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

¹² WRECKAGE

American astronauts in the 1960s took great pride in their flying skills, and their employers at NASA gave them every opportunity to hone their skills in the air. They were assigned discretionary access to Northrop T-38 training jets, which they used as personal transports between the major NASA facilities in Texas, Florida and Alabama. These fast, lightweight planes were the space-age equivalent of company cars.

By contrast, pilots recruited into the Soviet space programme from various Air Force squadrons found to their dismay that their flying time was greatly reduced, and they were forbidden to make any solo flights, no matter how great their previous experience in the air might have been. Although the airbase at Chkalovsky near Star City provided an obvious venue for flights, very few aircraft were made available to the cosmonauts. Equipping Star City with modern jets was always a struggle, because most of the hardware had to be requisitioned from rival organizations: the Air Force in particular. Vladimir Shatalov, ex-cosmonaut and Chief of Training after Kamanin’s enforced retirement in 1971, described how hard it was to obtain new jets for Star City’s use:

All aircraft pilots need to fly a minimum number of hours per year in order to maintain their qualifications. Cosmonauts at Star City who wanted to top up their conventional flying hours had to share a couple of MiG-15UTI tandem-seat trainers, which were among the most antiquated aircraft in the Soviet armoury. The first single-seat MiG fighters (with engines based on designs acquired from the Rolls-Royce company) had entered service as far back as 1947. Throughout the 1950s they were refined into one of the world’s most potent combat weapons, but by the end of the next decade these old machines were no longer at their best. Communist allies abroad still purchased them in large numbers, but the domestic Air Force was switching to far more advanced fighters. Denied further flights into space after Komarov’s death, Gagarin wanted to qualify in one of these newer jets, but first he had a great deal of catching up to do.

Although he was the most famous pilot in the world, he was not a particularly experienced one. Telltale clues can be discovered even to this day in the museum at Star City, where a number of Gagarin’s personal effects are preserved. His pilot’s log book is a much-venerated object, yet it makes disturbing reading. When he was recruited into the first cosmonaut squad at the end of 1959, his total flight time amounted to 252 hours and twenty-one minutes. Of this, only seventy-five hours had been spent as a solo MiG-15 pilot, first at Orenburg, then on station at Nikel in the Murmansk region.

For a young Air Force lieutenant starting out on his career, this was not an especially poor total, although most of the other cosmonauts in his group had logged 1,500 hours or so. If he had stayed on active duty with the Air Force, Gagarin could have built up his flying time to become a superbly skilled fighter pilot. After he was recruited for training at Star City, however, he lost this opportunity altogether. Throughout the entire period of his cosmonaut career, from 1960 to 1968, he accumulated only seventy-eight hours additional time in the air – none of them solo. This amounted to less than ten hours per year.

On February 18, 1968, Gagarin at last received his diploma papers from the Zhukovsky Academy, greatly improving his future career prospects (on the ground at least) with a significant and hard-earned qualification. Meanwhile the position of his immediate superior at Star City, Nikolai Kamanin, was under threat because of the Soyuz accident that had killed Komarov. Although not directly responsible for the many hardware problems that contributed to the crash, Kamanin was one of the officers in authority who had sanctioned the flight in the first place, and there was a chance that his head might roll for it. There was a real possibility that Gagarin might be promoted to the rank of General, and appointed Head of Cosmonaut Training in Kamanin’s place. The main worry on his mind was how to maintain the respect of the cosmonauts, a good many of whom had far more piloting experience than he did – as Beregovoi had so charmlessly pointed out.

According to an Izvestia journalist, Boris Konovalov:

Alexei Leonov justifies Gagarin’s desire to get himself – and others – back into the air. ‘People were asking, “Why does he have to fly?” It was because he was Deputy Chief of Training at Star City, and in order to do that, he needed to be an impeccable pilot.’ In other words, a man in the position of teaching other fliers needed to keep their respect by being a good pilot himself. Gagarin’s wife Valentina hinted at the problems he faced in a 1978 interview with Yaroslav Golovanov:

By March 1968 Gagarin had not flown for five months. He turned for help to Vladimir Serugin, an experienced flier and a good teacher. As a young man, Serugin had flown 140 combat missions against the Nazis. Taking into account the late collection of confirmation signatures from his superiors, his total number of sorties probably reached 200. He shot down seventeen enemy aircraft, putting himself in the ‘fighter ace’ category. By the war’s end he was just twenty-four years old, and a prime candidate for flying the best available new planes well into the 1960s.

In 1968 Serugin was in his late forties. Perhaps a little too old and too slow by then? It seems unlikely. As a test pilot he gained a reputation for pulling safely out of bad situations, or ‘coming unscrewed’ as the saying went. On March 12, 1968 he took out a newer version of the MiG, a model 21, and halted his take-off run just before he became airborne. He was convinced that something did not feel right. He taxied the plane back to the hangar and insisted that the mechanics check his engine. They found nothing wrong with it. Again Serugin took the plane to the runway, and again he turned back at the last moment. Sure enough, on closer examination the mechanics found a problem with the engine. This story suggests a flier at the peak of alertness, his instincts undimmed by early middle age.

Two weeks later, on March 27, Gagarin took off from Chkalovsky (the airbase directly alongside Star City) aboard a two-seater MiG-15UTI jet, with Serugin in the back seat acting as his instructor. The purpose of the flight was to prepare Gagarin for qualifying in a more modern MiG-17, so that he could leave the older plane behind once and for all.

Valentina was in hospital undergoing an appendectomy, and Gagarin planned to visit her later on, at the end of his day’s work.

At 7.30 in the evening, Taissia Serugina started to worry because her husband Vladimir was not yet home. As she remembers, ‘I was waiting for the whole night. I called his air regiment, and every time they said, “He’s not available, but everything’s in order. He’s busy with his work.” No one told me anything. I didn’t sleep, and I left the house next morning for work. Then they notified me that there had been a problem at the airfield, but I didn’t quite believe it. I thought if anything serious had happened to my husband, they would have told me yesterday… Suddenly my daughter ran up to me. “Mother!” she shouted, and there were tears in her eyes. “Father’s dead!” I don’t remember much after that.’

Alexei Leonov was one of only a few cosmonauts to have embraced helicopter flying as a worthwhile discipline. He was involved in the testing of possible lunar landing manoeuvres using adapted helicopters as crude vertical-descent simulators. On the morning of March 27, he was leading a group of cosmonauts through a parachute training run from the Kerzatch airfield, thirteen kilometres from Serugin’s and Gagarin’s base at Chkalovsky. He piloted a large helicopter through the deteriorating weather, trying to find a break in the clouds so that he could release his jumpers.

The cloud base was down to 450 metres and visibility was appalling. Rain and wet snowflakes thudded against the cockpit canopy. Leonov managed to release his first parachute team into the air, but the visibility was closing in fast. The local air-traffic controllers told him that the weather was not going to improve, so he took the helicopter back to Kerzatch with half his parachute team still aboard. ‘Moments after we had landed, we heard two explosions – an explosion and a bang that accompanies a supersonic shockwave. We wondered: what was it? An explosion or a bang? I said it was probably both – that the events were somehow linked. And these two sounds were just over one second apart.’

Chkalovsky was thirteen kilometres away and the sounds were muffled by the damp weather, but even at that distance they were distinguishable. Leonov became increasingly concerned. He knew perfectly well that Gagarin was flying today. On his own authority, he flew the helicopter to Chkalovsky, despite the poor weather. All the way there he monitored the controllers calling Gagarin’s code number, 625, on the radio link. As soon as Leonov touched down at Chkalovsky, a regimental commander came up to him and said, ‘The fuel in Yuri’s plane should have run out forty-five minutes ago, but he’s not returned to the airfield.’

Leonov decided he had better report his unpleasant theory. ‘I went to the Flight Control Office and Nikolai Kamanin was there. I told him, “You might think it’s strange to say this, but I heard an explosion and a supersonic bang.” I gave an estimation of the [compass bearing] I thought the sounds had come from.’

A search helicopter was despatched to overfly the area where Gagarin’s plane had last been spotted on radar, ninety-six kilometres north-east of Moscow. The pilot flew low over the ground and discovered an area of woodland with a bare black patch of scattered earth venting some steam, but visibility was still poor and he could not be sure that this was actually a wreck site. According to Leonov, ‘The search pilot thought the steam might be a natural phenomenon of some kind. He was ordered to land his helicopter and inspect the site on foot. Because of all the trees there was no obvious opportunity to put the helicopter down, so the pilot flew to the nearest open land, near a church, and settled there.’ Apparently he waded for an hour through thick snow, a metre deep in places, to get into the woodlands where he had seen the smoke. When he had found what there was to find, he struggled back to the helicopter and made his report by radio. There was a large crater, he said, and the earth from within it had been thrown outwards across a wide area. Some of the trees at the perimeter were broken, and many small pieces of twisted metal lay all over the site. Clearly this was an aircraft accident, but there was no obvious sign of a central piece of wreckage in the crater: a fuselage, for instance, or a main engine section.

Gagarin and Serugin had lost contact with Chkalovsky traffic control at 10.31 in the morning. By the time the helicopter pilot had waded in and out of the wreck sight, made his report and called for a properly equipped rescue team, it was about 4.30 in the afternoon. The grey winter light, already poor, was fading fast. The search team arrived with powerful torches, but they were of little use in the winter darkness. By evenfall the searchers had identified what appeared to be tatters of Vladimir Serugin’s clothing, and Gagarin’s map case, but they had found no obvious trace of either man’s body, nor of the main sections of the aircraft. ‘Throughout the night two battalions of soldiers searched the forest, but they didn’t find anything,’ Leonov explains. ‘And on the next day, while we were digging deeper into the crater, we found pieces of Gagarin’s flying jacket. It became clear that both of them were still in here somewhere. They didn’t eject.’

The front end of the plane had been rammed with great force several metres into the hard ground, by the sheer momentum of the heavy engine block. The recovery team had to try and dig the cockpit out of the hard-frozen earth. They found that it was utterly smashed, and the two men’s bodies inside were severely mangled. To their great distress, the rescuers spent many hours retrieving fingers, toes, pieces of ribcage and skull from the crater, the surrounding woodlands and even the trees – some of these had to be cut down once they knew what to look for. It became clear that the plane’s impact with the trees had caused terrible damage to the cockpit, even before the final impact on the ground had crushed it once and for all.

Meanwhile Gagarin’s personal driver Fyodor Dyemchuk, who had driven him to Chkalovsky that morning, was quietly waiting for the MiG to return so that he could get his passenger back to central Moscow, to see Valya in the Kuntsevo hospital in the evening. ‘At approximately eleven o’clock [that morning] all of us learned that his radio link was lost. Everyone assumed his transmitter was out of order or something like that.’ But the mood darkened once the search party was ordered later that day. ‘We were told that a crash site had been found and we were under orders to be ready at eight o’clock in the evening. We formed a team, picked up some equipment and went to that place. There was a lot of snow, and the ground was difficult, so it took us most of the night to drive through and reach the crash site. Of course everyone was upset. Everyone felt it. The most horrible thing was the uncertainty.’

At first light next morning, the extent of the crash became clear. Dyemchuk was closely involved in the search to recover every scrap of wreckage, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. ‘The only large pieces left were the engine, some landing gear, and one wing. The rest was scattered over the entire forest by the force of impact and the explosion. We were walking through the snow. You walk and see a hole in the snow, and you dip your hand in and pull out a piece of flesh or a piece of bone. Sometimes a finger. Those were very dark days.’

Dyemchuk’s worst moment actually came two days after the crash, when he was driving a distraught Valentina Gagarina away from the hospital after her operation. Thoughtlessly he let slip some comment or other about recovering Gagarin’s body. ‘She was hysterical. She didn’t know. She thought he was found intact, or at least that the majority of body parts were found. Of course men understand very well what happens in an explosion, but how could women know about these things? She didn’t realize they were blown to pieces. Because of my naïvety, I told her. Perhaps a bitter truth is better than a sweet lie.’

Under conditions of the greatest security, Leonov, Kamanin and other colleagues were asked to attempt an identification of the two dead pilots’ body fragments. Leonov says, ‘When they showed me part of a neck, I said, “That is Gagarin.” Why? Because of a birthmark. On Saturday we were at the barber’s shop at the Yusnost Hotel. There was a barber, Igor Khoklov, who liked Yura very much, and he always cut his hair. I saw the birthmark, about three millimetres across, and I said, “Igor, be careful. Don’t cut it off.” So I knew when I saw it that we could stop searching. We wouldn’t find Gagarin out there somewhere. He was here.’

Meanwhile, one of the most intensive air-accident investigations in Soviet history was initiated. Despite the very wide scattering of wreckage, 95 per cent of the MiG-15 was recovered for analysis over the next fortnight. Even while this painstaking recovery was being carried out, fragments of heart and muscle tissue from the pilots’ shattered bodies were sent off for chemical analysis.

A standard sequence of biochemical tests was performed on the remains of all Soviet military pilots killed in accidents. Lactic-acid levels in muscle tissues yielded clues to a pilot’s physical condition at the time of a crash. High levels of acid suggested tightly flexed muscles and a thoroughly alert pilot. Low levels indicated a relaxed state, perhaps a result of unconsciousness brought on by extreme g-forces. In such a case the accident investigation was fairly straightforward. The pilot could be deemed responsible for the crash, but his honour was protected. Another possibility, suggested by intermediate lactic-acid levels, was that tiredness might have caused the pilot’s attention to wander; in which case the investigation was widened to include his overall workload and career. The worst possibility was alcohol. If a pilot was found to have been drunk in charge of his aircraft, his reputation could not possibly be redeemed. The chemical tests searched for traces of alcohol as well as lactic acid.

Immediately after Gagarin’s and Serugin’s crash a rumour spread that they had indeed been drunk. This story is still put about today.[4] They went to a fiftieth birthday party for a colleague the night before their flight, and partied hard and long. Taissia Serugina utterly rejects this idea. ‘The night before the flight my husband went to bed at ten. I asked him, “Why are you going to bed so early?” He said, “Tomorrow I have to test Yura, so I want to be in good shape.” In the morning he left for work in a good mood. He said, “It’ll be a good day today.” But a tragedy occurred.’

Taissia admits that a party did take place prior to the crash, but two nights before. ‘On Monday there was a celebration in Star City for a colleague’s fiftieth birthday. On Tuesday my husband was working as normal. On Wednesday Yura was due to fly. That’s why, on Tuesday evening, my husband told me he’d go to bed earlier.’ Taissia blames the rumours of drunkenness on Serugin’s immediate superior at the Chkalovsky airbase, General Kuznetsov, who treated Serugin with considerable discourtesy throughout their working relationship. ‘He would summon my husband to his office, then keep him waiting outside. Finally my husband would become exasperated. He would arrive, only to find that the man wouldn’t see him, so he’d turn around and drive back to the airfield.’

The problem between the two men appears to have been rivalry for rank within the Chkalovsky airbase. Gagarin and Serugin were very good friends, and Taissia Serugina is convinced that General Kuznetsov resented her husband’s closeness with the First Cosmonaut. ‘Yura said to my husband, “Don’t pay any attention to Kuznetsov, because very soon I’ll be Chief of Training and everything will work out.” Afterwards, Kuznetsov said that my husband was ill during that last flight, and he had a sick stomach or an ulcer. Never in his life did he complain about any illness. To say such foul things is absolute dishonesty.’

If Kuznetsov was using the phrases ‘ulcer’ or ‘sick stomach’ to suggest a hangover, then the hard evidence supports Taissia Serugina’s side of the argument. Samples from Gagarin’s and Serugin’s remains were sent to several institutes, and all of them reported similar results. Lactic-acid levels in the muscle tissues of both men were high, indicating that they were fully conscious and alert at the time of the crash. In fact, the levels suggested an intense physical battle with the MiG’s control yokes (what we would call ‘joysticks’). Meanwhile the alcohol levels were not found to be significant.

The aircraft wreckage revealed other clues. The yokes in the front and rear cockpit compartments were positioned as they should have been by pilots attempting to control a wayward aircraft. In theory, the crash could have dislodged the yokes entirely by chance, but the foot pedals also appeared to be in the right positions. Likewise for the throttle levers and flap controls. Despite the extreme damage to most of the cockpit’s mechanical components, there was strong evidence to suggest that both pilots fought hard to save the plane from a catastrophic spin. What’s more, they seemed to have been trying all the right manoeuvres, aiming for a subtle 20-degree tilt of the aircraft, rather than simply hauling at the yokes in thoughtless panic.[5]

Alexei Leonov was a member of the crash investigation team. As he points out, ‘The plane was not in a dive when it hit the ground, but coming out of it. The plane didn’t crash nose-first, but almost flat on its belly.’ Its downward momentum was still sufficient to drive the engine block several metres into the ice-hardened earth; but the ‘pancake’ impact suggested that the two pilots may have been heart-breakingly close to levelling out when they ran out of sky.

The central question was: why had the plane lost control in the first place? Obviously it had not collided with another plane, otherwise it would have disintegrated in mid-air, scattering wreckage across a much larger area of ground. And there would have been signs of wreckage of the plane which it had collided with.

The crash seemed a puzzle. The investigators turned for answers to the service record of Gagarin’s and Serugin’s MiG. Perhaps the ageing jet had somehow failed, or lost power? The commission noted several concerns:

Gagarin and Serugin flew with expendable drop-away fuel pods under the wings. Leonov says, ‘There was always a drawback with this configuration. The dynamic design of the fuel tanks reduced the safety parameters of a flight, such as the angle of attack, the angles of sliding, and g-forces.’ Drop-tanks were not required to sustain a brief training sortie directly over home base. The tanks’ usual purpose was to supply a combat MiG with enough fuel to reach foreign enemy territory. When it reached its intended war zone and began to fight, the MiG was supposed to drop the depleted tanks in order to regain maximum nimbleness and speed. On March 27 a pair of tanks was installed on Gagarin’s training plane so as to familiarize him with the extra care he would have to take while they were in place. They should not have presented any special problems. All MiG pilots understood the strict regulations forbidding them to attempt simulated combat manoeuvres with the tanks attached.

In general, the MiG-15UTI was a rugged machine that allowed its cadet students plenty of margin for error – tanks or no tanks. Everyone called the UTI configuration ‘mother’, because so many thousands of pilots had learned to fly aboard these two-seater machines. Despite doubts about the age of Gagarin’s jet, and its damning record of overhauls, the wreckage did not suggest that any structural failures had occurred prior to the crash itself. So why did an intact and fully functioning MiG suddenly fall to earth? Seeking an explanation, the commission looked into the weather reports for the day of the crash:

Apparently Serugin was misinformed that the cloud base was at 1,000 metres, when in fact it was down to 450 metres. A slight fault in the MiG’s instrumentation prevented its altimeter from responding accurately if the plane was in a dive. Serugin may have descended through the cloud layer thinking that he had twice the height margin over the ground than was actually the case. The difference in flight time would not have been more than a few seconds at most, but it could have been crucial.

Were those few seconds of visibility beneath the cloud layer sufficient for Serugin to see that he was running out of altitude? If so, then why didn’t he order an emergency ejection before the plane actually hit the ground? According to Leonov, the minimum safe height for ejection from a MiG was as low as 200 metres, but the belly-first pattern of the crash suggested that Serugin may have thought he was on the verge of pulling up safely, which could be why he did not order an ejection; and, as everyone knew full well, if he had considered bailing out, the escape procedure itself might have caused some difficulty. Two decades after the crash investigation, Igor Kacharovsky, an expert aircraft engineer, wrote to Sergei Belotserkovsky with his observations:

Kacharovsky’s point was that no instructor worth his salt wanted to leave a less experienced pilot to fend for himself in a stricken plane. The instructor would be honour-bound to get his pupil out of the plane first, before tending to his own survival. The arrangement aboard the MiG-15UTI flouted this honourable tradition. Though he can offer no proof that an ejection was ever attempted, or even considered, Kacharovsky suggested the following terrible scenario:

Kacharovsky imagined the two men arguing the position, wasting valuable seconds until it was too late and they hit the ground. In fact, this scenario is more emotional than strictly logical. The MiG-15UTI designers had little choice in the ejection sequence. All two-seater jets around the world employ the same sequence, for a very simple reason. If the pilot in front ejects first, then the plane moves fractionally forward beneath him as he flies upwards. In the brief fractions of a second while he is still close to the top of the plane, the rear cockpit position passes directly under his ejection seat, so the rear pilot’s escape route is blocked for valuable fractions of a second. What’s more, the rocket blast from the first seat burns through the rear canopy, putting the other pilot’s life in grave danger. However, if the rear pilot ejects first, the man in front can then fire his own seat safely, because his rocket exhausts will trail over an empty rear cockpit position.[9]

There is no moral shame attached to this. The safety margin between the separate ejections is less than half a second. The supervising officer in the back seat issues the order to eject and immediately exits the aircraft. The cadet in the front seat responds so quickly afterwards that the difference in timing is barely significant.

Much more significant was the fact that the cockpit canopy frame was found among the wreckage. In a modern jet fighter a pilot in danger pulls a simple lever on his seat, and the elaborate ejection mechanisms take care of everything else, including the removal of the canopy. If worst comes to worst and the canopy does not come away properly, then a web of explosive wires built into the plexiglass shatters it, so that the seat can simply punch its way out. On the old MiG, however, a separate mechanical lever on the pilot’s left side had to be pulled first in order to dispose of the canopy. Only then could he eject. Obviously neither pilot had pulled the canopy jettison lever.

But the canopy frame in the wreckage did not have much plexiglass left within it. Most of the transparent material was shattered, and only a very small proportion was recovered at the wreck site. This was the only physical evidence in the entire investigation that directly suggested a mid-air collision of some kind. If the MiG had smashed into another plane, there would have been much more in-flight damage than merely the shattering of the canopy. The missing glass was suggestive of a grazing impact with a bird, or with the suspended instrument package of a stray weather balloon – and this is the principal explanation for the crash that the commission eventually settled on, based on the one solid piece of evidence: that the plexiglass was missing. Serugin and Gagarin lost control of their plane when the canopy shattered, and did not quite manage to recover.

The KGB conducted a parallel investigation, not just alongside the Air Force and the official commission members but against them. Their report also focused on the simplest possible explanation, as adopted by the commission, based on the shattered cockpit canopy. One of the KGB investigators, Nikolai Rubkin, today a ‘State security expert’, knows all aspects of the security service’s relationship to the early space effort. He is one of the few people who can gain access to the voluminous original report, stashed way even now in the bowels of the Lubyanka. He says, ‘The missing plexiglass in the canopy meant that something must have hit the cockpit before the crash. A bird strike would tend to hit the front of the canopy, not the top. An impact with an aircraft would have created much more damage. The missing glass is more consistent with an impact against the suspended instrument package of a weather balloon.’ So could the commission’s findings actually be correct? ‘The only indisputable fact is that the cockpit canopy glass was broken before the plane hit the ground,’ Rubkin says, carefully. ‘Everything else is guesswork. Only Gagarin and Serugin could tell us the truth about what really happened that day.’

Rubkin puts the investigation’s politics into broad perspective: ‘There were several sub-commissions investigating different areas. One of them dealt with the aircraft’s maintenance, another with pilot preparation, a third with the fuelling and tank installation, and a fourth examined all the medical matters. Finally there was another looking into any possibility of sabotage, or a revenge plot. That last was very much the KGB’s responsibility at the time.’ The problem – as so often with a high-profile and politically sensitive investigation – was that the five sub-commission teams did not communicate with each other. ‘Since there were several major institutions responsible for all these various areas, and the KGB had its own departments, the sub-commissions’ documentation was never assembled as one coherent package for the main commission. The reason was that too many interested parties worked for institutions that might have been found responsible for the crash. Certain people, whether we like it or not, adjusted the facts to save their honour. I found a report from General Mikoyan, the famous man who designed the MiG in the first place, saying that he was completely dissatisfied with the way the investigation was carried out.’

Alexei Leonov and Sergei Belotserkovsky also remained thoroughly dissatisfied with the commission’s work. They thought the weather-balloon theory was completely wrong. Leonov thinks he knows exactly what happened that day. ‘Another plane passed very close to Gagarin’s and Serugin’s MiG in the clouds, coming within ten, fifteen, twenty metres. The vortex [backwash] from the other plane turned the MiG upside-down and caused the loss of control and the crash.’

Leonov’s theory about aerodynamic interference from another plane provides a credible explanation for the disaster, except that such an ordinary problem should have been survivable. If backwash was a factor on March 27, Serugin should have been able to stabilize the MiG without too much difficulty. Major-General Yuri Khulikov, a former Air Force Chief of Flight Security Services, points out that the MiG-15 had been intensively flight-tested under simulated backwash conditions. Given a reasonable altitude for safety, any averagely experienced pilot should have been able to regain control. In January 1996 Khulikov gave an interview to Moscow News, in which he focused rather harshly on ‘pilot error’ as an explanation for the crash. ‘Even if Gagarin and Serugin got into a vortex stream, the MiG should have been recoverable. Such a vortex doesn’t much affect the engine. I’d like to point out, this conclusion was reached after a very stringent series of tests… Gagarin wasn’t at all prepared for such conditions… You must understand what the name “Gagarin” meant in our country at that time. It was a symbol of the victory of socialism in space. It seems that the First Cosmonaut couldn’t be capable of making mistakes.’[10]

But Khulikov has an axe to grind, since his loyalties lie with the original members of the 1968 investigating commission and those senior officers responsible for general air-traffic control at that time. Notably he forgot to mention that the MiG-15 and many other planes used in vortex recovery tests had never been fitted with drop-tanks because – and this is where the military logic goes round in circles – it was forbidden to fly drop-tanks in such extreme manoeuvres. Quite simply it never occurred to anyone to test MiG-15 training craft under the most severe flying conditions with the tanks attached, because it would have been much too dangerous, even for the most experienced test pilot.

Clearly a backwash hitting a MiG with drop-tanks (as flown by Gagarin and Serugin) would have been more of a hazard than Major-General Khulikov likes to admit.

Alexei Leonov goes much further, insisting that it was not just ordinary backwash from another MiG, but a powerful supersonic shockwave from a brand-new, high-performance fighter that slammed into Gagarin’s and Serugin’s plane like a solid brick wall.

Leonov was always firmly convinced that the two bangs he had heard after he landed his helicopter at Kerzatch were made by two entirely different phenomena. The MiG-15UTI was fast, but far from supersonic. The distant bangs may have sounded faint from where he was standing at the time, but he was sure they were caused by an explosion and an additional supersonic boom. Therefore another, and much faster, aircraft must have entered the same airspace at the wrong moment. But when Leonov tried to persuade his fellow investigators to explore this theory, ‘all my attempts were stopped by some invisible wall. I understand that a Deputy Chief Commander was appointed to the accident commission. He was also in charge of the traffic control for that region, and he could have been responsible [for events on March 27], but he didn’t pay attention to them in his report. It could have been problematic.’

Leonov was unhappy about such obstruction. He was sure that the supersonic boom had not been a figment of his imagination. Eyewitnesses on the ground, near the crash zone, contributed some powerful supporting evidence, which again was not included in the final report. ‘Apart from the fact that I heard the sounds myself, three local dwellers were questioned separately. All of them said they’d seen smoke and fire coming out of a plane’s tail. Then it went up into the clouds. So it was a reversed process. Gagarin fell down to earth, but this other plane went upwards at great speed.’ The witnesses were shown aircraft identification charts, and all of them immediately picked out the distinctive outline of a new Sukhoi SU-11 supersonic jet, which looked nothing like an old MiG-15. ‘We knew that SU-11s could be in that area, but they were supposed to fly above 10,000 metres,’ says Leonov.

The ‘smoke and fire’ coming from the mysterious plane’s rear end were sharply suggestive of an afterburner at full thrust. The SU-11 included an afterburner, which was a relatively new piece of technology: a supercharger wherein the jet exhaust was re-ignited for extra thrust, particularly when the plane was pushing towards supersonic speed and beyond. At full thrust the SU-11 could achieve nearly twice the speed of sound. The antiquated subsonic MiG-15 did not have an afterburner and its exhaust stream was not noticeably fiery.

The evidence for this mysterious second aircraft in the area was supported by one of the air-traffic controllers on duty that day, Vyacheslav Bykovsky, who told the commission that he had seen two other target blips on his radar screen, one of which was approaching from the east. Apparently that signal continued to register on his screen for at least two minutes after Gagarin had crashed. In fact, the timing of the crash was hard to define. Seismometers in Moscow registered a signal at 10.31 in the morning, consistent with an aircraft impact, but Bykovsky says, ‘To this day I don’t believe Gagarin fell at that time, because we lost contact with him on the radar at forty-one minutes past, not thirty-one.’ Then he contradicts himself, saying that the MiG’s chronometer was found among the wreckage, jammed at 10.31. ‘Who knows what all this means? There are so many possibilities. Maybe the people in Moscow recorded some other shock before the crash. I don’t know. I went to Star City a year after Gagarin’s death, and the tour guide said he died at 10.41. A year afterwards they said he died at 10.31. There’s a big difference.’

Immediately after the crash, Bykovsky and the other controllers in his station were placed under security, and their evidence at the time was carefully filtered. Today he says, ‘There were two other planes in the area. We knew about them. The generals on the commission gathered us all together and we explained to them what we’d seen, but we were segregated and we didn’t work again for more than a week. People were questioned about the other plane [the plane which may have interfered with Gagarin’s and Serugin’s flight] and many said they’d seen it.’

As Bykovsky demonstrates, the testimony about radar signals is complex and ambiguous. He readily admits that the tracking equipment was unable to keep simultaneous tabs on both the positions and altitudes of nearby aircraft. ‘Either the blips on the screen appear or they disappear. If a plane changes altitude, it disappears for ten seconds, so the signal on a radar screen isn’t always constant. At forty kilometres’ distance from the airbase the signals disappear altogether.’

Leonov says that Bykovsky’s report of at least one – and possibly two – additional target on his radar screen was discounted by the commission. ‘It was attributed to his lack of experience. They took him away somewhere, and I don’t know exactly what happened to him. In any case, none of this appeared in the subsequent documentation. The fact that I provided this information [about the two bangs] and spoke to people who saw the other plane – this wasn’t enough for the commission. That’s why no one knows about the other plane, except its pilot and his conscience.’

In fact, a second MiG pilot, Andrei Koloshov, emerged from obscurity in April 1995 to admit that he was indeed flying in the area at the time. In the journal Argumenti i Fakti (Arguments and Facts) he said, ‘The cause of Gagarin’s death was that he was reckless in taking an unjustifiable risk. He and Serugin deviated from their proper flight pattern.’[11] Koloshov suggested that the two men agreed to fly away from their designated zone in search of clearer weather, so that they could at least try out some basic manoeuvres. He presented absolutely no evidence to support his theory. Perhaps he had a guilty conscience. The original traffic-control voice tapes (finally unearthed by Leonov and Belotserkovsky in 1986 after a long battle with the authorities) show that, far from flying recklessly, Serugin had cut an intended 20-minute training session down to five minutes because of the poor weather. Bykovsky remembers without prompting that the last voice communication from Serugin was to say that ‘their job was done. He told us everything he was doing. He had completed the training task and he asked for permission to come out of [the current flight zone]. Then the radio link was lost.’

Koloshov’s charge of recklessness on Serugin’s part seems unjust, but today Leonov is not concerned with the MiG pilot’s ungenerous testimony, because he is still convinced that this pilot and his subsonic MiG-15 were utterly irrelevant and had nothing to do with Gagarin’s death. ‘No MiG-15 could have made the supersonic bang that I heard that morning.’ Leonov and Belotserkovsky still assert that a supersonic Sukhoi SU-11, never firmly identified in the confused radar data, was the true culprit – in the air, at least.

Leonov is generous towards the SU-11’s pilot, whoever he may have been. ‘If he’d been identified at the time, he’d have been torn to pieces by an angry crowd. On the one hand, they should have released this information; but on the other, if we think about it wisely, perhaps not. It wouldn’t remedy anything.’ It was not so much a single pilot but ‘the whole system that allowed for Gagarin’s death. The entire system. You can’t take the entire system to court. You can judge it morally, but you can’t punish it.’

The ‘system’ did not want to be judged or punished. In all, the commission’s report accumulated twenty-nine thick volumes of technical data, but the mere appearance of fact-gathering was not the same as making a fair analysis of the causes. The 1968 commission report’s central judgement was deliberately vague and simplistic: ‘an aggregate of causes’. The main thesis – the grazing impact with a weather balloon – suited everyone because it was the most innocent. No one was to blame – at least, no one on the ground.

One of the commission’s hardest-working investigators, Igor Rubstov, supported Leonov’s and Belotserkovsky’s theory that a supersonic aircraft had come close to colliding with Gagarin’s and Serugin’s MiG. As the commission moved ever further away from this difficult territory, Rubstov gathered all his courage and went to the KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka to argue his case. ‘I can’t say I felt too confident in that particular building.’ He met Colonel Dugin of the KGB, who demanded to know why he was insisting on the collision theory. Rubstov bluffed in classic Russian style. ‘I said that if the commission failed to investigate [the near-collision scenario], people might think there was something to hide. It was better to investigate it properly to demonstrate that it was not the true version of events.’ Colonel Drugin was unimpressed. On his desk there was a slim folder, which he now opened. It turned out to be Rubstov’s personal file. ‘You don’t honour discipline very much, do you?’ the Colonel said.

Rubstov knew that he was referring to an incident during the war, when an aviation unit at Stalingrad had retreated, quite justifiably, to a safer position under intense German attack. For twenty years and more, no particular inference had been drawn from this event. Drugin now implied that he could use this ancient story as proof of Rubstov’s cowardice, simply because he had been a member of the retreating unit. Drugin did not have to make this threat in so many words. He merely opened the personal file at the relevant page so that Rubstov could catch a glimpse of its contents, then asked him to reconsider his ideas about the near-collision scenario. ‘Later on, this version was not confirmed,’ Rubstov forlornly admits.

Leonov and his closest colleagues wanted to learn the truth about the crash. It took them the best part of two decades, but in 1986 Belotserkovsky lobbied successfully for a new commission of inquiry. He gained access to the secret investigation documents and original supporting materials, including unedited voice tapes of the air-to-ground dialogue. Meanwhile Leonov was amazed to find that documents supposedly written by him in 1968 as part of the original commission of inquiry were in someone else’s handwriting. ‘They were rewritten, and certain effects were falsified.’ Leonov’s accusation comes as no great surprise to security expert Nikolai Rubkin. ‘I can’t exclude that possibility. We’ve never had any problem in our country finding people to forge signatures. There have always been plenty of ranch-hands skilled in this kind of art.’

Belotserkovsky discovered that all the radar operators were hopelessly confused at the time of the crash. ‘First of all, I noticed that the tapes of the conversation between the flight controller and Gagarin’s plane contain a curious moment. The thing is, the controller was still calling out Gagarin’s call sign, six-two-five, after his plane had already crashed. The controller’s voice was perfectly calm. He wasn’t nervous. But from minute forty-two of the tape, he did show some nervousness. That was about twelve minutes after the crash.’ Belotserkovsky was suspicious about the long delay in the controller’s reactions. Even allowing for the sluggish response of the radar equipment, the MiG-15’s blip must have dropped off the screens eventually, as the actual aircraft plunged towards the ground, but it took a full twelve minutes for the controllers to realize that anything was wrong. This may explain the ten-minute discrepancy in the timing of the crash that Bykovsky describes, with some discomfort, in his interview.

Belotserkovsky found many other flaws in the ground-control procedures, and in the original commission’s fudged report. The standard practice back in 1968 was to make photographic records of traffic-control radar screens at set intervals. An automatic system of cameras was built into the consoles to do this, but on March 27 the cameras at Chkalovsky were not working, so the controllers resorted to a crude back-up recording system. They placed pre-cut sheets of tracing paper across their radar screens and marked the positions of the various targets at intervals. Belotserkovsky found the old and faded sheets tucked discreetly into a folder marked ‘secondary material’, as if to disguise their importance. ‘There was a whole spectrum of conditions that we did not manage to cover while working on the original commission. We agreed that two particular lines of evidence, the voice tapes and the tracing-paper sheets, showed that the traffic controller was talking to a different plane, which he mistook for Gagarin’s. Most likely, Gagarin’s plane got so close to the other plane that they appeared for a moment on the radar screen as a single target. When Gagarin’s plane went into a spin, the other one was still on the screen.’

In the poor weather, and with no warnings from ground controllers, the crew of the other jet may not even have been aware of the near-miss. But some retired Sukhoi SU-11 veteran out there may well be keeping his head down today.

Gagarin’s death was shameful not just because of the loss of a national hero in muddled circumstances, but because of the dangerous flaws revealed in the Soviet military technology of his time. Obviously their radar systems were not capable of simultaneous mapping of aircraft heights and positions, nor of positively identifying one target from another. The implications of this were highly alarming. In theory, a foreign jet simulating approximately the usual routines and flight patterns of Soviet aircraft could have flown close to an airbase, or some other military target, without clearly being identified as a potential enemy. In all likelihood Gary Power’s U-2 spy craft, shot down in May 1960, was identified as hostile only because its flight path was noticeably different from the expected routes of other Soviet aircraft that day.