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

FOREWORD

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.

At a giant crossroads on Moscow’s Leninsky Prospekt a 30-metre-high steel statue of him dominates the skyline, while ninety-six kilometres to the north-east another memorial marks the spot where, just a few days after his thirty-fourth birthday, he died in a terrible accident that gouged a huge crater in the frost-hardened earth. Three decades after this catastrophe, fresh bouquets of flowers at the site confirm the continuing love of ordinary citizens for this man. Young or old, privileged or poor, most Russians still smile with pride at the merest mention of his name. They recall with genuine affection a peasant boy with a winning smile, who stunned the entire world with his achievement. Russians don’t hesitate to remind us Westerners, ‘He was the first, you know.’

The first man in space: Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin.

My fascination with Gagarin was sparked three years ago, when I was completing a major television documentary series on the Soviet nuclear-weapons programme. It became clear to me that the story of The Red Bomb would not be complete without a description of the rockets that were built to carry them out into space, even as they threatened us with destruction here on earth.

After completion of The Red Bomb, I seriously considered producing a major multi-part series on the Soviet space programme, but it was a daunting task. Where to start? How to focus this enormous subject into a cohesive analysis?

A close friend in Moscow, one of my contacts within the KGB, solved the problem for me. One day he saw a Russian television programme making the silly and utterly unsubstantiated claim that Gagarin was still alive, having escaped from a mental institution where he had been incarcerated for the last thirty years. Even the KGB would not have been capable of ‘disappearing’ Russia’s greatest hero. My contact urged me to make a serious documentary film that told the truth. At that moment it occurred to me that Gagarin’s name was world-famous, yet nobody knew the first thing about him, or about the remarkable people who launched him into space aboard a converted nuclear missile. My next project was assured, in my own mind at least; and, as it happened, the BBC and other major broadcasters around the world shared my enthusiasm to reveal the unknown Yuri Gagarin.

Researching The Red Bomb took me and my production team into some very murky areas. For some reason I imagined that finding out about Gagarin would be slightly easier than unveiling the secrets of the ultra-secure Soviet nuclear-weapons programme. I was wrong. This time it was not so much the paranoid remnants of a massive State security system that I came up against, but the natural reticence of the individual Russian mind. The habit of discretion, at every level of society, has become utterly ingrained, long after the secret policemen have lost their power to enforce it.

I discovered that – even after all these years – many people who worked alongside Gagarin at the height of the Soviet space effort in the 1960s were unwilling to discuss their experiences, or to share their memories of the man himself. They were still afraid, I think, that some anonymous squad of men in heavy overcoats might turn up at their apartments in the early hours of the morning to arrest them for speaking out of turn. Perhaps more importantly, Westerners are still too foreign to be trusted with personal intimacies about old friends – and people who spent their entire careers in the Soviet military-industrial complex do not easily surrender their most sensitive technical secrets to outsiders.

Patiently, and I hope with tact and diplomacy, I persevered. I found that several key people were willing to speak, so long as they could give their testimony directly to fellow Russians rather than Western journalists. In this regard, my good friends Igor Morozov, Valerie Gorodetskaya and Maria Semenov were invaluable. They knew what was required and surpassed my greatest expectations. Morozov is a veteran of difficult, in-depth reporting from the old Soviet days. Gorodetskaya and Semenov have an astonishing ability to relax their interviewees while getting right down to the truth of the matter in hand. Gradually a degree of trust was established, and there was a ‘snowball’ effect, as reluctant witnesses took heart from the openness and enthusiasm of those who had spoken before them. An incredible amount of information emerged, and in this area we extend our thanks to Sergei Kuzhenko and Boris Malakhov for their invaluable help.

Inevitably the interviews had to be shortened, if the emerging television documentary was to fit into its standard 52-minute slot. I felt uneasy about wasting any of the stories entrusted to us by so many people who had been persuaded that we were going to make good use of their testimony. I decided that a book was needed, in addition to the film. Writer Piers Bizony joined our research team to co-write the book with me. It was a gamble, taken at short notice. Would we get along? Could we two very different characters, very much in control of our own different styles of storytelling and ways of working, collaborate on the same narrative without conflict?

Yes, we could. From the first, we saw exactly the same story, and the strength of our working relationship added to the strength of the book. I know something of Russia and its people, while Piers knows about their early rockets and the mind-set of the engineers who built them and the young pilots who flew aboard them. Together we explored fascinating and hitherto unknown aspects of Gagarin’s life and work that surprised and moved both of us, and gave us an overwhelming sense that we were bringing to light a truly important story.

But no amount of teamwork could easily overcome the problems of searching for facts, documents and people in a country so vast and complex as Russia. The old bureaucracies no longer fly the hammer and sickle above their rooftops, yet they remain as impenetrable as ever. Money is now the dominant preoccupation. Certain things are possible for the right price. No one in particular is to blame for this; it is simply a basic fact of life in the ‘New Russia’. The other problem is accountability. Who is in charge of any particular organization? Whom should we approach for access to buildings, for permission to use photographs or rights for film clips?

There are substantial historical archives in Russia, yet few people know exactly what they contain, because there simply is not the money available to catalogue and store them properly. Certain enterprising academics will search through them, for a price, but merely locating a particular resource does not guarantee access to it.

Take as an example what should have been a relatively simple task: obtaining the rights to reproduce a few minutes of archive footage of cosmonauts training for their flights. The space-medical institute in question demanded a horrendously high price for their footage, until their chief administrator agreed to release it for free, because he believed that his institute would benefit by having its work highlighted in our documentary. Then his deputy arrived back from vacation and overturned his decision. At last a senior advisor in President Yeltsin’s administration cleared the way for us… until the space-medical institute complained, in no uncertain terms, that it was not answerable to Yeltsin – or anyone else in the government – and so the entire deal was off. We began our negotiations again, from scratch.

There was hardly a single instance where we contacted an interviewee without using intermediaries, or obtained documentary material directly from its source. Business relations in Russia are multi-layered and complex. Certain procedures have to be observed. Discovering the secrets of Gagarin’s life and death came down to much more than simply picking up the phone and calling his old colleagues for a chat.

From our Western perspective, Russia is unimaginably vast. How could we possibly find the long-retired engineers who built Gagarin’s spaceship, especially bearing in mind that their real names were kept secret throughout their careers? How could we identify and locate the humble farmworkers in deep rural locations (with no telephones in their homes), who saw Gagarin come home from space and land in a field? How could we even learn the names and addresses of the KGB escorts, long-retired and never identified at the time, who advised Gagarin during his global publicity tours in the mid-1960s? How to persuade the cosmonauts who vied with Gagarin for position in the space hierarchy to talk openly about things that simply are not supposed to be mentioned?

Once again, our Moscow researchers were indispensable to us in locating many of our witnesses and persuading them to speak. Some advisors within the modern, but still daunting, remnants of the KGB also helped us. They do not wish to reveal their names, but they know how grateful we are for their help in locating certain people.

But we owe our greatest debt to the interviewees themselves. As I hope this book will demonstrate, we have managed to speak to most of the surviving key figures in Gagarin’s life. With considerable candour, occasionally at some risk, and almost always with a special Russian humour and emotion that brings their stories to life, the following people have entrusted us with their memories.

Gagarin’s brother Valentin and sister Zoya told us about Yuri’s early childhood and upbringing, as well as the impact of his famous space flight on the lives of those closest to him. They also narrated their family’s terrifying experiences during the Nazi invasion of their homeland. These events shaped their brother’s character. Yelena Alexandrovna, a retired schoolteacher, recalled Yuri as a bright, mischievous pupil, a merciless prankster, who also showed a deeper and more responsible side to his nature, remarkable for one so young.

Journalist Yaroslav Golovanov, who at one time actually trained for space flight himself, knew Gagarin and the other cosmonauts well. With his help we heard from Georgi Shonin and other Air Force pilots who were recruited into the space programme alongside Gagarin. Golovanov filled in the basic details of Gagarin’s career, drawing on his encyclopaedic memory and his many books on the subject. Nevertheless, we know we have uncovered some important events that Golovanov himself may find surprising.

Sergei Belotserkovsky, a crucial figure in the academic training of all the early cosmonauts, knew Gagarin very well and provided us with valuable personal anecdotes and fascinating documentary evidence surrounding the investigation into Gagarin’s tragically early death.

The diaries of the late Nikolai Kamanin, Chief of Cosmonaut Training, provided a close and unique insight into the character of the First Cosmonaut. Almost on a daily basis, Kamanin outlined the strengths and weaknesses of Gagarin and his great rival in the race to become the world’s first spaceman, Gherman Titov. Through Kamanin’s highly spontaneous scribbles, we saw just how close Gagarin came to being second. We are grateful to Kamanin’s executors for permission to reproduce some extracts from a very colourful and outspoken journal.

For his part, Titov spoke frankly of the immense pain brought about by his role as Gagarin’s back-up, or ‘understudy’, for the historic first space flight, while Alexei Leonov put many other aspects of a cosmonaut’s life into perspective. These two men were very close to Gagarin, and they shared his experiences of flying into space and seeing the earth from orbit. They both had dramatic tales to tell.

Oleg Ivanovsky, Vladimir Yazdovsky and Yuri Mazzhorin – three of the most significant technical administrators in the Soviet space programme – revealed extraordinary details about their work, and of the spacecraft that Gagarin flew. They also revealed aspects of the deep humanity within the character of Sergei Korolev, the legendary ‘Chief Designer’ of Soviet rockets and spacecraft.

Sergei Nefyodov and Yevgeny Kiryushin, forgotten contributors to the space effort, recounted their secret work as ‘testers’, enduring great physical discomfort and risking death as part of the medical and physiological research programme that surrounded the early manned rocket programme.

Farm worker Yakov Lysenko, a very old man now, still gets a gleam in his eye as he recalls Gagarin landing in a field after his flight and greeting him; while Tamara Kuchalayeva and Tatiana Makaricheva recalled how, as schoolgirls, they ran across a gentle meadow to see where the world’s first spaceship came to rest after its epic journey.

Anna Rumanseyeva recalled nursing Gagarin after a minor but embarrassing accident that nearly cost him his career. This was the first time that she, or anyone else, had told the truth about this significant and very human incident.

Sergei Yegupov, an archivist at the space training complex just outside Moscow, gave us access to some remarkable letters addressed to Gagarin from ordinary citizens, and illuminated for us some of the more difficult political aspects of Gagarin’s career.

State security expert Nikolai Rubkin helped us analyse important details of Gagarin’s fatal accident in a MiG training jet, and the flawed, compromised investigation that followed. Vyacheslav Bykovsky, an air-traffic controller, spoke to us about the day of the crash, even though this particular subject must have been very difficult for him. He had kept his silence for thirty years.

KGB veteran Venyamin Russayev came forward, after lengthy and delicate negotiations, to tell us an incredible and shattering story about Gagarin’s efforts to save the life of Vladimir Komarov, the first man ever to die during a space flight. Russayev’s evidence, revealed in our book for the very first time, is truly shocking and moving, and lays a trail all the way to the Kremlin.

Gagarin’s wife, Valentina Gagarina, does not speak to journalists, but she was responsible for persuading Russayev to come forward to tell an important story that even now it is dangerous to reveal. We are deeply grateful for her blessing. Certain aspects of her husband’s story must be difficult for her to dwell on. Conscious of this, we hope we have honoured Yuri Gagarin’s memory and character, as well as telling the truth about his eventful and complex life.

We are indebted to Gagarin’s personal driver Fyodor Dyemchuk for his memories, while Igor Khoklov, his favourite hairdresser, told us many fascinating tales. Khrushchev’s speechwriter and senior aide Fyodor Burlatsky put Gagarin’s intimate and difficult relationship with the Kremlin into perspective from close personal knowledge.

Of course this book is as much about the early Soviet manned space programme as it is about Gagarin himself, for the two stories – personal and technological – are intimately connected. Several Western experts in space history advised us about the engineering and administrative aspects of our narrative. Phillip Clark, Rex Hall, Brian Harvey and Gordon Hooper were endlessly patient with our questions. Douglas Millard at the National Museum of Science and Technology (London) provided many books and documents, while James Oberg and James Harford gave us advice on key issues and David Baker provided some excellent photographs. Andy Aldrin, John Logsdon and Peter Almquist outlined a particularly important aspect – the shocked American reaction to the first Soviet space triumphs. It is sobering to be reminded just how many exceptionally brilliant scientists and engineers were trained and employed within the Soviet regime.

Here, then, is the story of a moment that can never be repeated: the moment when one of our kind first ventured off the planet and into the cosmos. Many have followed, but only one man was first. Yuri Gagarin was no superman; he was mortal and flawed, just like the rest of us; yet he deserves his status in history: not just for the mere fact of being first into space, but also because he lived his life with decency, bravery and honour.