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

² RECRUITMENT

In October 1959 mysterious recruiting teams arrived without warning at all the major air stations in the Soviet Union, including Nikel. They did not say exactly what they wanted, or which organization they represented. Groups of pilots were selected and summoned into an office, twenty or so at a time, for an informal conversation with some ‘doctors’. A few days later the requested groups became smaller, the many rejects winnowed out through mysterious consultations in the background, until eventually the recruiters were holding private interviews with just one candidate at a time, from a shortlist of perhaps a dozen from any given airbase. These lucky ones were sent to the Bordenko Military Hospital in Moscow for a series of rigorous health checks. In all, nine out of ten candidates failed this stage of the review process, again because of secret decisions taken behind closed doors.

In his published accounts, Gagarin recalled undergoing seven separate eye examinations in the Bordenko hospital, countless interviews with psychologists and a nightmarish mathematical test, during which a soft voice whispered all the solutions to him – the wrong solutions – through a pair of headphones. He had to concentrate on his own thought processes and ignore ‘the obsequious friend’ whispering so helpfully in his ears. The doctors were ‘as stern as State prosecutors. Our hearts were the main object of their examination. They could read our whole life history from them. You couldn’t hide a single thing. They tapped our bodies with hammers, twisted us about on special devices and checked the vestibular organs in our ears. We were tested from head to toe. Complicated instruments detected everything, even the tiniest cracks in our health.’[1]

The exact dialogue between Gagarin and his recruiters is not on record. However, one of his fellow pilots at the Nikel airbase, Georgi Shonin, was assigned for cosmonaut training soon after Gagarin, and his experience of the selection process must have been pretty similar. ‘At first we talked about the usual boring things. How did I like the Air Force? Did I like flying? What did I do in my free time? What did I like to read? And so on. A couple of days later a second round of talks began. This time far fewer of us had been called for. The talks now became more specific.’ Shonin went to Moscow without really knowing why, then came back to Nikel utterly punctured, probed, exhausted, but apparently listed fit by the doctors for whatever new job awaited him. The recruiters sat him down one last time. ‘They asked me, “How would you feel about flying in more modern planes?” And the answer dawned on me.’ At that time some air regiments were switching over to new high-performance fighters and Shonin assumed that the Nikel squadron was about to become one of the lucky ones. But no, the recruiters were not interested in anything so banal as putting him in a new kind of MiG. ‘They asked me, “What if it was a question of flying something completely new?” I immediately cooled off, because I knew a lot of pilots were being transferred to helicopter units.’ Shonin regarded helicopters as complex but unappealing machines with no speed, no style and, above all, no status. ‘I’m a fighter pilot,’ he pleaded. ‘I specially chose a flying school where I’d train for combat jets, and now you want me—’

One of the recruiters interrupted him. ‘No, you don’t understand. What we’re talking about are long-distance flights on rockets. Flights all the way round the earth.’

‘My mouth dropped open in surprise,’ Shonin remembers. But he took the job. Gagarin was recruited ahead of him by several weeks, and although no record exists to prove it, he and Valya must have welcomed a chance to escape from Murmansk with honour intact. He explained to her that he had been selected as a test pilot for new types of aircraft and was to be stationed just outside Moscow. They left Nikel on March 8, 1960, gladly giving away their standard-issue furniture to other families on the base.

On starting his new job, 26-year-old Gagarin found himself in a group of just twenty ‘cosmonauts’ finally selected out of an initial candidate list of 2,200 from all over the Soviet Union. This first squad would become very tight-knit, despite the obvious (if unspoken) rivalry to gain actual space flights. Gagarin’s relationship with fellow recruit Gherman Stepanovich Titov would develop into something much more complicated – an unspoken contest to win the first human flight into space.

To the other cosmonauts, Gagarin came across as an easy-going fellow. By contrast, Gherman Titov seemed proud and aloof, even to his friends, and sometimes rather strange, too. He loved to spout reams of poetry or quote fragments of stories and novels, not just the modern approved works, but real literature from the old Tsarist days. His father, Stepan Pavlovich, was a teacher and had named him Gherman after a character in a story by Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Queen of Spades’.[2]

Titov’s was an intensely self-possessed character. In 1950, at the age of fourteen, he crashed his bicycle and broke his wrist, but instead of running home and pleading for comfort, he pretended that nothing had happened. He nursed his pain in secret, unwilling to admit any weakness because he had already signed up for elementary training in aviation school at the next available opportunity, and he did not want his accident to spoil his chances of selection. When he finally received his papers as a cadet in 1953, he worried that the military medics might investigate his bones and call his bluff. They did not; instead, he called theirs. He took to performing early-morning exercises on a set of parallel bars, until his flawed wrist appeared as good as the other. He trained at the Volgograd Air Station for two years, graduating with distinction, and in 1959 was, like Gagarin, interrogated by mysterious visitors as a potential cosmonaut. The space doctors took Titov apart with greater rigour than the Air Force, but still they failed to find anything amiss in their X-rays, and he was selected to be part of the first group of twenty cosmonauts, along with Gagarin. Long after it was too late, the medical examiners told him that if they had known about his old wrist injury, they would never have sanctioned his recruitment.

While Gagarin’s face was open and quite easy to read, Titov’s eyes were hooded and dark, his nose set stern. His mouth often seemed to narrow in disapproval, so that his expression could verge on arrogance. He was quick-tempered and was not afraid to speak his mind. He wore his uniform smartly, and his glossy, brown wavy hair helped create the impression of a bourgeois cavalry officer; as did his personal pride, too much poetry and a suspicion of class (just because he had read a few books and his father was a schoolteacher). Titov was not the sort of man who would easily prosper in an egalitarian workers’ and peasants’ paradise – except for one valuable saving grace. He had proved himself excellent in one of the few realms of Soviet life where individual excellence was encouraged: up in the air, protecting the Motherland in a MiG.

Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was another important figure in Gagarin’s new life as a cosmonaut. Born in May 1934, Leonov was almost exactly the same age, although his well-rounded, happy face and slightly thinning hair gave him a more middle-aged appearance. As a young man he considered becoming an artist, and in 1953 he enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Riga, but almost at once he had a change of heart, applying instead to the Air Force school at Chuguyev. There he became a talented parachutist and qualified as an instructor. His chunky features belied a super-fit condition, and he trained with intense self-discipline as a fencer and runner, almost always finding time in the early morning for a four-kilometre workout. When the space recruiters came to Chuguyev in 1959 he soon got himself a new posting.[3]

Leonov’s sense of humour was infectious, often mischievous, and as long as he was not thwarted or irritated, he was a genuinely lovable man, although in keeping with all his cosmonaut colleagues he was fiercely determined to succeed in his new profession. When it came to work and training he could be cold-blooded at times, but by and large his humour and professionalism won him many allies. He always retained his fascination for art, taking sketchbooks everywhere he went (including into orbit) and eventually becoming one of the leading Soviet space artists. He became Gagarin’s closest friend from the earliest days of their cosmonaut training. ‘I quickly discovered for myself the kindness of this man’s nature,’ Leonov says today. ‘Yuri liked his friends very much and paid them a lot of attention. He kept in touch with old ones and very easily made new ones. Our relationship was especially warm because we knew each other for a long time and, even when he became famous, it didn’t affect him. He always stayed a very good friend.’

On January 11, 1960, a special cosmonauts’ training centre was inaugurated under the directorship of medical scientist Yevgeny Karpov. His second-in-command, directly responsible for the cosmonauts’ recruitment, training and ‘ideological reliability’, was General Nikolai Kamanin, a tough and highly ambitious combat veteran with no discernible sense of humour. The space historian James Oberg has described him as ‘an ageing war hero and authoritarian space tsar, a martinet’,[4] while Yaroslav Golovanov, who was intimately connected with the early Soviet space programme, remembers him as ‘a terrifyingly evil man, a malevolent person, a complete Stalinist bastard’. In time, many of the cosmonauts would come to hate Kamanin, but his strict military discipline, his remorseless attention to detail and his refusal to accept anything but the highest standards from his students would prepare them successfully (in most cases) for the rigours of space.

When Gagarin and his nineteen colleagues arrived for training, few suitable facilities existed to prepare them for space. Karpov and Kamanin were allocated a large swathe of birch and pine woodland forty kilometres north-east of Moscow, and in March 1960 they began construction of a secret base called Zvyozdny Gorodok, or ‘Star City’. A huge square compound was cleared in the middle of the site, thoroughly screened from any nearby roads by the surrounding woodlands. A simple hostel was built; some standard-issue barracks; and a number of low buildings to house the training facilities, some of which – as the cosmonauts would discover to their cost – were designed to inflict stress, trauma, loneliness and exhaustion. In time, Star City would grow to the size of a small town, with its own private community of bars, hotels, sports clubs and administration centres. A short distance to the south, a large and sprawling Air Force base at Chkalovksy provided convenient landing strips for jet trainers and cargo planes, as well as accommodation for the cosmonauts and their young families.

Despite the size of the Star City construction zone, few people outside the space effort knew very much about it. The road that passes Chkalovsky skirts the dense pine forest that so effectively conceals the complex. On the right-hand side a small guardpost protects an innocent gap in the mask of trees. In 1960 the turn-off road might easily have been mistaken for a loggers’ track or an old farm route, except for the guardhouse and the solid tarmac surface capable of taking heavy trucks.

When Gagarin and his colleagues were recruited, the facilities at Star City were not yet operational. The cosmonauts’ early training consisted mainly of academic and physical work in various Moscow scientific and medical institutions, in particular at the Zhukovsky Academy of Aeronautical Sciences on Leningradsky Prospekt. The least popular venue was the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems near Petrovsky Park, headed by Oleg Gazenko, where all the cosmonauts underwent a bewildering array of medical, physical and psychological tests. One of the procedures they all had to face here was the ‘isolation chamber’, a large sealed tank capped by an airlock and containing the barest of living accommodations. The doctors would seal their victims inside, then raise or lower the interior air pressure according to their scientific whims. Then they would provide a miserable set of tasks: maths sums, intelligence tests, physical exercises, and so forth. What the inhabitants of the chamber were not allowed to do was pass the time by somehow enjoying themselves. No chatter was permitted; no books, no magazines; no contact with the outside world, except for the most minimal dialogue with the technicians monitoring the chamber. A session might last anything from one to ten days, although the victim was never warned in advance how long it might be. The purpose of this ordeal was to determine if a man could survive the boredom and loneliness of life in a spaceship, perhaps held in orbit above the earth for many days during some unfortunate delay in the re-entry sequence. That was the official explanation for the chamber. For a cosmonaut the choice was perfectly simple: take the chamber with a smile or you did not get to fly in space.

Gagarin survived several sessions without major incident, although he did confess afterwards that he found the experience ‘uncanny, unnerving’. The psychologists told him to describe his thoughts and emotions at certain regular intervals timed by a clock inside the chamber. When he talked, his listeners did not always reply. He could not be sure whether they were ignoring him deliberately, or whether they had simply gone away to find some breakfast. Or maybe supper… Gagarin’s clock gave no reliable clues to ‘outside’ time; nor could he count on dawn or dusk to guide his pattern of existence, because the chamber had no windows. The interior electric lighting came on when he tried to sleep or switched off abruptly when he was awake and busy with some task or other. Time lost all its meaning. ‘It’s easy for your mind to dwell too much on the past in such isolation,’ he reported later, ‘but I concentrated on the future. I shut my eyes and imagined myself in the Vostok, with the continents and oceans drifting beneath me.’[5]

The journalist Lydia Obukhova was allowed to witness one of these tests (though she was not permitted to publish what she had seen until some months after Gagarin’s eventual flight in April 1961):

Regardless of the mental torture inflicted by the psychologists, Gagarin never lost sight of the main prize: getting into space. He smiled, he charmed, he played the innocent farmboy to Titov’s stern, poetry-spouting intellectual, but he tolerated all the tests with the same self-discipline and bravery.

When it came to Titov’s turn in the chamber, he was one of the few cosmonauts to think more deeply about what the ordeal was really supposed to prove. It wasn’t just a question of testing the body in various atmospheric pressures, or merely surviving the boredom. There were more subtle tests to pass, he was sure. ‘They tell you there’s no noise in the chamber, but that’s rubbish. The air-conditioning system is working, the ventilator is on. They’re all making noise, and you quickly get used to it. The most important thing is the isolation. Can you spend ten days on your own?… There’s nobody looking through the keyhole, but you know you’re being watched.’

The tins of food and the little cooking stove seemed to represent some sort of test. There was water in the chamber for drinking and for personal hygiene, but very little to spare. On the very first day of their sessions, some of the more impetuous cosmonauts had ripped open their food tins with great enthusiasm, eager to relieve the tedium with a snack. They had emptied the tins into the single saucepan provided, warmed the pan on the stove and eaten the food, only to find that there was no obvious means of cleaning the pan afterwards, and they still had many more mealtimes ahead of them. Titov says, ‘I thought I’d be clever about it. I put my tins into a saucepan of water and heated them that way. Then you open the tins, eat the meals and throw the tins away. You don’t have to wash anything afterwards.’ Repeatedly boiled, the few cupfuls of water in Titov’s pan were safe to reheat later. His water lasted, his pan stayed clean and his psychologists were happy. Or at least they were not unhappy, which was the most a cosmonaut could hope for at the end of his time in the chamber.

The doctors disapproved when Titov wanted to read in the chamber, but he got the better of them. He asked whether they could find a copy of Yevgeny Onegin for him to take inside with him. The answer was no, absolutely not. Such a form of entertainment was not allowed. Titov assured them he only wanted the book as a physical talisman, a foolish good-luck charm. ‘I said I already knew it by heart. I wooed them. I persuaded them, and eventually they gave it to me. Of course I didn’t know it!’ So Titov contentedly frittered away his time in the chamber reading his book.

Film footage still survives of other sessions in the chamber, with Titov happily quoting Pushkin poems straight from memory, while the doctors observe him through a thick plate-glass window. He appears supremely confident, beaming with pride at his clever memory, his wide knowledge of literature. Unfortunately he was thinking too much like a bourgeois, assuming that his higher-than-average standard of education must be an advantage. In time, and to his great disappointment, Titov would discover that he had got it all wrong.

He was not so self-confident in the whirling centrifuge, a small capsule spun on the end of a long boom to simulate the g-loads of acceleration and deceleration: the traditional fairground ride for all pilots and astronauts the world over, loved to death by each and every one of them. For a pilot as proud as Titov, it was unnerving to be so much at the mercy of others. ‘In an aircraft you can fly a high-g loop, and you control when you come out of it. The centrifuge was disgusting. The g-force is pressing you and pressing you, but you have no control. You just sit there like a guinea-pig.’

Gagarin did not like it either, despite his much-heralded talent for taking g-forces. His earlier qualification runs in an Air Force centrifuge had peaked at around seven g’s. His MiG fighter had pulled nine, maybe ten on a vicious high-speed turn. Now the space-training centrifuge took him briefly up to twelve. ‘My eyes wouldn’t shut, breathing was a great effort, my face muscles were twisted, my heart rate speeded up and the blood in my veins felt as heavy as mercury.’[7]

Perhaps the most unpleasant training procedure was the ‘oxygen starvation’ experiment. The cosmonauts were locked in the isolation chamber while the air supply was pumped out, slowly but remorselessly. Gagarin had to endure this test without complaint if he was to be pronounced fit for a space mission. The doctors sealed him up, then watched his face on a television monitor while he wrote his name on a paper pad, over and over again. Journalist Lydia Obukhova watched this procedure, and archive footage taken by the technicians still survives. As the oxygen level in the chamber was reduced, Gagarin’s writing became erratic, until eventually he was scribbling gibberish. Down went the air level. Gagarin dropped his pencil, dropped the pad, stared at nothing and suddenly blacked out. His threshold of consciousness must have been high enough for him to pass the test, or else he would have lost his place in the cosmonaut squad, but it is reasonable to assume that he shared the other cosmonauts’ intense dislike of the procedure, because it made them look so foolish in front of the doctors. Senior space engineers shared this distaste and wondered what the doctors thought they could achieve by suffocating their test subjects. The only way a cosmonaut could lose his air supply in orbit was if his capsule sprang a leak, in which case he would close the visor on his space helmet and switch to a separate emergency air supply. If both the cabin and the spacesuit sprang leaks, then the cosmonaut was as good as dead anyway, but the chances of this double failure occurring were negligible. In space, either you had air to breathe or you did not. There were no half measures. The senior rocket engineers thought the ‘oxygen starvation’ experiment was pointless, but the doctors did not, and that was that.

For the rattled cosmonauts, it was almost a relief to move on to the parachuting exercises, where they could tease the doctors because most of them lacked the courage to follow the pilots out of the aircraft’s doorway. Their instructor was Nikolai Konstantovich, an expert parachutist with a record-breaking freefall jump from a height of fifteen kilometres to his credit. Future space crewmen might have to eject and parachute to earth at similar altitudes, and Konstantovich’s job was to demonstrate all the things that could go wrong up there – and how to get out of them. For example, there was the ‘corkscrew’ problem, when a misfiring ejection seat throws the pilot into a sickening spin, or the seat fires cleanly, but the craft it’s coming out of is tumbling. Either way the pilot cannot pull his parachute safely, because the lines will twist around each other like the strands of a rope, and the silk canopy will not unfurl. The pilot must stabilize his fall and give his ’chute a chance to open normally. Konstantovich taught his pupils deliberately to sabotage their own jumps, then to regain control, preferably some time before they hit the ground. ‘That’s very unpleasant,’ Gagarin recalled. ‘Your body starts spinning at great speed. Your head feels like lead, and there’s a sharp, cutting pain in your eyes. Your body is drained of strength and you lose all sense of direction.’[8]

At least the parachuting felt more like proper space training. Once Gagarin and his comrades were in a plane and doing something useful, they felt better. More in control. For another group of victims, however, there was no such easy escape from the doctors’ needles, gas tanks and isolation chambers.

Quite apart from the cosmonauts, another group of ‘testers’ was put through a similar series of medical procedures – similar but worse. These young men were selected from a slightly lower rung of the aviation-academic ladder. They were not necessarily fighter pilots or first-rate theoreticians. They were just averagely bright, fit young military men. During recruitment they were never asked outright if they would like to fly in space. They were offered a chance to ‘participate’, which was a subtle but important shift of emphasis.

The testers’ job was to find out just how much a human body could take. Then the cosmonauts, who were somewhat less expendable, could be pushed to those limits but no further. Unlike the cosmonauts, testers were not professionally acknowledged, and were paid only according to their previous military occupations as soldiers, technicians or mechanics. They were seduced with great care by their recruiters into a feeling of privilege and self-worth, but in truth their status was barely better than that of disposable laboratory rats. When they received injuries – and they did receive injuries – there were no special arrangements to compensate them or their families, because the authorities were unwilling to acknowledge any of their work in public. Even today, long after glasnost, the Russian space authorities do not like to discuss the testers’ contributions to the early space effort, nor to the development of high-performance jet fighters, parachutes, ejection systems and flight suits for the Air Force. In all, approximately 1,200 testers were involved in various programmes over three decades.

They were all military volunteers, good soldiers, who did not like to surrender, to fail in front of their comrades. They were ‘free’ to abort any test-run halfway through if the discomfort became too great, but very few wanted to quit. Like the cosmonauts, who all dreamed of getting the first flight into space – of going higher, flying faster – the testers had their own strange pinnacle of glory to climb. Who could take the highest air pressures? The lowest? Who could survive the catapult sled’s most rapid accelerations? The bone-jarring crash-stops? Who spent the longest time aboard the centrifuge, and how many g’s could they take? Who among them was the toughest, the strongest, the bravest?

Sergei Nefyodov, a veteran from those days, recalls with a bitter smile, ‘At first we didn’t know what kind of tests we were in for, but it soon became seriously clear. They said they’d try us out in a “soft” landing experiment. That made us laugh! The tester had to throw himself out of a seat at some height – not great, but high enough. It was the level that might actually occur from a real landing of a spacecraft. There were some traumas as a result. The most serious was when something broke, or the system didn’t work properly. Some lads couldn’t get up again after the test.’

Nefyodov still boasts today that the testers took turns in a centrifuge that would have wiped out the delicate little cosmonauts. ‘I achieved seven minutes at ten g’s. The cosmonauts only had to endure two or three minutes at seven g’s, and twenty seconds at twelve g’s. My colleague Viktor Kostin often took twenty-seven g’s for a very short time, by taking severe shocks in the catapult sled. Those were very brief, measured in microseconds, but once he went up to forty g’s for a fraction of a second. I’d like to make it clear that we weren’t chasing record g’s just for the sake of it. We wanted to see how long a person could endure. Though we didn’t use the word “record”, because we couldn’t claim any sporting achievements.’

This was the great frustration – the testers could not tell anyone how tough they were, because their jobs were extremely secret. They knew perfectly well that they were being given a much harder time than the cosmonauts. Sometimes they would look across at the physicians, with their dials and monitoring equipment, and they could only wonder. Nefyodov says, ‘On the one hand, they [the doctors] were representatives of very humane professions, but on the other hand, the g-forces would climb, and the technicians would ask: should they stop the tests? It seems the subject can’t take any more, he’s going red, his heart is galloping, his sweat is flowing, but the doctors don’t stop the test...

‘It was dangerous for the testers. One of the senior academics for the test programme, Sergei Molydin, he said – and I can quote him – “we experimented on dogs, and fifty per cent of them survived. As you know, a person is stronger than a dog.” Well, that’s a joke! The consequences of our tests couldn’t be predicted. Even if a person survived, he might become an invalid in later life, with damage to the lungs, the heart or other internal organs. Of course we could refuse a test at any time, but the unwritten rule was not to refuse. If you turned down a test, this would only happen once, because after that you weren’t in the team any more.’

Nefyodov says that half of all the testers he worked with in the 1960s have not survived into the 1990s, but he isn’t bitter about his career. Far from it. He takes great pride in his contribution to the space effort. ‘The only tragic side is that our profession never existed. It was a close secret, so we had no social protection from the State, and no one ever investigated the long-term health of the testers. Today our old friends, our colleagues, are beginning to die.’ He remembers a particularly nasty experiment to simulate the failure of a spacecraft’s air-cleansing system. ‘If carbon dioxide builds up in the air to three per cent in a submarine, for instance, that’s enough to declare an emergency condition. With a colleague in a test chamber [at the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems] I went over to three and a half, four, five per cent. Honestly, you have nothing to breathe, your face turns an unpleasant colour, the lips turn blue, your brain won’t work, you have a hideous headache and your strength fails. My partner and I had nosebleeds, but we worked for the set time. I always remember saying to him, “Just a half-hour more, and it will pass.” Then half an hour later, “Just one more half-hour.” I had to pep him up in some way.’

Yevgeny Kiryushin vividly remembers the altered state of consciousness he experienced in a centrifuge, with his body pushed beyond any normal definition of stress. ‘Suddenly there was a light, it was very interesting, dark at first, then yellow, lilac, crossing some sort of emptiness, and then you just forget any sensation in yourself. You just have the impression that you’re a brain, a hand, an eye. The oppressive weight is all in the seat, and suddenly, above your body is you. You’re completely weightless, as if having a look at yourself from above. That’s the transforming moment. All of your real achievements happen in those few minutes. But the experiments are frightening, without exception.’

Nefyodov remembers meeting Yuri Gagarin personally for the first time on January 2, 1968, when the First Cosmonaut came to visit the medical experimental facility and share a New Year’s celebration with the testers. ‘At that time I had just started working on explosive decompression, which interested me greatly. He kept asking me, “What’s it like? Aren’t you frightened? Have you simulated an atmospheric drop to fifty kilometres’ pressure?” It was great to talk to him about all this. But suddenly he asked me why I was looking so sad. I felt calm, but to him it appeared as if I was sad. He gave me a warm hug and said to me, “Sergei, everything is in your hands. You must have an unsurpassable desire.”’

An unsurpassable desire. The cosmonauts had it, and the world sang their praises. The testers had it, but they could not speak of it – except to Gagarin, who took the time to understand when a young lad volunteering for an insanely dangerous run of explosive decompressions tried, for a few moments, inarticulately, to share the reasons why he was doing it.

In fact, there seemed to be no shortage of people willing to volunteer for the most dangerous kind of work. Vladimir Yazdovsky, a senior manager closely involved with all aspects of the early Soviet space effort, recalls, ‘After the dog Laika’s flight in the second Sputnik, there were nearly 3,500 applications to the Academy of Sciences from people in prison, from abroad and from many organizations, saying, “You don’t have to save me, just send me into space.” Of course we couldn’t reply to everyone, and as long as we didn’t know how to bring someone back at the end of a flight, we weren’t going to send anyone up.’