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

¹ FARMBOY

This is the story of a young man who became famous in 1961, even though the world knew almost nothing about him. The great achievement of his life, celebrated to this day, took him less than two hours to complete, yet required bravery and commitment over a period of years. A triumphant superstar at the age of twenty-seven, he was tired, frightened and haunted by the time of his thirty-third birthday. In that last year of his short life he battled with his country’s government to try and save a colleague destined for almost certain death; he met State security agents in darkened stairwells, avoiding hidden microphones, and passed on documents so sensitive that people could lose their jobs just for glancing at them. This man put his own life at risk, first for his country, then for his friends. Even his childhood required bravery, in the face of terrifying events that few of us could hope to survive.

We remember Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin as the first person in history to travel into space, but there is much more to his life than this.

He was born on March 9, 1934 in the village of Klushino in the Smolensk region, 160 kilometres to the west of Moscow. His father, Alexei Ivanovich, and his mother, Anna Timofeyevna, worked on the local collective farm, he as a storesman, she with the dairy herd. Yuri’s brother Valentin was ten years his senior, and a younger brother, Boris, was born in 1936. Despite hardships, the family was reasonably content, given the inevitable harsh conditions of Stalin’s early collectivization programme and occasional unexplained disappearances among their friends and neighbours.

Responsibility for minding Boris and Yuri while Anna worked on the collective farm fell to the couple’s only daughter, Zoya. ‘I was seven when Yura was born, but at seven you already know how to be a nanny, so I got used to that. Of course, as a girl I was more responsible for looking after the littlest children, while Valentin helped out with the cattle on the farm.’

Official Soviet accounts of the Gagarin family as ‘peasants’ do not take into account Anna’s origins in St Petersburg, where her father had worked as an oil-drilling technician, until the 1917 Revolution persuaded him to move his family into the country; nor the fact that she was highly literate, and never went to bed at night without first reading aloud to her children, or helping them to read for themselves.[1] As for Alexei, by all accounts he was a loyal husband, a strict but much-loved father and a skilled carpenter and craftsman, although there was a period in the early 1930s when it seemed best not to advertise his talents. Joseph Stalin had a murderous obsession with kulak farmers: anyone who made a reasonable living in agriculture or as a rural tradesman. When the collectivization programme became more firmly established, Alexei was made responsible for the maintenance of farm buildings and facilities, crude though they were.

At his side, the boy Yuri learned to tell the difference between pine and oak, maple and birch, just by the touch and smell of the wood. Even in the dark he could tell. His first experiences of materials, machinery and the technical possibilities of the world around him were bound up with wood shavings and the smooth feel of a good piece of carving; his early taste for precision, with his father’s chisels, planes and saws.

Everything changed in the summer of 1941, when German divisions attacked the Soviet Union along a 3,000-kilometre front, making rapid advances against the Red Army. After several weeks of stunned inertia, Stalin’s response was to order his divisions to pull back at each encounter, drawing the Germans so deep into Soviet territory that (like Napoleon before them) they were caught off-guard by the first Russian winter. The brief summer of Nazi success was followed, in essence, by a two-year retreat, with appalling casualties on both sides. The Smolensk region lay directly in the Nazis’ retreating path. Gzhatsk and all its outlying villages, including Klushino, were overrun and occupied.

At the end of October 1942, German artillery units began to fire on Klushino. ‘The front line was only six kilometres away, and shells were falling into our village every day,’ Valentin recalls. ‘The Germans must have thought the mill was a dangerous landmark, so they blew it up, along with the church. An hour later our own side launched an artillery attack in reply. It was all so pointless, because everybody must have had the same landmarks drawn on their maps.’

Soon after this barrage, four armoured German columns passed right through the village. There was a terrible battle in the surrounding woodlands, resulting in heavy casualties for both sides, but the Russian troops came off worst, with at least 250 dead or wounded. Two days after the fighting had subsided, the older Gagarin boys, Valentin and Yuri, sneaked into the woods to see what had happened. ‘We saw a Russian colonel, badly wounded but still breathing after lying where he fell for two days and nights,’ Valentin explains. ‘The German officers went to where he was lying, in a bush, and he pretended to be blind. Some high-ranking officers tried to ask him questions, and he replied that he couldn’t hear them very well, and asked them to lean down closer. So they came closer and bent right over him, and then he blew a grenade he’d hidden behind his back. No one survived.’

Valentin remembers Yuri’s rapid transformation after this from a grinning little imp to a serious-minded boy, going down into the cellar to find bread, potatoes, milk and vegetables, and distributing them to refugees from other districts who were trudging through the village to escape the Germans. ‘He smiled less frequently in those years, even though he was by nature a very happy child. I remember he seldom cried out at pain, or about all the terrible things around us. I think he only cried if his self-respect was hurt… Many of the traits of character that suited him in later years as a pilot and cosmonaut all developed around that time, during the war.’

Now the familiar tragedy of occupation came to Klushino: men in drab uniforms bashing down doors, dragging people away to be shot. If the need arose to preserve ammunition, they gouged at people with their bayonets or herded them into sheds and burned them alive, until the aggressors were broken in turn by their own misery, and ultimately by the cruel Russian winter and the unforgiving vastness of the landscape.

One particularly nasty piece of work, a red-haired Bavarian called ‘Albert’, collected the German vehicles’ flat batteries in order to replenish them with acid and purified water, and also fixed radios or other pieces of equipment for the big Panzer battle tanks. Albert took an immediate dislike to the Gagarin boys because of their use of broken glass. The village children did what they could, smashing bottles and scattering the bright shards of glass along the roads and dirt tracks, then hiding in the hedges to watch the German supply trucks swerving out of control as their tyres burst. Albert became convinced that Boris was one of these child-saboteurs. He came across the boy playing with Yuri, and sat down on a nearby bench to watch them. After a while he offered Boris some chocolate, putting it on the ground so that when the boy reached for it, he could stamp on his fingers. ‘The skin came right off his fingers, so of course Boris cried out,’ says Valentin. ‘Then the Devil took him – we always called him the Devil – and hanged him by his scarf on the branch of an apple tree. Mother came and found the Devil taking pictures with his camera. It’s difficult to talk about…’ Anna scuffled with the German, and at one point he picked up his rifle. For a terrible moment it seemed as if he was ready to shoot, but by some miracle one of his superiors shouted to him to come away. Fortunately, the Devil’s work had been sloppy, and a child’s woollen scarf did not make a very effective noose. Once Albert was safely out of the way, Anna and Alexei released Boris from the apple tree.

Albert and his fellow soldiers had thrown the Gagarins out of their home, and the family had been forced to dig for themselves a crude shelter in the ground. Here they carried Boris’s limp body, and by sheer force of will and desperation they brought their throttled child back to life. ‘Boris stayed in the dug-out for a week, terrified to go out,’ says Valentin. He also remembers that Albert came across a rare Gagarin family luxury in the house, a wind-up gramophone, and played a particular record time and again, hoping to taunt the Gagarin family as they huddled in their rough shelter. ‘He would open the window of our house and play the military march “Red Army Advance” as loud as he could. Obviously he didn’t know what it was.’

In the days after the terrifying drama by the apple tree, Yuri began a ceaseless vigil, watching for the times when Albert would leave the house. Whenever it was safe, he crept over to the Germans’ precious pile of tank batteries and dropped handfuls of dry soil into the accumulator caps to ruin them, or muddled up the chemical replenishment stocks, pouring them willy-nilly into the wrong compartments. Albert and his companions would get back to find their batteries looking perfectly normal, and patrolling tank drivers would arrive in the mornings to pick them up. They would shake Albert’s hand, make their Nazi salutes and be on their way, but at evenfall they would return, furious that Albert had given them dead batteries. Most of the tank commanders were SS officers, so their displeasure was a very serious business for everyone, German and Russian alike. ‘They were very hard to pacify,’ Valentin recalls drily.

Humiliated by the anger of the SS officers, Albert went on the rampage, searching the village for Yuri, but he had to hunt on foot because his child-nemesis had shoved potatoes deep into the exhaust pipe of his military car, so that it would not start. The Devil stormed his way into all the dug-outs, threatening to shoot Yuri on sight. Perhaps the German commanders were impatient with Albert’s dead batteries by now, because they called him away from the district before he could finish the boy off once and for all.

Valentin was placed in a work detail by the Germans, along with eight other lads. ‘The rules were very simple. You started work at eight in the morning, and then you could die, or else you worked until they said to finish. Even if you were halfway through chopping a tree and it was about to fall on your head, you had to stop the instant they told you, or else you’d feel a stick or a rifle butt.’ As the Germans began to dig in for the winter, pretty much trying to survive, like the villagers, occasional confusions developed as to who was the enemy, who the aggressor. There was one particularly large communal dug-out, capable of supporting three or four hundred people, but whether this was a German or a Russian construction nobody could say, since it was built and used by both sides at once. Valentin recalls, ‘Somebody’s aircraft attacked it one morning, dropping a clutch of bombs onto it – a tonne and a half each, the Germans reckoned. No one knew for sure how many were killed.’

During the spring of 1943, Valentin and Zoya were abducted by SS guards and herded onto a ‘children’s train’ for deportation to Germany. They were taken first to Gdansk, in Poland, where they worked in adjoining labour camps. ‘I had to do the washing for hundreds of Germans each week,’ Zoya says. ‘We lived as best we could, but they were the proprietors and we were the slaves. They could have done anything they liked to us – killed us, or let us live. We were worn down with fear all the time, and we looked like ragged Cinderellas, all skin and bone, with our elbows sticking out. We had no shoes, and occasionally found soldier’s boots that were too big for us… The Germans put us in ruined houses after they’d expelled the people already living in them.’ Zoya does not like to dwell on her experiences as a 15-year-old girl hauled away by enemies.

In the chaos of the Germans’ long retreat from Russia, the SS use of trains for prisoners was considered something of a luxury by the ordinary troops. The ‘children’s trains’ running through Poland were commandeered or otherwise diverted from their original course. Valentin and Zoya escaped their camps and spent two weeks hiding in the woods, waiting for Russian troops to rescue them. ‘When they actually came, we hoped they would let us go home,’ Zoya recalls, ‘but they said we must stay with the Russian army as volunteers.’ Zoya was sent to look after horses in a cavalry brigade and, by a bitter stroke of irony, followed them deep into Germany, where the children’s train was supposed to have taken her in the first place. By now, Valentin was considered old enough for front-line service. He quickly learned how to handle an anti-tank grenade launcher and other heavy weapons.

Meanwhile, Alexei and Anna Gagarin thought their two eldest children were dead. Alexei, never a very fit man, was ulcerated with grief and hunger, and was seriously injured when the Germans beat him up when he refused to work for them. He spent the rest of the war in a crude hospital, first as a patient, then as an orderly. Anna spent some time there too, with her left leg badly gashed after a German sergeant, ‘Bruno’, had flailed at her with a scythe. Yuri threw clods of earth in Bruno’s eyes to drive him away.

The Germans were driven out of Klushino at last on March 9, 1944. Alexei, limping but defiant, showed the incoming Russian forces where the fleeing Nazis had buried mines in the surrounding roads and dirt tracks. Anna recovered from her wound, and struggled to look after Boris and Yuri, although there was almost no food of any kind to be had. Only towards the end of 1945 did she discover that Valentin and Zoya were still alive. They came home at last, grown-up now.

Lydia Obukhova, a writer who came to know the Gagarins well during the 1960s, commented in 1978:

After the war, the Gagarins moved to nearby Gzhatsk and built a simple new home, using the slats and beams from the wreckage of their old house as raw material. The original house had been very modest anyway, consisting only of a kitchen and two small adjoining rooms. ‘Of course life was hard after the war,’ Zoya explains. ‘Everything from Brest up to Moscow was completely destroyed, all the cattle taken away, the houses in ruins. There were only two houses left in our village.’ The people of Gzhatsk built a school, and a young woman, Yelena Alexandrovna, volunteered to run it, making the best of a blackboard with no chalk and a classroom with no books. Yuri and Boris learned to read from an old Russian military manual left behind by departing troops. For geography they relied on war maps rescued from the burned-out cabins of army trucks and tanks.

Yelena was not on her own at the school for long. In 1946, Lev Mikhailovich Bespavlov joined the school to teach maths and physics. A new father figure had now arrived in Yuri’s life. Speaking to an Australian journalist in 1961, Yuri described Bespavlov as ‘a wizard, specially when he’d fill up a bottle with water, and seal it, then take it out into the freezing air outside, so that the water would turn to ice and expand, shattering the bottle with a satisfying bang. Bespavlov could float pins on water, and make electricity by combing his hair.’[3] Perhaps the greater part of his appeal lay in the faded airman’s tunic he sported, for in the chaos and terror of the war years, Yuri had encountered one thing so wonderful, so magical, that it seemed for a moment to transcend the horror all around – an aircraft; and even when this piece of magic had been dismembered and taken away, its memory remained.

There had been a dogfight, two Soviet ‘Yak’ fighters, two German Messerschmitts, with the score levelling out at one-all. The stricken Yak came down in a patch of marshland half a kilometre outside the village. One of its landing legs buckled on impact, and the propeller was twisted completely out of shape. The ground was soft, which made for a very poor landing, and although the pilot survived, he grazed his leg quite badly. Immediately, a crowd of villagers ran across to help him. They put a bandage on his injured leg, offered him a drink of milk and fed him some pieces of dried bacon.

After a while another Russian aircraft, a Polikarpov PO-2, came down safely in an adjacent clover field with firmer ground. Airmen called the PO-2 a ‘cornplanter’, because its lightweight plywood construction enabled it to make landings in rough fields. Today its apparent ‘rescue’ mission was somewhat double-edged; the PO-2 crewman was supposed to check on the health of the downed Yak pilot, then ensure that his fighter did not fall into German hands, if necessary by destroying it.

Yuri watched all of this, mesmerized. According to Valentin, ‘Some of the older boys in the village were sent into the clover field with whatever dregs of petrol they could scavenge, to refuel the PO-2. The pilot had some bars of chocolate, which he gave to Yuri. He divided them among several other boys, accidentally keeping none for himself, obviously much more interested in the planes.’

As the light faded, the two pilots were invited to shelter in a dug-out, but chose instead to spend the night huddled near the PO-2 to keep watch over it. They tried to keep guard throughout the night. Inevitably, cold and bruised, they fell asleep and awoke early next morning to find Yuri staring at them. In the light of day, the damaged Yak fighter did not really seem worth guarding any more, so the pilots set fire to it, then struggled back over the fields to the PO-2, the injured pilot leaning on the other’s shoulder for support. They coaxed the ‘cornplanter’ into the sky without too much trouble and flew away, while Yuri watched, fascinated, as a tall column of smoke billowed from the wreck they had left behind.

Now the boy’s teacher, Lev Bespavlov, carried with him some of that special magic in his uniform, which he had rightfully earned as a gunner and radio operator in the Red Army Air Force. Yuri looked up to him, listened and learned.

Yelena recalls Yuri being a good pupil: mischievous but honourable. ‘Like all children of that age, he did some naughty things, but if ever we were asking the pupils, “Who did it?”, Yuri would always say, “It was me, I won’t do it again.” And he was very vivid. Recalling those years, I would say he was a very decent and responsive boy. When we learned about his flight into space we immediately remembered his very nice smile. He preserved the same smile for the rest of his life – the same one he had when he was a boy.’ Yelena remembers placing Yuri at the front of the class for a few days, where she could keep an eye on him. ‘He wasn’t really the sort of boy you could take your eye off for too long. Even right under my nose, he managed to find trouble. He pulled all the nails out of the bench at the front, so that when he and the other children sat on it, the whole thing collapsed.’ But Yelena could not stay annoyed for long. She remembers a tiny little girl, Anna, who kept getting trampled or left behind when the other children stampeded about the place. Yuri became quite protective of her; carried Anna’s satchel after school and walked her home, to show the others that she should not be picked on.

Unfortunately, he did not shine at music. ‘He participated in all the amateur talent activities. The instruments for the orchestra were a present from the collective farm. Yura played trumpet. He was always proudly walking in the front.’ The Gagarin family had to survive, rather than enjoy, these atonal outbursts, as Zoya remembers. ‘He brought his trumpet home and started to practise. Father got fed up. It was a sunny spring day, and Father sent him outside, saying he had a headache because of the noise. So he practised outside. We had a cow, and she started to moo. It was a concert for free. Everyone was laughing.’ Zoya fondly recalls her younger brother as ‘a real live wire. He was always leading games, the instigator rather than the follower. He was very much alive.’

Yuri’s favourite subjects at school were maths and physics, and he was also keenly involved in a model aeroplane group, much to Yelena’s inconvenience. ‘Once they launched one of his planes from a window and it fell on a passer-by. He was exasperated, and came into the school to complain. Everyone went very quiet, until Yuri stood up and apologized. So he probably had this urge to fly.’

Valentin remembers his pesky brother at six years old, demanding that he and his father build him miniature gliders, or wooden propeller toys powered by rubber bands. Little Yurochka would insist, ‘I want to be a hero for my country, flying a plane!’ Until the war, at least, planes were seldom seen in the skies above Klushino. Fleeting glimpses of such craft must have made a powerful impression on the boy.

When Yuri was sixteen he became anxious to get away from home and earn some kind of living. ‘He saw that life was very hard for our parents, and he wanted to get a profession as soon as possible, so that he wasn’t a burden on their shoulders,’ says Zoya. ‘Personally, I didn’t want him to go, but he said he wanted to carry on studying, and our mother said she wanted him to study, too.’ Yuri expressed his enthusiasm for the College of Physical Culture in Leningrad. He was a fit young man, not very tall, but agile and coordinated. He thought he might train as a gymnast or sportsman. Valentin remembers their father’s objection to this plan. ‘He said it was not a job. Even though it might be physically hard work, it was a silly thing to do. But the physics teacher, Bespavlov, insisted that our parents let Yuri go.’ Alexei hoped that one day his three sons would join him as carpenters, but such a plan was not really practical.

In the event, all the Leningrad places were taken. The best available option was at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant in Moscow, which incorporated a school for apprentices. Here Yuri could learn a proper trade – steel foundryman. There was much pulling of strings with relatives on his father’s side of the family for interviews, references, accommodation. In 1950 Yuri was finally accepted as an apprentice and went off to Moscow, where Uncle Savely Ivanovich agreed to let him stay with them for a while.

At Lyubertsy, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin received his first adult uniform: a foundryman’s peaked cap with a union emblem; a baggy tunic of cardboard-stiff serge, with the sleeves much too long; dark baggy trousers; and a wide leather belt with a big brass buckle. He looked at himself in the mirror and decided that his comical outfit was worth a picture. He spent his last few roubles sending a photograph back home.

Gagarin’s foreman at Lyubertsy, Vladimir Gorinshtein, was a dour, heavy-set man with a drooping moustache and bulging muscles, and a tongue on him as scalding as the molten steel he so loved to work with. ‘Get used to handling fire,’ he would say to his cowering apprentices. ‘Fire is strong, water is stronger than fire, the earth stronger than water, but man is the strongest of all!’[4] ‘We were scared,’ Gagarin recalled in a 1961 interview.

His first assignment was to insert hinge-pins into the lids of newly assembled metal flasks. The walrus-faced foreman strode across to inspect the work. By beating his fists against his forehead and swearing mightily, he was able to hint that Gagarin had installed his pins completely the wrong way round. ‘The next day we all made better progress,’ Gagarin recalled. By his own admission, this was typical for him. He had no particular knack for getting things right the first time. He had to work quite hard at his tasks, practising them repeatedly. In a brief interview given many years later, Gorinshtein said:

Gagarin’s year-end report from the foreman was good. In fact, he was one of only four apprentices to be selected for training at a newly built Technical School in Saratov, a city port on the great Volga river. Here he would learn the intimate secrets of Russia’s most important machine: the tractor.

In the spring of 1951 Yuri and his three lucky companions from Lyubertsy were escorted to Saratov by their new teacher, Timofei Nikiforov. Within a few hours of their arrival in the town, Gagarin saw a notice. ‘AeroClub’ it read. ‘Ah, my friends. That would be something. To get in there!’ His companions laughed, but a few days later the club accepted his application to join. To his dismay, Gagarin found that the Technical School kept him relentlessly occupied, and it was several weeks before he could actually go to the club’s airfield on the outskirts of Saratov.

Dmitry Martyanov, the club’s war-veteran chief of training, saw Gagarin for the first time as a young man with a rapturous expression on his face gazing at an old canvas-clad Yak-18 training plane, so he strolled across and offered to take him for a brief trip into the air. They went up to 1,500 metres, crawled through the sky at 100 kmph, and came back down to earth after a few minutes. ‘That first flight filled me with pride, and gave meaning to my whole life,’ Gagarin recalled.

Martyanov said, ‘You handled that very well. One would think you’d done this before.’

‘Oh, I’ve been flying all my life,’ Gagarin replied.[6]

Apparently Martyanov knew exactly what he meant, and he became a firm friend from that moment.

In the spring of 1955 21-year-old Yuri graduated with an ‘excellent’ grade from Saratov Technical School. By this time his interest in tractors was waning. He had spent the previous summer at the AeroClub learning to fly the Yak-18. After his first solo jaunt, he gave his friend and tutor Martyanov a pack of Troika cigarettes, a sort of traditional pilot’s gift. But it wasn’t all fun and games. He had to attend evening lectures in aviation theory, while keeping awake in the daytime for Technical School. He ploughed through the extra workload, determined not to fail. His reward at the club was to make a hair-raising parachute jump from the wing of a plane. Martyanov also recommended Gagarin for the Pilots’ School at Orenburg, on the Ural River. Of course Gagarin would have to sign up as a military cadet, if he wanted to get in there. Orenburg was not some cosy little ‘club’, but a deadly-serious training centre for military fliers; though it has to be said that the AeroClub wasn’t exactly for fun, either. In Soviet society, ‘fun’ was a difficult concept to grasp. Better to say: at the AeroClub eligible citizens could volunteer informally to practise a useful skill.

At the very least, ‘fun’ was supposed to keep you fit for work. Gagarin signed up with various sports clubs in Saratov and built up his small, undernourished frame with plenty of exercise and food. He played volleyball and basketball, and showed off to pretty girls sitting on the banks of the Volga how he could water-ski on one leg. If he fell off and clambered to shore wet and grinning, that seemed to impress them just the same. He had grown into a very fine-looking and confident young man, albeit slightly shorter than average and better suited for acrobatic rather than sprint sports. His good-natured charm and generous humour won him many friends.

The tutors at Orenburg were not so easily charmed. They were soldiers on active duty. Gagarin would have to commit to their discipline for years to come and, after they had finished with him, they might send him away to fight and be killed. Anna and Alexei Gagarin expressed dismay at the thought of their boy enlisting with the military, and this obsession with aircraft seemed reckless. However, Alexander Sidorov, a fellow member of the Saratov AeroClub, recalled in 1978 that Gagarin already had the keen self-discipline expected of a future military pilot:

It was not easy to score top marks at Orenburg. Yadkar Akbulatov, a senior instructor, said in 1961, ‘Don’t imagine that Yuri was an infallible cadet, a child prodigy. He wasn’t. He was an impetuous, enthusiastic young man who made the same slips as any other.’ His worst marks were for his landings. He was in danger of failing Orenburg completely if he could not get his aircraft down without bouncing on his tyres. Akbulatov flew with him a couple of times to see if they could iron out some faults. ‘I took him up and watched him carefully. On steep banking turns his performance wasn’t absolutely perfect, but in vertical dives and climbs he put on a show that made me see stars from the g-load. Then came the touchdown. It was faultless! I asked him, “Why can’t you always land like that?” He grinned and said, “I’ve found the solution.” He put a cushion under his seat so that he could get a better line of sight with the runway.’ From now on, Gagarin never flew any aircraft without his cushion.[8]

True to form, Gagarin had worked on the landing problem with bloody-minded determination and had solved it, cushion and all. Now for the target practice. After all, what was the use of a military pilot who could not shoot the guns on his plane? At first, his practice gunnery strafes fell completely wide of the target, while his classmates at Orenburg scored bull’s-eyes. Gagarin re-sat all the theoretical classes on the ground, tried again from the air and eventually destroyed his targets in the approved manner.

One notable sporting incident boosted Gagarin’s career prospects while he was captaining the Junior Cadets’ basketball team. After one particular game, where they thrashed the opposition, the tutors at Orenburg praised him for his skilful play. ‘We didn’t win because we played better,’ he said. ‘We won by sheer determination. We were bent on winning, while the other side hadn’t made up their minds.’ This statement impressed some of the senior officers watching the game. Akbulatov and his colleagues began to think of Gagarin as a contender. No genius, but a winner for all that. Plus, he was a young man who loved pulling heavy g’s, an appropriate enthusiasm for a would-be fighter pilot.

At Orenburg, Gagarin met Valentina ‘Valya’ Goryacheva, a pretty, hazel-eyed medical technician one year younger than him. She worked on the Orenburg base, and came to a dance party one evening, only to find that the callow cadets with their short, bristly haircuts did not seem particularly impressive. In an interview with journalist Yaroslav Golovanov in 1978, she recalled that the civilian boys in downtown Orenburg seemed better dressed, had nicer hair and were more handsome. She never expected to find a love match at a military compound, just a pleasant night’s partying. She danced with Gagarin a couple of times, while he cheerfully asked questions about her.[9]

At ten o’clock precisely the music stopped. The cadets were expected to go to bed now (alone), so that they would be ready for an early start the next morning. Gagarin said, ‘Well. See you next Sunday.’ Valya made no reply. ‘Back home, I thought: Why should I go and meet that bald-headed character again? In any case, why does he behave in such an assured way? But the next Sunday we went to the cinema. We had a difference of opinion about what we saw. Then afterwards he said, “Well. See you next Sunday.”’

And he did. Valya’s parents, Ivan Goryachev and Varvara Semyonova, lived in Chicherin Street, Orenburg. Valya had never known any other home town, but for Gagarin this place was entirely new and unknown. Valya’s parents, along with her three brothers and three sisters, quickly became fond of him and their house became a kind of second home. Ivan cooked for the local sanatorium and applied his considerable chef’s talent at home. No great fan of the dull food at the flying school, Gagarin ate well during his many off-duty visits to Chicherin Street. According to Valya, when she was interviewed in 1978, there was only one serious problem on Gagarin’s mind at that time: ‘His parents were having a hard time making ends meet, but how could Yura help them in any way from his small cadet’s pay? He said it would have been better if he had gone back to Gzhatsk as soon as he’d finished at the Technical School so that he could earn a living in the profession he had learned, as a foundryman.’ But Gagarin persisted with his training at Orenburg, achieving the rank of Sergeant in February 1956, and making his first solo flight in a MiG-15 jet on March 26, 1957.

On October 4, 1957, the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite. The cadets at Orenburg rushed around in great excitement when they heard the news. Gagarin’s best friend on the base, his namesake Yuri Dergunov, ran towards him on the tarmac shouting ‘Sputnik!’ at the top of his voice. Gagarin was excited too, but the moment did not immediately change his life, as some accounts have suggested. He was much more concerned with his pending final exams at the Pilots’ School, and with his growing love for Valya. The date for their marriage was already set for October 27. He recalled that at the time the wedding arrangements seemed far more pressing to him than any thoughts of flying into space; besides, the idea of sending people into the cosmos still seemed a distant abstraction. He never imagined that he would be in orbit in three-and-a-half years’ time.

Valya had no idea that rocket travel would feature in her husband’s life. She married a charming but essentially ordinary young military flier, not some future space hero. She must have known the risks involved, even in this simple relationship: that she would end up moving from one strange town to another as Yuri moved between different air stations; that he might set out to work one morning and not come back in the evening… Obviously she made these accommodations. She was entitled to expect that the military would assist with housing, health care, pensions and schooling for any children she and Yuri might raise. In return, she knew that she might have to grieve silently and without fuss if her husband was killed flying in his jet plane. Many other wives in her position shared the same burdens, the same nagging fears, and to some extent this must have helped. Valya made several close friends among the pilots’ wives and, later, among the wives of the cosmonauts. What she never anticipated was becoming the wife of the World’s Most Famous Man. She was a shy and intensely private young woman.

Nor was Valya thrilled with her new husband’s first proper posting after he passed out of Orenburg with excellent grades and a Lieutenant’s commission on November 6, 1957. Shortly after graduating, Gagarin was sent to the Nikel airbase on the northernmost tip of Murmansk, 300 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, with an assignment to fly MiG-15 jets on reconnaissance missions. Valya followed him out there and discovered a terrible hinterland of sub-zero temperatures, biting winds and long, pitch-black nights, interspersed by a few hours of gloomy grey daylight. Here, on April 10, 1959, she gave birth to the couple’s first daughter, Lena.

Throughout the long winter months flying conditions at Nikel were awful. Ice menaced the control surfaces of Gagarin’s MiG, and snow blindness was a constant threat, with the sky and the ground merging into a seamless sheet of white with no discernible horizon. The on-board electronic approach and landing systems of a MiG were not particularly sensitive in those days. Snow-blinded pilots had to rely on the bigger ground-control radars to guide them towards the narrow radio beacons on the perimeter of the runway. Even in clear weather there were hazards. One day Gagarin put his plane down on a landing strip covered in black ice, transparent to the naked eye but slippery as oil. He had never practised at Orenburg for these conditions. His plane skidded violently and the landing gear’s tyres burst under the strain of his sudden braking.

Gagarin’s good friend Yuri Dergunov from the Orenburg Pilots’ School had campaigned hard to be assigned the same posting when he qualified. It was a great shock when he crashed and was killed in his first month at Nikel. Valya recalled, ‘For several weeks Yuri walked around in a daze and spent one sleepless night after another. I knew that no relaxing draughts or sleeping pills would help him, and if I offered him medicine it was only to take his mind off his depressing thoughts for a few moments at least.’[10]