasn’t because he disliked Brezhnev. No, quite the opposite, it was because Brezhnev regarded him as a representative around the world for Khrushchev. Immediately Gagarin lost his status, his position. I had the feeling he didn’t know what to do with himself. Politically he represented the hand of peace extended from the Soviet Union to the West, but Brezhnev started up the arms race again, and he didn’t need people like Gagarin.’ Burlatsky stresses the perpetual truism of political life in Russia. ‘It’s not so important who’s who, but who belongs to whom. Gagarin belonged to Khrushchev, and that was enough to finish his career in Brezhnev’s time.’

Burlatsky is not alone in his opinion that the new hard-line regime ‘affected Gagarin’s life in such a way that he lost everything, and he had to try and find himself again in some kind of new experience. Drink, perhaps. He was devastated. One day he was a representative of his country, and the next, a simple pilot without any position. Somebody once wrote, “The greatest unhappiness is to have known happiness before.” Brezhnev and his Politburo friends took that happiness away, and they were guilty of everything that happened to Gagarin afterwards.’

Gagarin’s personal driver Fyodor Dyemchuk sums up the political fall-out for the First Cosmonaut in the most straightforward way. He remembers that in the Khrushchev days Gagarin’s frequent trips to the Kremlin were happy affairs, often accompanied by laughter and drink. In Brezhnev’s time the trips became far less frequent, ‘and Gagarin would come out looking sad and sit quietly in the car. I wouldn’t ask him what was wrong. I didn’t need to. I could see he was busy with his thoughts.’

Gagarin’s greatest initial shock was that he was no longer able to work behind the scenes on behalf of the many people who came to him with pleas for help. He was hardly a saint, but he was without doubt an essentially good-natured man, a product of his decent upbringing in Gzhatsk and Klushino. The virtues of social and personal responsibility that he had learned during the war years stayed with him throughout his life. Among those former colleagues who hint today at Gagarin’s moments of caprice, his occasional misbehaviour and thoughtlessness, none of them denies his warm and generous behaviour towards friends and strangers alike when they were in trouble. In fact, by 1964 all the cosmonauts who had completed missions were well known, and their influence stretched a long way in higher quarters.

At Star City a special Correspondence Department was established ten days after Gagarin’s flight to deal with the immense quantities of mail coming in from all over the Union, and many foreign countries besides. Over time the department was expanded to deal with other cosmonauts’ correspondence, with seven secretaries on permanent duty (at least two of whom were answerable to the KGB). Sergei Yegupov headed the operation with two principal aims in mind: first, to help Gagarin with his workload; second, to keep an eye on any sensitive matters that might crop up. His duties are more politically relaxed now, and the world’s fascination with cosmonauts has faded, but he still runs the department. ‘Most often the letters were addressed to “Gagarin, Moscow”, or “Gagarin, the Kremlin”. In the end it was decided to give him a special post code, “Moscow 705”. Over the years, I think we must have received at least a million letters.’

Most of the letters – but by no means all of them – expressed joy, wonder, admiration and pride at Gagarin’s achievement. Yegupov does not like to acknowledge that some of these letters must have been ‘difficult’ in some way. ‘We still keep the entire archive at Star City, and everybody can get access to them. You will see, there are no bad letters anywhere in the correspondence.’ It seems reasonable to assume that some of them must have been weeded out, but a great many distressing pleas for help still remain. ‘About ten or fifteen per cent of the correspondence contained various requests from ordinary citizens asking for better housing, the installation of water supply points, an increase in pension payments, and applications for kindergartens – incidentally, that was a pretty complicated issue in those days.’

The most sensitive letters came from prisoners asking for their cases to be reviewed. Fyodor Dyemchuk remembers a particular incident involving a young man harshly sentenced for a first offence. ‘Gagarin said, “What shall I do? I have to help, because if we save this boy it’ll be so much easier and simpler. If he goes to prison he’ll simply be lost for ever into the crime system, and he’ll never make it to become a man.” He went everywhere and visited everybody’s offices. He really pushed, and I think he got some positive results.’

One can only imagine Gagarin’s anxiety when faced with requests like these:

Yegupov pulls out other typical examples from the archive. ‘Here’s a letter asking for better housing for the Kurdyumov family, nine people living in a single room, sixteen metres square, in an old house with damp running down the walls. Here’s another request for better housing from citizen Morazova, and meanwhile she has a child with an inborn heart deficiency; or this one, where prisoner Yakutin says he was wrongly convicted, and requests the verdict to be cancelled.’ Somehow Gagarin managed to answer almost all the letters, showing great concern, and even folding a particularly heart-breaking example into his wallet as a spur to his conscience. He was, however, entirely unmoved by some of the pleas he received:

‘Why did you have to show me this?’ he complained to Yegupov. ‘I’ve wasted three minutes on reading it.’ Then he spent a good half-hour phrasing a careful and warm reply to a 15-year-old boy from Canada who had politely written in for career advice.

As often as not, people would actually accost the First Cosmonaut in person with their pleas for help. Alexei Leonov says that whenever Gagarin visited his family in Gzhatsk, he would find various local dignitaries waiting for him in his parents’ house with requests for political favours. ‘He did a lot for his old neighbours and the people of Smolensk. Gzhatsk was originally an old-fashioned merchants’ town, but after 1961 it started to bloom, and it turned into a modern, highly developed city.’ Gagarin’s name and reputation stimulated a drastic change of fortune for the entire region.

But there was one notable occasion when Gagarin refused point-blank to help. A mother wrote to him saying that her son was in trouble for cutting down a fir tree in a forbidden area at Christmas time. Gagarin looked into the business, found out that it had probably been more than one tree and that the young man was selling them off for profit. He recommended the man be sacked from his job. According to his driver, Gagarin became pretty angry and said, ‘What happens if everyone goes and cuts down “just one” fir tree? Where are we going to live then? Any day now, we won’t have anything left.’

Leonov puts this (and other similar incidents) down to Gagarin’s perceptions of the earth from space. ‘After his flight he was always saying how special the world is, and how we had to be very careful not to break it.’ This is a common enough truism by modern standards, taught to all of us in school, but what must it have been like for the very first man in space to discover it for himself? In April 1961 Gagarin was the only human being among three billion who had actually seen the world as a tiny blue ball drifting through the infinite cosmic darkness.

So the tree-cutter lost his job at Gagarin’s specific request, but more often he was inclined to help his petitioners by appealing to higher authorities. ‘You could hardly find a single man who wouldn’t assist him if he asked for it. Who could refuse him?’ says Yegupov.

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev could.

In his first months in office, Brezhnev was preoccupied with achieving dominance over his co-conspirator Alexei Kosygin. Brezhnev’s attitude towards Korolev was similar to Khruschev’s: an insistence on orbital ‘firsts’, accompanied by a hazy lack of interest in the exact technical details. However, the scheduled mission of Voskhod II did interest Brezhnev, because it promised a major new triumph: the first spacewalk, enabled by a flexible airlock attached to the re-entry ball’s flank. Korolev was just as keen to try out this new concept. In 1962 he prepared Leonov, who was one of the prime candidates for the first walk, with a suitable pep-talk. ‘He told me that any sailor has to learn to swim, and each cosmonaut has to know how to swim and do construction work outside his vehicle.’

On February 23, 1965, Korolev launched an unmanned test vehicle with the new airlock attached. The mission ended badly when the capsule broke up during re-entry, as a result of poor command signalling from the ground. A few days later, an air-drop of the capsule from a plane also failed because the parachute did not open. Oleg Ivanovsky remembers Korolev saying in disgust, ‘I’m sick of flying under rags.’ He hated parachutes and always wished that he could design a rigid rotor system, or some other aerodynamic device to replace them. Perhaps it was a mercy that he never lived to see a much more terrible parachute failure in April 1967: a failure that might easily have claimed the life of Yuri Gagarin…

The Voskhod II mission took off on March 18, 1965 with wonderful timing, ahead of NASA’s first Gemini mission by just six days. This time there were only two crewmen in the cabin, to make room for their bulky spacesuits. Pavel Belyayev remained inside, while his co-pilot Alexei Leonov squeezed into the flexible airlock and pushed himself out of the capsule. For ten minutes he enjoyed the exhilarating sensation of spacewalking, and then began to pull himself back into the ship – only to discover that his suit, at full pressure, had ballooned outwards, so that he could no longer fit into the airlock. Extremely exhausted by his efforts, Leonov had to let some of the air out of his suit to collapse it, so that he could squeeze back aboard.

Then, prior to coming home the next day, Belyayev saw that the ship’s attitude was incorrect for the braking burn, and he shut down the automatic guidance systems before they could make matters any worse. With help from Korolev and ground control, he and Leonov had to ignite the braking motors manually on the next orbit, displacing their eventual landing site by 2,000 kilometres. The capsule descended onto snow-covered wilderness near Perm, alongside the very northernmost reaches of the Volga. It smashed into a dense cluster of fir trees and was wedged several metres off the ground between two sturdy trunks. Meanwhile the recovery teams were 2,000 kilometres away, in the zone where they had expected the capsule to come down. The cosmonauts had to spend a restless, frozen night waiting to be picked up. They pushed open the capsule’s hatch but dared not climb down from their precarious perch, because a pack of wolves was howling somewhere very nearby in the darkness.[5]

These difficulties were not mentioned in the Soviet press reports, and the mission was a great propaganda triumph all around the world, particularly after Yuri Mazzhorin had responded to a stern phone call from Alexei Kosygin’s office. ‘They said that not a single word about the landing in Perm should appear in the media. I had

no idea what that region looked like, but I had to go to all the television stations and make sure you couldn’t identify Perm in any of their news footage.’ Subterfuge aside, the fact remains that Alexei Leonov walked in space well ahead of his American rivals. The London Evening Standard ran an article about the US astronauts Young and Grissom, gearing up for the first Gemini shot, with the headline ‘follow that cab!’, while The Times described Leonov’s adventure as ‘a fantastic moment in history’. Once again NASA had been trumped. Leonov’s spacewalking rival, Ed White, did not get his own chance to catch up until the second Gemini mission on June 3, nearly three months after Voskhod II’s flight.

An accomplished artist, Leonov set about designing a commemorative postage stamp showing his spacewalk, and spent hours happily chatting with Gagarin about the differences each man had observed in the curvature of the earth. ‘My view was much steeper, much rounder than Gagarin had reported, and it worried me, but then we realized that Voskhod’s maximum orbital altitude was 500 kilometres, and Vostok’s 250 kilometres, so I was much higher. You see, everything has a sensible physical explanation.’ It was the infernal rules of secrecy that made no sense. Leonov’s innocent stamp designs had to be vetted by the KGB propaganda experts. ‘Everything was so secret – they were all civil servants, you see. I drew a completely different spacecraft that wasn’t anything like [the one that had really flown] and then they were satisfied.’

In the wake of this more-or-less successful mission, Voskhod III was scheduled to coincide with the Party Congress of March 1966. Cosmonauts Georgi Shonin and Boris Volynov began training for an ambitious rendezvous with an unmanned target vehicle. Even the journalist Yaroslav Golovanov was recruited for forthcoming Voskhod missions, along with two other writers, after Korolev had expressed frustration at the cosmonauts’ rather prosaic descriptions of space flight.

On January 14, 1966 Korolev was in the Kremlin Hospital for a supposedly routine intestinal operation. Weakened by years of ill-health and overwork, and by the great damage inflicted during his imprisonment in a Siberian labour camp from 1938 to 1940, his body was far more fragile than the doctors had suspected. Internal bleeding proved difficult to control, and two huge tumours had developed in his abdomen. After a lengthy and fraught operation, Korolev’s heart gave out and he died.

Gagarin was furious that the privileged and well-rewarded doctors had not been able to save his mentor and friend. Sergei Belotserkovsky remembers him raging, ‘How can they treat someone so respected in such a mediocre and irresponsible way!’ In fact, Yuri had always said that he did not trust the Kremlin’s special hospital for the élite. In June 1964 Valentina Tereshkova had been assigned a room there so that she could give birth to her baby (seven months after her marriage to Andrian Nikolayev). Gagarin’s barber friend Igor Khoklov remembers his carefully reasoned distrust. ‘He said, “None of those old bosses in the Politburo are capable of fathering babies any more. The Kremlin hospital delivers maybe one or two a month. We must send Valentina to an ordinary people’s hospital where they deliver babies on a conveyor belt, and have the experience to know what they’re doing.” He had a very good relationship with Tereshkova, by the way.’ Gagarin’s wishes were granted and the Kremlin hospital lost its star female guest. Now, in the bleak and bitter-cold January of 1966, Gagarin was deeply distressed by Korolev’s death, and angry.

Throughout all his years working to give the Soviets a lead in space, Korolev had never discussed his arrest, torture, beatings and imprisonment under the old Stalinist regime. People thought of him as a burly man, built like a bear, but the truth was that his body was made rigid by countless ancient injuries. He could not turn his neck, but had to swivel his upper torso to look people in the eye; nor could he open his jaws wide enough to laugh out loud.

Two days before he was scheduled for surgery he was resting at his home in the Ostankino district of Moscow. Gagarin and Leonov came to visit him with several other colleagues, and at the end of the evening, just as most of the visitors were putting on their greatcoats to leave, Korolev said to his two favourite cosmonauts, ‘Don’t go just yet. I want to talk.’ So his wife Nina fetched some more food and drink, and for four hours, well into the early hours of the morning, Korolev told the story of his early life – a story that Leonov has never forgotten. ‘He told us how he was arrested, taken away and beaten. When he asked for a glass of water, they smashed him in the face with the water jug… They demanded a list of so-called traitors and saboteurs [in the early rocket programme] and he could only reply that he had no such list.’ Korolev described how he saw, through puffy eyes, that his captors had pushed a piece of paper between his bruised fingers for him to sign; how they beat him again, and sentenced him to ten years’ hard labour in Siberia. ‘Yuri and I were both struck by the unexpected parts of his story,’ says Leonov.

From a living death in Siberia, Korolev was recalled to Moscow when an old ally of his, the renowned aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, requested him for war work. He would be assigned to a less harsh special prison facility for engineers, which included design offices and better living conditions.[6] In fact, Tupolev was himself a prisoner. But no special arrangements were made to transport Korolev to Moscow, and he had to improvise. Cold beyond endurance and hallucinating with hunger, he found a hot loaf of bread on the ground one day, apparently dropped from a passing truck. ‘It seemed like a miracle,’ he told Gagarin and Leonov. He worked as a labourer and shoe repairer to earn his passage back to Moscow by boat and rail. His teeth were now loose and bleeding, because he had not eaten fresh fruit or vegetables in a year. Trudging along a dirt track one day, he collapsed. An old man rubbed herbs on his gums and propped his body to face the feeble sun, but he collapsed again. As Leonov vividly recalls, ‘He told us he could see something fluttering. It was a butterfly, something to remind him of life.’

It seems that after so many years’ silence the ailing Chief Designer now wanted to unburden himself to his two favourite young friends. The two cosmonauts were deeply affected by what they heard. Leonov says, ‘This was the first time that Korolev had ever talked about his imprisonment in the Gulag, since these stories are usually kept secret… We began to realize there was something wrong with our country… On our way home, Yuri couldn’t stop questioning: how could it be that such unique people like Korolev had been subjected to repression? It was so obvious that Korolev was a national treasure.’

After the funeral Gagarin insisted on spending the night at Korolev’s house. According to Yaroslav Golovanov, ‘Gagarin said, “I won’t feel right until I’ve taken Korolev’s ashes to the moon.” At the crematorium he asked cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov to scatter some of Korolev’s ashes on the next space flight, during the descent, although, according to Orthodox custom, you must not divide a person’s ashes.’ It is not clear whether any ashes were actually taken into space, but Golovanov insists that several handfuls went missing from the crematorium. ‘Komarov did scatter some of them after Korolev’s death. Gagarin and Leonov also had some ashes.’

Korolev’s death marked a turning point for Gagarin. He became totally recommitted to flying in space, and even to flying to the moon. His self-discipline returned, and he worked on his diploma with passionate energy. He impressed Kamanin, who allowed him to train as back-up for the first Soyuz mission. All being well, the back-up position would automatically entitle Gagarin to the second Soyuz flight. But this put him in direct conflict with another cosmonaut, who believed that the assignment belonged to him, not to Gagarin. The noted space historian James Oberg says, ‘This tension between Gagarin and one or two of the cosmonauts isn’t written about very much, perhaps because people don’t like to talk about it. Basically Gagarin pulled rank.’[7]