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

¹¹ FALLING TO EARTH

Most of the cosmonauts got on well with Gagarin, appreciated his humour and generosity of spirit, enjoyed drinking and partying with him and deferred to him as the undisputed leader of their cause. Many were anxious to see him back in space, but one cosmonaut in particular felt differently.

Georgi Timofeyevich Beregovoi, born in April 1921, was one of the oldest cosmonauts, recruited in 1963 when the list of ‘near-misses’ among the original 1959 candidates was re-evaluated. Among all the cosmonauts, only he and Pavel Belyayev (Leonov’s commander on the Voskhod II mission) could claim the greatest distinction for a pilot: experience in real aerial combat. Beregovoi flew 185 missions against the Germans during the war, and was awarded the much-prized title Hero of the Soviet Union. During the 1950s he served as a test pilot, so when he signed up for cosmonaut training he believed he was well qualified. In 1964, quite soon after his selection, he gained a back-up posting for the planned Voskhod III mission and trained with every confidence that he would fly whatever mission came next. Nikolai Kamanin felt at ease with a fellow war veteran. He sponsored Beregovoi’s recruitment and gave him every chance to succeed.

After Korolev’s death, his deputy Vasily Mishin took over the administration of OKB-1. He was good-natured and eager, but he lacked the political influence and raw cunning of his predecessor.[1] One way and another, the Voskhod III schedule slipped so badly that it had to be cancelled. Mishin decided to focus OKB-1’s energies on Soyuz and on the further, very troubled development of the large moon booster, the N-1.

Beregovoi now expected his back-up status to be shuffled smoothly along to the next mission, the first manned test of the new Soyuz configuration. At this point Gagarin stepped in and claimed that posting for himself, making every possible use of his rank as Deputy Director of Cosmonaut Training to do so. Beregovoi made his annoyance crystal-clear to anyone who would listen, and eventually stormed into Gagarin’s office at Star City for a direct confrontation. Gagarin’s driver Fyodor Dyemchuk walked into the office at the wrong moment and overheard the row. ‘The other man was the superior in years, but he hadn’t flown into space yet. He made indecent remarks about Gagarin, and said he was too young to be a proper Hero of the Soviet Union and he’d become conceited. He called Gagarin an upstart, and Gagarin replied, “While I’m in charge, you’ll never fly in space.” They argued for quite a while.’

There seems to have been some fault on both sides. Beregovoi was not automatically entitled to a Soyuz mission, despite what he may have thought. His training on the very different Voskhod hardware was completely inappropriate for the new ship, and he had no right to take out his run of bad luck on Gagarin, just because the Voskhod series had been brought to a close before he could fly. Judging from the fact that he rose to become Head of Star City in 1972, Beregovoi was an ambitious man.

After this row Dyemchuk reported fearfully to his master that some other cosmonauts and senior staff in the Star City compound had asked to use Gagarin’s official car, and Dyemchuk, as a humble driver, had not been able to refuse them. ‘He hit the car with his fist and said, “We have one commander here, and he’s the only person who can order the car!” Apart from him, no one could reserve it. He showed his emotions and a small dent was left in the bonnet.’ Dyemchuk is convinced that this outburst was entirely out of character for Gagarin, the result of stress rather than vanity.

Yaroslav Golovanov says, ‘Around this time you heard other cosmonauts saying, “So what, about Gagarin? He flew once around the earth, and all he had to do was watch over Vostok’s automatic systems.” Well, that’s not right, because when he flew, the whole business [of space flight] was starting from scratch, and everything he did was extremely important and brave, because nobody knew what might happen. They didn’t even know if a man could swallow properly in space, or endure the lack of gravity. It’s completely wrong to reproach Gagarin.’

Almost certainly these critics, muttering under their breath, were not from the first group of twenty, but from the new intake training for Soyuz. Not only had Korolev’s death deprived Gagarin of a dear friend and mentor, it had also taken away his most important political protector in the space community, just as Khrushchev’s fall from power had left him defenceless against jealous generals in the Kremlin. The First Cosmonaut had to fight unusually hard to maintain his position in the cosmonaut hierarchy, and the strain was wearing away at his old easy-going nature. Meanwhile OKB-1 was becoming a weaker bureau under the leadership of Vasily Mishin, who could not defend himself as effectively as Korolev against interference from the Kremlin, or from the vicious competition of rival aerospace bureaux anxious to increase their own profile in space.

Suddenly NASA’s gigantic moon programme came to a halt. On January 27, 1967 Gus Grissom and his crewmates, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, clambered into the first flight-ready Apollo, atop a half-sized version of the Saturn rocket. This was supposedly a routine check-out procedure, during which they would run a simulated countdown with all systems running and bring the ship to the very last second before take-off, without actually igniting Saturn’s engines. Morale around the pad was poor, even before the test began, because the new capsule had not come up to expectations. The detail work on the electrical and communications systems was inadequate, prompting the astronauts to stick a mouldy lemon on top of the capsule’s duplicate simulator to show their contempt for the overall design. When Chaffee climbed through the hatch of the flight vehicle to start the test, he complained that the interior smelled of sour milk. The consensus was that the balky environmental control hardware was generating fumes. Then the radio system glitched. Furious, Grissom shouted, ‘How the hell are we supposed to communicate with mission control from space when we can’t even talk to them on the ground!’ The mood around the Kennedy launch complex was distinctly strained as the technicians locked Apollo’s heavy hatch into place, sealing the crew inside.

Five hours into the test, Grissom’s garbled voice on the crackling radio link said, ‘We’ve got a fire in the capsule.’ A few seconds later, another voice (possibly White’s) was more urgent. ‘Hey, we’re burning up in here!’ There was a scream of pain, then just a hiss of static as the radio went dead. Suddenly the side of the capsule split open. There was a horrifying ‘whoosh!’ as the top of the launch tower was engulfed in thick, acrid smoke and flames. The pad crew, high atop the gantry, tried desperately to get the astronauts out, but the smoke was impenetrable and the heat quite overpowering. It took four minutes to open Apollo’s hatch, by which time all three astronauts were dead.[2]

The tragedy was reminiscent of Valentin Bondarenko’s death in the isolation chamber back in 1960, but NASA could not draw any lessons from that because of the obsessive secrecy that always surrounded the Soviet space effort.

NASA entered a two-year hiatus, a period of self-doubt, its technical and political reputation severely tarnished by the deaths. The Soviet cosmonauts grieved for their US counterparts, and were permitted to send official expressions of condolence to the dead men’s families, even as Leonid Brezhnev and Vasily Mishin speculated about the window of opportunity that had arisen for the Soviet space effort to take advantage of NASA’s enforced slow-down.

The Soviets’ gigantic N-1 lunar superbooster was running badly behind schedule, and even the demoralized Americans knew that it did not present a serious threat. According to a National Intelligence Estimate document of March 2, 1967, their appraisal of the N-1 was that:

The landing and return of a man on the moon seemed very far off yet for Mishin and his beleaguered team at OKB-1; but a much simpler circumlunar flight, Jules Verne-style, might be achievable without the need for the colossal and as yet unflown N-1 booster. Korolev’s old rivals in the aerospace community, Glushko and Chelomei, were developing a rocket called Proton, which was larger and more powerful than the R-7 but not quite powerful enough to carry a lunar landing module as well as a crew return capsule. Mishin faced a difficult choice: if he opted for the circumlunar flight aboard Chelomei’s Proton, he would have to sacrifice some development work on the N-1 and the bug-like landing craft; but if he could achieve a fairly basic ‘once-around-the-moon’ flight while NASA was still preoccupied with recovering from the Apollo fire, any subsequent walkabout on the lunar surface by American astronauts would come across as yet another second-best. With this tantalizing prize in mind, work on the new Soyuz capsule was accelerated, while the N-1 was allowed to fall further behind and Korolev’s old enemies dug their claws deeper into OKB-1.

The cosmonaut team was affected by all these complications. Leonov began training a squad for a touchdown mission with the N-1, which would include the use of the tiny one-man lunar landing pod, while another team of astronauts was prepared for circumlunar flights aboard the Proton, using an elongated Soyuz variant known as a ‘Zond’. Meanwhile, yet another group, including Gagarin, was training for the first basic earth-orbital test of the Soyuz mated to a standard R-7. In contrast to the overall NASA effort, with Apollo as its privileged centrepiece, the Soviet lunar programmes were divided, confused and contradictory, especially in the absence of Korolev’s managerial discipline.

By the spring of 1967, development of the Soyuz was moving towards that crucial first flight. On April 22 the Soviet propaganda departments felt confident enough to let slip some rumours to the international press agency, UPI. ‘The up-coming mission will include the most spectacular Soviet space venture in history – an attempted in-flight hook-up between two ships and a transfer of crews.’ But some doubts seemed to be preying on Nikolai Kamanin’s mind. His diary more or less implies political pressure to push the Soyuz launch schedule forward:

Kamanin’s anxiety presaged disaster. Alexei Leonov says, ‘The first manned test of the Soyuz was assigned to Vladimir Komarov, with Yuri Gagarin as the back-up, and another Soyuz spacecraft was being prepared for Yuri to fly at a later date. He trained very hard for two years, reporting the progress of his training in detail to the State Committee. Then Komarov flew for two days [specifically, 27 hours] and we had a big problem.’

Komarov’s launch was supposed to be followed a day later by another Soyuz with three more crewmen aboard: Valery Bykovsky, Yevgeny Khrunov and Alexei Yeliseyev. The two Soyuz ships were supposed to dock, then Khrunov and Yeliseyev were scheduled to spacewalk into Komarov’s capsule and sit in his spare seats, thus producing another world ‘first’ – going up in one ship and coming home in another. This was designed as a rehearsal for a future moon mission. The Soyuz did not yet include an airtight docking tunnel, so the only way of swapping a crewman between the capsule and a future lunar lander would be to spacewalk him from hatch to hatch.

It seems likely that the Brezhnev administration wanted the docking to take place on or around May Day. The year 1967 had a special significance in the communist calendar; it was the fiftieth Anniversary of the 1917 Revolution. The concept of making a ‘union’ between two spaceships collaborating in orbit was highly symbolic, especially for a ruling government obsessed with symbols. In 1982 Victor Yevsikov, an engineer on the Soyuz development team who helped design the heat-shield, admitted from his new safe haven in Canada that heavy political pressure was applied to Vasily Mishin and OKB-1 to get the two Soyuz ships into orbit on time:

As the deadline for the mission drew near, OKB-1 technicians knew of 203 separate faults in the spacecraft that still required attention. Yuri Gagarin was closely involved in this assessment.[6] By March 9, 1967, he and his closest cosmonaut colleagues had produced a formal ten-page document, with the help of the engineers, in which all the problems were outlined in detail. The trouble was, no one knew what to do with it. Within Soviet society, bad news always reflected badly on the messenger. Quite apart from Mishin, as many as fifty senior engineers knew about the report, or had helped draft it, but none of them felt sufficiently confident to go into the Kremlin and do what had to be done: request that Leonid Brezhnev play down the symbolism of the pending launch, so as to allow a decent delay for technical improvements.

The cosmonauts and space bureaucrats eventually adopted an age-old technique. They recruited a non-partisan messenger from outside the Soyuz programme to deliver the document for them: Yuri Gagarin’s KGB friend Venyamin Russayev.

‘Komarov invited me and my wife to visit his family,’ says Russayev. ‘Afterwards, as he was seeing us off, he said straight out, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.” As I knew the state of affairs, I asked him, “If you’re so convinced you’re going to die, then why don’t you refuse the mission?” He answered, “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the back-up pilot instead. That’s Yura, and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.”… Komarov said he knew what he was talking about, and he burst into such bitter tears. Of course he kept his emotions in check in front of his wife, but when we were alone for a moment he collapsed completely.’

Russayev could not be of much help on his own. Back at his desk in the Lubyanka the next morning, after a sleepless night, he decided to ask advice from one of his KGB seniors, Major-General Konstantin Makharov, a man he respected. ‘Makharov’s department dealt with space issues in relation to personnel. He used to work very closely with Korolev, but he was gone, and [his successor] Mishin wasn’t the same kind of man. The guys in my department also contributed to this work, but Mishin was impossible to deal with, particularly when firm decisions were required. He always needed a lot of guidance… I went to Makharov’s office and told him there was a serious problem with the rocket. He listened to me very carefully, and then he said, “I’m going to do something. In the meantime don’t leave your desk today. Not even for one second.” I kept my promise, and I’d only been back at my desk for a short while when he sent for me again. He gave me a letter, prepared by a team mobilized by Yuri Gagarin. Most of the cosmonauts took part in the research. Makharov told me to take the letter upstairs and see Ivan Fadyekin, Head of Department Three.’

This ‘letter’ consisted of a covering note, along with the ten-page document describing all 203 problems in the Soyuz hardware. Russayev insists, ‘I didn’t read it. I simply didn’t have the time.’ Just as likely, his instincts as a KGB man warned him that sneaking a look at the document might be very dangerous for him. As soon as he saw it, Fadyekin decided the same thing and dodged the responsibility straight away. ‘I don’t have the expertise for this.’ He redirected Russayev to a much more dangerous man in the Lubyanka: Georgi Tsinev.

Tsinev was a close personal friend of Leonid Brezhnev; in fact, he was related by marriage, and they had fought alongside each other in the war. If anyone could deliver an important message straight into the hands of the First Secretary, Tsinev could. Unfortunately for Russayev, things were not quite that simple. Tsinev was rising fast within the KGB, helped along by his powerful patron in the Kremlin. He was not going to allow any irritations to disturb that cosy relationship. ‘While reading the letter, Tsinev looked at me, gauging my reactions to see if I’d read it or not,’ Russayev explains. He had the inescapable feeling that Tsinev already knew the document thoroughly and was not remotely interested in its technical details. ‘He was glaring at me very intently, watching me like a hawk, and suddenly he asked, “How would you like a promotion up to my department?” He even offered me a better office.’

Russayev was now in great danger. Tsinev was trying to buy him off with a promotion, at the same time as placing him in a department where he could be more closely monitored. If Russayev accepted the deal, he would lose any chance of helping Komarov and Gagarin’s cause. On the other hand, if he rejected Tsinev’s offer, the consequences did not bear thinking about. ‘It was all part of the game, I suppose. I was very angry, but I couldn’t let it show. I declined Tsinev’s offer very carefully, explaining that I wasn’t really qualified for the work in his department.’

Tsinev kept hold of the document and it was never seen again. Within weeks, Fadyekin was transferred to a junior consular office in Iran, merely for the crime of glancing through it. Makharov was fired immediately, without a pension, and Tsinev took over as chief of an entire counter-intelligence department. Russayev was stripped of any responsibility for space affairs, and transferred to an insignificant staff training department outside Moscow, well away from the Lubyanka. ‘I kept my head down like a hermit for the next ten years,’ he says.

Early on the morning of April 23, 1967, the Soyuz was propped up against the gantry at Baikonur, ready for launch, according to the original schedule. As Komarov made his final preparations before taking the lift up to his seat in the capsule, Gagarin seemed to have forgotten that the torture inflicted on back-up pilots in the old Vostok days no longer applied. Instead of forcing them into spacesuits and driving them all the way to the base of the pad to watch their more fortunate colleagues ascend to the top of the rocket, back-ups were now stood down from duty the night before a flight – only this time, Komarov was not necessarily the more fortunate man. The journalist Yaroslav Golovanov noticed Gagarin behaving very strangely. ‘He demanded to be put into the protective spacesuit. It was already clear that Komarov was perfectly fit to fly, and there were only three or four hours remaining until lift-off time, but he suddenly burst out and started demanding this and that. It was a sudden caprice.’ Golovanov did not realize that this was not random misbehaviour. Russayev and others insist that Gagarin was trying to elbow his way onto the flight in order to save Komarov from almost certain death.

The problem with Golovanov’s version is that Komarov was not supposed to wear a spacesuit for this mission; therefore his back-up, Gagarin, would not have been assigned a suit, either. The front module of the Soyuz incorporated airtight hatches at each end, allowing the module to serve as an airlock. The spacewalkers from the second Soyuz needed their suits, but Komarov did not. In which case, why did Gagarin demand to be dressed in a suit? A more realistic explanation is that he wanted Komarov to wear the spacesuit in order to give him an extra safety margin. This is not as simple as it sounds; spacesuits are so much an integral part of a capsule’s system that they cannot always be worn with the simplicity of an overcoat, but have to be plugged in to other life-support machinery. Another possibility is that Gagarin was trying to disrupt the preparations somehow, but without any clear plan of action. Whatever happened in the suiting-up room that morning, the archive pre-launch footage shows an unhappy Komarov, a downcast Gagarin and some very subdued technicians.

Komarov encountered problems almost as soon as he had achieved orbit. One of the two solar-power vanes on the rear equipment module refused to deploy (yet another mechanical problem) and his guidance computers ran short of power. Launch of the second Soyuz, crewed by Yeliseyev, Khrunov and Bykovsky, was cancelled while ground controllers worked on Komarov’s power deficit, although by some accounts Vasily Mishin held off cancelling the second launch for as long as he could. After eighteen orbits (twenty-six hours), Komarov’s problems had not been resolved, and the mission directors decided to terminate the mission altogether during the next orbit. Komarov had great difficulty lining up his capsule for re-entry and complained, ‘This devil ship! Nothing I lay my hands on works properly.’

Unlike the old Vostok ball, the Soyuz capsule had a distinctly flattened underside to give it some aerodynamic lift in the atmosphere, rather like an Apollo module. The drawback was that it had to be aimed much more accurately than Vostok. With his guidance systems almost entirely off-line, Komarov could not keep his ship at a stable angle, and when it began to spin, he fired his attitude control jets to try and bring it back in hand. Unfortunately the OKB-1 designers had put the thrusters too close alongside the star tracker navigation sensors, and the delicate lenses could no longer tell stars from random reflections. Passing over the night side of earth, and searching for a more obvious reference target for his blurred instruments, Komarov had to use the moon in a desperate attempt to work out his alignment.[7]

Rumours about the dialogue between Komarov and ground control have circulated for many years, based on reports from American National Security Agency (NSA) staff monitoring the radio signals from a USAF facility near Istanbul. In August 1972 a former NSA analyst, interviewed under the name ‘Winslow Peck’ (real name Perry Fellwock), gave a very moving account of the interception:

As he began his descent into the atmosphere, Komarov knew he was in terrible trouble. The radio outposts in Turkey intercepted his cries of rage and frustration as he plunged to his death, cursing for ever the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship – although his ‘final screams’, mentioned later in Fellwock’s account, may be an exaggeration.

Korolev’s inadvertent prophesy about ‘flying under rags’ was fulfilled when the parachutes did not deploy properly. A small drogue canopy came out, but failed to pull the bigger canopy from its storage bay – yet another serious design flaw. A back-up parachute was released, only to become entangled with the first drogue. There was nothing to slow the capsule’s fall, and Komarov slammed onto the steppe near Orenburg with all the force of an unrestrained 2.8-ton meteorite. The capsule was utterly flattened, and the buffer retro-rockets in its base blew up on impact, burning what little wreckage was left.

Recovery troops picked up handfuls of soil to try and dampen the flames. Their radio messages back to base were garbled and distressed: something about the cosmonaut ‘requiring urgent medical attention’. It seems unlikely that any recognizable portion of Komarov’s body would have survived intact, although Russayev says that a heel bone was found among the ashes.

This was the first Soviet fatality during an actual space flight, and it came as an immense shock; nor could the basic truth of the disaster be discreetly hidden from the outside world (although the Soviet authorities admitted only to an unfortunate parachute failure, and not to a series of design and preparation flaws dating from long before the ship took off). This time it was NASA’s turn to send letters of condolence. Both sides in the superpower divide had learned that the space environment showed no concern for nationalities or flags, but treated all trespassers – Russian and American alike – to the same set of risks.

Three weeks after Komarov’s death, Gagarin met Russayev at his family apartment, but refused to speak in any of the rooms because he was worried about bugs – listening devices buried in the walls or hidden in light fittings and telephones. The lifts and lobby areas were not safe either, so the two men trudged up and down the apartment block’s echoing stairwells and along the corridors. Anything to keep moving and confuse the eavesdroppers.

The Gagarin of 1967 was very different from the optimistic and carefree young man of 1961. Komarov’s death had placed an enormous burden of guilt on his shoulders. ‘He told me the story about the huge research effort undertaken to try and prevent the flight,’ says Russayev. ‘He said the results were supposed to have been reported to the Main Man [Brezhnev]. He explained how they’d thought of me as an envoy in charge of getting the letter to the relevant offices. I told Yuri how I’d worked on it, and everything that had happened… He warned me, “Walls have ears.” It was Yuri’s idea to avoid the lifts. Somebody must have told him my apartment was bugged… I found out for sure when my wife woke me up at three in the morning, and we both heard a rustling behind the ventilation grille where they were installing the bug. The thought of it made me furious. How could they bug one of their own agents? I suppose that’s the essence of Soviet life. There were always so many bugs around.’

At one point Gagarin said, ‘I must go to see the Main Man personally. Will he see me, d’you think?’

Russayev says, ‘I was amazed he could ask me this. I said, “But Yuri, you’re the one who’s always standing next to him on the Mausoleum. You’re always chatting together, and now you’re asking me if I can tell you whether or not he’ll see you? I haven’t even shaken the guy’s hand.”

‘“Yes, but I never talk seriously with him. All he ever wants to do is hear dirty stories and jokes from all my foreign trips.”’

Gagarin was profoundly depressed that he hadn’t been able to talk properly to Brezhnev and persuade him to cancel Komarov’s launch. As Russayev explains today, ‘Relations between Khrushchev and Gagarin were absolutely excellent, but with Brezhnev it wasn’t so good. If people don’t want you, it can be hard to get through.’

Shortly before Gagarin left, the bitterness and intensity of his anger became obvious. ‘I’ll get through to him [Brezhnev] somehow, and if I ever find out he knew about the situation and still let everything happen, then I know exactly what I’m going to do.’

Russayev goes on, ‘I don’t know exactly what Yuri had in mind. Maybe a good punch in the face.’

Russayev warned Gagarin to be cautious as far as Brezhnev was concerned. ‘I told him, “Talk to me first before you do anything, and I’ll try to advise you. I warn you, be very careful.” But I wasn’t in the space department any more. I wasn’t even in Moscow, so there wasn’t much I could do. I don’t know if Yuri ever got to see Brezhnev, and I’ve felt guilty ever since that I couldn’t stay with Yuri to guide him.’

One story has it that Gagarin caught up with Brezhnev eventually and threw a drink in his face.

Although Gagarin grieved for Komarov, who had always been one of the ablest and most likeable cosmonauts, he remained as determined as ever to fly, and was extremely disappointed when his superiors decided to ground him from further rocket flights. Alexei Leonov explains, ‘After Komarov, the State Committee decided it wasn’t possible to fly Yura, because all the problems with the Soyuz had to be corrected, and it was going to take two years to redesign the vehicle.’

It was not just the slippage in the launch schedule, but renewed nervousness at the possibility of losing Gagarin to an accident, that contributed to his grounding – and there were certain military traditions to uphold. Sergei Belotserkovsky reluctantly agreed with the decision to ban the First Cosmonaut from further missions. Although he is well aware that Gagarin desperately wanted a moon flight, he says, ‘The main candidate [for a possible lunar attempt] was Andrian Nikolayev. Regarding Yura, Korolev told me shortly before his death that he probably shouldn’t fly any more. Yura was in a difficult situation, because he was Deputy Director of the Cosmonauts’ Training Centre, and the responsibilities of that job are clearly laid out – the control and training of other cosmonauts. It’s not usual for the chief of a training centre to make flights himself.’

Gagarin was very depressed by this decision, and wrote a letter to the State Committee in which he pleaded, ‘I can’t be prevented from flying. If I stop flying, I will have no moral rights to lead other people whose life and work are connected with flying.’

With the straight-talking wisdom of an honest working man, Gagarin’s favourite hairdresser Igor Khoklov says, ‘Yuri couldn’t live without flying. It was his whole life. A man can’t live without his trade. He can’t survive.’

When the redesigned Soyuz finally flew successfully for the first time, on October 26, 1968, Gagarin’s harshest critic, Georgi Beregovoi, was at the controls.

The truth behind Komarov’s accident and Gagarin’s grounding is only now coming to light, but most Western analysts knew by now that something was wrong with the First Cosmonaut’s career. As long ago as 1982, in his ground-breaking book Red Star in Orbit, the American space writer James Oberg wrote:

Gagarin diverted himself with more partying, prompting a ­disappointed Kamanin to note, ‘Since Komarov’s death, Gagarin has been dismissed from all space flights. He has undergone a new, more stormy process of personality disintegration.’

At the beginning of March 1968, the last month of Gagarin’s life, a comfortable accommodation centre for cosmonauts was at last completed in Star City. Alexei Leonov remembers some hard partying, perhaps triggered by the cosmonauts’ desire to block out the emotional horror of Komarov’s terrible death. ‘We probably met at Gagarin’s apartment more often than anybody else’s place. The traditions of hospitality were already established, from where we lived before, at Chkalovsky. There was this law – if you arrived late for a party you had to strip down to the waist and get into a bath of cold water and submerge your head. Even famous people had to go through this. The law was the law! Actually this was a tradition started by Yuri, and the point was that after a cold bath you were revived with a big jolt of vodka so as not to catch a cold. The trouble was, everybody started to turn up late to get their vodka.’

One distinguished guest was the architect Komarovsky, responsible for the tall tower at Moscow State University, where the first cosmonauts had been dropped down the lift-shaft back in 1960. He was welcomed with an ancient peasant gesture of hospitality, still observed by modern Russians, even those aboard the Mir space station: gifts of vital foodstuffs to protect the traveller against hunger. ‘We took Komarovsky up to the top floor, where there was some bread and salt and vodka,’ says Leonov. ‘Then from the eleventh floor down to the tenth, where there was more bread and salt and so on, all the way down through every floor. Komarovsky, and some other famous people, they said at the end of all this, “Well, we’ve seen many extraordinary things in our lives, but never so much bread and salt!” Anyway, that’s how we thanked the people who built our apartments.’

Certainly for Gagarin, these parties distracted him from his anxieties. Zoya recollects that when he was back home in Gzhatsk, his innermost fears occasionally surfaced:

‘Yes, it’s true, it was on December 5. He always came home at that time of year to see us, and to go hunting. Just as he was getting ready to leave, Mamma had some sort of anxiety, and I remember Yura saying, “Everybody in the world asks me for something. I’m always helping complete strangers, but you never ask anything of me. You never tell me what you need.” Valya and the girls [Lena and Galya] were already waiting in the car, but I had the feeling Yura didn’t want to leave us. I think he was worried about something.’