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

⁷ COMING HOME

Korolev, Mazzhorin and the trajectory mappers at OKB-1 knew precisely the direction that Gagarin’s ball would adopt as it plunged through the atmosphere and fell to the ground. What they did not know was exactly how far along that direction it would travel before coming to rest. The trajectory calculations from Mtislav Keldysh’s computers were good to an accuracy of just a few kilometres. In the vastness of outer space this was more than acceptable. For a homecoming Vostok ball it could have meant the difference between landing harmlessly in an empty field and crashing through a roof, killing all the people beneath. With great care, Vostok’s incoming route was selected to place as few houses as possible in the path of danger. All the descent scenarios favoured large meadowlands, scrublands and fields.

Today, Russian capsules come down onto the vast (and supposedly uninhabited) steppes of Kazakhstan, not far from where they lifted off in the first place. A well-rehearsed procedure for capsule location and crew retrieval has operated for three decades. Back in 1961, Korolev and his mission planners were not quite so ready to dump their very first cosmonaut into the middle of nowhere. Gagarin fell to earth only a short distance from where he had first flown an old Yak-18 at the Saratov AeroClub six years earlier. The exact location of his touchdown was twenty-six kilometres south-west of the town of Engels in the Saratov region, on the outskirts of a village called Smelkovka.

From ground level there was no possibility of observing the ball’s hatch flying away, or the sudden jolt of Gagarin’s ejection seat. At seven kilometres’ altitude, this was all happening too high up to be seen. But tractor driver Yakov Lysenko heard a distinct crack in the skies above his head. Naturally he looked up. The faint echo of the hatchway’s explosive bolts took twenty seconds to reach him. By that time Gagarin and his craft had fallen three kilometres closer to the ground, and their parachutes had opened. They were just about visible now to the naked eye. In fact, it is probable that Lysenko heard a different bang closer to the ground, when the ball’s parachute hatch was blown off at just four kilometres’ altitude to deploy the folded canopy from within. ‘You can hear an explosion if it’s a plane or something like that, but I saw there was no plane,’ says Lysenko. ‘There was no engine roar. I was standing and watching, and I saw a ball in the air. Well, not a ball, but something landing with a parachute. A pilot from a plane, I thought.’

Lysenko ran back to Smelkovka village to raise the alarm. He gathered together a reassuring group of friends, and they all tramped across the fields to the spot where he had seen the ‘pilot’ come down. Gagarin seemed very happy to encounter ordinary folk like them. ‘We came to the place, and he was coming towards us. He was very lively and happy, especially after he landed successfully. He was wearing a jump-suit or whatever it’s called, and he said, “Boys, let’s be acquainted. I am the first space man in the world, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin.” He shook hands with everyone. I introduced myself, and he said, “Boys, don’t leave. All the bosses will be here any minute now. They’ll come by car, lots of people, but don’t leave. Let’s take a picture so we’ll remember this.” But of course everyone forgot about us. They came from a city or a military garrison. They took him into a car straight away. He told us not to leave, but they drove him away, and we’ve never seen him since.’

The official reception party arrived with terrifying speed, as if out of nowhere. General Stuchenko (his head still at risk) had been monitoring the skies all morning with close-range radar. Gagarin and his re-entry capsule were located long before they hit the ground, and Stuchenko disbursed his forces accordingly. ‘The military came by plane. Some of them were even landing by parachute,’ Lysenko recalls. ‘It was a complete invasion force. They didn’t allow us to get too close. They’re very strange people, you know.’

Lysenko may not be a sophisticated man – he’s just a simple tractor driver – but his grasp of the geopolitical significance of what he saw that day makes for a fine summary. ‘The Soviet Union announced a spaceship, the first in the world, with Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin. The whole country was rejoicing. You know, it was a shame to the foreign countries. America is a mighty country, but they didn’t quite make it to be first. As they say, “It’s important who crosses the bog first.” That’s how I understand it.’

Lysenko and his friends were not the only people to see the cosmonaut come down, as Gagarin’s sanctioned account of his landing makes clear:

A slight shiver of nervousness. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew about the American spy Gary Powers, who had been shot down over Russian territory the previous May. Maybe this orange-clad pilot was yet another foreign spy parachuting from his stricken aircraft? A number of Western aerospace historians believe that some of the farm workers came at Gagarin with raised pitchforks, only standing down their weapons when they caught sight of the big red letters ‘CCCP’ emblazoned on the upper front of his white space helmet. Today the Soviet space journalist Yaroslav Golovanov is prepared to admit that ‘when they saw Gagarin’s orange protective suit, the women became frightened, because there was all this business about Powers only a year before. They said, “Where are you going? Where are you off to?” They thought maybe he was a spy.’

TASS radio announcements of the flight had been broadcast well in time for Gagarin’s actual descent. In all likelihood the farm workers greeted him with nervousness at first, but not with outright hostility. It may be that some of them had left their houses early that morning to go to work in the fields and may not have heard the radio bulletins about the space flight…

So who exactly had the opportunity to greet the cosmonaut first? Was it Lysenko and his pals, or the woman and child whom Gagarin spoke of? ‘Oh, I forgot about that,’ says Lysenko. ‘Yes, when we went to where he landed, Takhtarova, the local forest warden’s wife, was weeding potatoes with her grand-daughter. They had a small piece of cultivated land nearby. When he landed, we were not there. She was scared, and wanted to run away. Then he saw us.’

Later that day a simple signpost was erected at this site, more or less where Gagarin’s feet had touched the ground:

Two days later a more permanent stone obelisk was erected bearing a plaque: ‘Y.A. Gagarin Landed Here.’ No similar marker identified the place where his empty spaceship came down. Gagarin’s ejection at high altitude had caused him and his capsule to drift apart by more than two kilometres by the time they hit the ground. Contemporary documentation blurs the whole issue. Recording the capsule’s landing site would have meant admitting the forbidden secret of the First Cosmonaut’s separate descent under his own parachute. However, the exact site is known – unofficially at least – because a group of children playing in a meadow near the banks of a tributary of the River Volga saw the empty ball come down, alarmingly close to a ditch. It made a dent in the soft ground. Today that hollow looks like a thousand similar indentations in the gentle surrounding grasslands.

Two schoolgirls, Tamara Kuchalayeva and Tatiana Makaricheva, ran over to see this amazing object. ‘We were supposed to be in a lesson at school, but all the boys ran off. They saw a ball flying,’ says Tatiana. ‘It was huge. It fell down, then bounced and fell down again, settling on its side. There was a large hole [in the ground] where it fell for the first time. The boys ran to it and climbed inside. They picked up many small tubes of cosmonauts’ food and brought them back to school, and they told us the ball had landed.’ The two fit, handsome women are mildly surprised that their nostalgic hike across the hillocks and furrows to see the landing place now makes for quite a sturdy walk. ‘Today we come here and are already tired, but at that time you can imagine how fast we children ran!’ says Tamara. ‘We’d heard the radio announcement and we all ran with inspiration.’

Proudly the boys handed out the tubes of space food they had found. ‘Some of us were lucky and got chocolate,’ Tatiana recalls. ‘The others got mashed potatoes. I remember tasting some and spitting it out.’

Tamara says, dismissively, ‘If you offered it to us today, we wouldn’t eat it.’

By now the children (and a good many adults besides) were clambering in and around the ball looking for souvenirs. The military security squad had arrived, though not yet in sufficient numbers. According to Tamara, ‘They tried to scare us off. “Go away, go away!” they said. “It could explode!” Their threats didn’t have the slightest effect on us.’

Actually there were several opportunities for citizens of the Saratov region to collect souvenirs. Gagarin had cut loose from his parachute the moment he landed, because he was slightly worried that the wind might drag him off his feet. That parachute went missing soon afterwards, while the ball’s larger canopy was shredded by souvenir-hunters. The cabin’s heavy hatch came down somewhere, as did a detachable radio transceiver and other items of survival gear, and the second hatch covering the ball’s parachute compartment.

All these components had some interesting adventures before they were recovered. For instance, there was the matter of the raft. If the ball had come down over the sea, Gagarin might have stayed with it until splashdown, because the impact on water would have been less severe than on the ground; but the ball was not guaranteed to stay afloat for an indefinite time, so he would have clambered with all due haste into an inflatable life-raft. In the event, he came down over Russia precisely according to plan, and the raft stayed packed inside his survival pack. Apparently someone removed it without authorization, and a day or so later he took it to the nearby Volga tributary to do some fishing. A large detachment of KGB officers arrived in the district and requested that all stolen equipment from the Vostok be surrendered, including the raft. They threatened the entire population of Smelkovka with detention if the missing equipment was not returned immediately. Tractor driver Lysenko remembers a certain degree of fuss about ‘something being torn, or going missing. Perhaps it’s better not to say… Some of our boys, the younger ones, found a boat. The special police came and said, “It belongs to the State. We must have it.” They visited all the houses and put pressure on various people.’

Yaroslav Golovanov adds his contribution to the story. ‘Eventually the KGB recovered their prize, and the unhappy fisherman could only fidget and say, “I’m sorry, but the boat is dilapidated, ripped apart.” The KGB officers wanted to correct the fisherman’s false ideas. “The boat is fine. Nothing has been torn,” they said.’

Apparently the KGB officers did not want to tell their superiors that various historic items from the First Cosmonaut’s equipment had been tampered with, before they could collect them all.

Gagarin’s social responsibilities began the instant his feet touched the ground. The old woman and the little girl needed reassuring that he was not an enemy spy. He really wanted the farm lads from Smelkovka to be rememembered, because they had been so friendly. Now the military was all over the place, and the officer on the scene, Major Gasiev, came up to him. Gagarin saluted smartly and said, ‘Comrade Major! USSR Cosmonaut Senior Lieutenant Gagarin reporting!’

‘Listen, you’re a Major too. Don’t you know? You were promoted during your flight,’ said Gasiev with a big grin. They embraced amicably, officers of equal rank, and of course Gasiev had a hundred questions.[2]

Then there was the question of the Altitude Record. The sports official Ivan Borisenko needed Gagarin to sign some documents. In a 1978 account Borisenko described ‘dashing up to the descent module, next to which stood a smiling Gagarin’. This seems unlikely because the capsule was at least two kilometres away, and Borisenko must have rendezvoused with the cosmonaut at his separate touchdown site, or else in another field on the outskirts of Smelkovka, where a large helicopter was sitting ready to take Gagarin to the nearby Engels airbase. Some time very soon after his landing, the First Cosmonaut blithely put his signature to a sheaf of Borisenko’s off-white lies.[3]

In the helicopter, Gagarin politely and enthusiastically answered all the questions that his military escorts threw at him. What was the earth like? The weightlessness? He was learning that all the questions would be similar, wherever he went. But at one point he went quiet for a moment. According to Golovanov, he said, ‘You know, I never got to see the moon through my porthole… Never mind, I’ll see it next time.’ With that, he brightened up and took more questions.

General Stuchenko, his career resting safe for today, met Gagarin on the tarmac at Engels and immediately posed another complex social challenge for the space traveller, as witnessed by Golovanov. ‘Yuri Alexeyevich, in the battles to liberate the Gzhatsk district, there was only one commander. You must remember me?’

‘No, I don’t.’ This was not such a good reply. Stuchenko looked absolutely crestfallen, and Gagarin had to think fast. ‘I mean, I don’t remember your face. But I remember there was a commander. So that was you? How wonderful! You must be my double godfather. Once you rescued me from the Nazis, and now you’re meeting me on my return from space!’[4]

This response proved more satisfactory. Then Stuchenko asked, ‘How would you like it if we sent a plane to Moscow to fetch your wife? Valentina could come here and then you could fly home together.’

Another awkward problem: how to refuse such a kind offer from a superior officer, and a General, no less. ‘Thank you very much for the thought, Comrade General, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t do. Valya’s nursing our newly born daughter at the moment.’

Stuchenko escorted Gagarin into the airbase’s officer’s quarters, where he had an opportunity to call his family and report his success to the First Secretary on a secure phone link. Gagarin spoke carefully, knowing full well that his every word would be written down for posterity.[5]

‘I’m glad to hear your voice, Gagarin Alexeyevich.’

‘Nikita Sergeyevich, I’m glad to report that the first space flight has been successfully completed.’

Khrushchev continued in an official vein for a while, but he could not long resist the ordinary questions. ‘Tell me, how did you feel in flight? What’s space like?’

‘I felt fine. I saw the earth from a great altitude. I could see seas, mountains, big cities, rivers and forests.’

Now, for Khrushchev, the real fun. ‘We shall celebrate together with all the Soviet people. Let the world look on and see what our country is capable of, the things our great people and our Soviet science can do.’

Gagarin dutifully echoed the sentiment. ‘Now let the other countries try and overtake us.’

‘Exactly! Let the capitalist countries try to overtake us!’

According to his senior aide Fyodor Burlatsky, Khrushchev was deeply impressed by Gagarin’s cheerfulness and the enthusiastic nature of all his replies. He genuinely looked forward to seeing the young man in Moscow for a splendid and very public celebration in two days’ time.

‘Thank you, Nikita Sergeyevich,’ Gagarin signed off. ‘Thank you again for the confidence placed in me, and I assure you I’m willing to carry out any further assignment for our country.’

He was thinking about the moon, perhaps. After all, Korolev had pressed a replica of a lunar spaceship’s plaque into his hand just before he took off and said that one day he might pick up the original…

The halt at Engels was little more than a rest-stop, a chance to make those necessary phone calls and switch to a more powerful aircraft. Gagarin boarded an Ilyushin-14 for Kuibishev (today called Samara), another large town on the Volga about 350 kilometres north-east of Saratov. Here he would rest for a day or so, before heading for Moscow early on April 14.

An hour after Gagarin’s rocket had left the launch pad, Titov, Gallai, Kamanin and a substantial delegation from Baikonur boarded an Antonov-12 plane bound for Kuibishev. Korolev was the most notable absentee from the Antonov’s passenger list. He was still monitoring the communications from distant radio ground stations and listening ships, which were tracking the final phase of Vostok’s orbit and descent. (He and Ivanovsky flew out later to supervise the ball’s recovery from the Saratov region.)

Titov’s mood was strange, perhaps rather surly. ‘We landed at Kuibishev airbase, which was also a big factory facility for making passenger aircraft. Then Yura arrived by Ilyushin-14. He was brought from the Saratov area. He was surrounded by Generals, and I was just a Senior Lieutenant with very small shoulder-straps, as they say. But I was interested to know: what was the weightlessness like? Yura was walking down the gangway, and I pushed everyone aside. All of them looked at me. “Who’s this lunatic Lieutenant?” they said. We other cosmonauts were top-secret [unknown] people, so to say. But I reached Yura. “How was the weightlessness?” I asked. “It’s all right,” he said. That was our first meeting after his flight.’

The airfield’s perimeter fences were buckling under the weight of curious onlookers, who all knew what was afoot. Kuibishev was seething with exultant crowds when Gagarin’s car left the airbase and passed along the city’s main street escorted by motorcycle police and so forth. ‘Someone in the crowd threw a bicycle under the car’s wheels because they wanted Yura to stop and say hello. The car swerved to avoid an accident,’ says Titov, who was in the car behind. ‘I don’t recall if the bicycle was damaged, but people wanted very much to see him.’

On the outskirts of Kuibishev, a special dacha on the banks of the Volga had been prepared so that Gagarin could take a medical examination and get a day’s rest before flying to Moscow early on April 14. Oleg Ivanovsky remembers meeting him there and giving him a huge hug. ‘I asked him, “How are you feeling?” and Gagarin replied, “What about you? You should have seen yourself at the launch pad when you opened the hatch. Your face went every colour of the rainbow!” Everyone was rushing up to him, but I didn’t lose my head. I gave him that morning’s newspaper, and he wrote me a few kind words alongside the front-page photograph of him wearing his helmet. Everybody involved with Vostok was coming up to him and asking: did he have any comments about their particular items of equipment?’

Somehow Gagarin managed to find time for a shower, a semi-quiet stroll by the Volga and a proper meal, all the while being charming and helpful to his endless interlocutors. At a preliminary press conference he gave his impressions of the earth from space: ‘The day side of the earth was clearly visible – the coasts of continents, islands, big rivers, large surfaces of water. I saw for the first time with my own eyes the earth’s spherical shape. I must say, the view of the horizon was unique and very beautiful.’ Then he described a sunset as it appeared from orbit, and the incredible delicacy of the earth’s atmosphere seen edge-on. ‘You can see the colourful change from the brightness of the earth to the darkness of space as a thin dividing line, like a layer of film surrounding the earth’s sphere. It’s a subtle blue colour, and the transition is very gradual and lovely. When I emerged from the earth’s shadow there was a bright orange strip along the horizon, which passed into blue, and then into a dense black.’[6]

Some correspondents (and even a few of the cosmonauts) found it hard to come to terms with Gagarin’s eloquent description of a sunrise and sunset all happening within the space of ninety minutes (Vostok’s basic orbital period, not allowing for the boost and deceleration phases). Nor did many people understand what he meant by the ‘earth’s shadow’. The adventure of space flight – so commonplace now – seemed very magical and strange in 1961.

In the evening, when all but the most intimate colleagues had at last been sent on their way, Gagarin played a quiet game of billiards with Cosmonaut Two: a polite but subdued Gherman Titov. ‘I still feel jealous, right up until now,’ Titov admits. ‘I have a very explosive character. I could easily say rude things, offend someone and walk away, but Yuri Alexeyevich could talk freely to anyone – Pioneers [boy scouts], workers, scientists, farmers. He could speak their language, you see? I was jealous of it.’ Yet they were pilots both. They would always have that in common. And mutual respect, if not an absolute love. They played billiards and Gherman listened with genuine interest as Gagarin explained certain events of his flight. With that success now stamped into the pages of history for ever, at least Cosmonaut Two could be sure of his own chance of flying in space during the next few months. Vostok was proven, and Korolev’s ‘Little Seven’ seemed to be working more reliably now, after its somewhat frisky adolescence. However, the dacha’s billiard room may have been too public a place for Gagarin to go into details about the equipment module’s failure to separate properly. That was an unpleasantness that Titov would have to discover for himself. He does not specifically remember Gagarin warning him about it in advance.

One persistent journalist snapped some informal shots of Gagarin under the dim lights of the billiard room before being sent on his way. ‘Surely that’s enough, now,’ Titov said.

It wasn’t nearly enough.

Next day Korolev, Kamanin, Keldysh and the other members of the State Committee convened at the dacha and took evidence from Gagarin about his flight. Behind closed doors he felt free to describe the retro-pack problem in detail. To this day there is no clear explanation as to why the issue wasn’t resolved in time for Titov’s flight on August 6. Probably an alteration was made, but it simply did not work. The data cables from the rear equipment module slotted into a large round plate on the ball, through a plug with seventeen pins, each consisting of an array of smaller pins, so that eighty separate electrical connections were made in all. It was no simple matter to eject such a complicated plug. These and similar basic mechanical problems dogged the early years of Russia’s space effort.[7]

In America, NASA’s engineers also recognized the difficulty of separating re-entry capsules after a flight. Like the Russians, they relied on thick bundles of wires for connecting the capsules to their support modules. The crucial difference is that if their plugs failed they could simply slice right through the umbilical bundles with a guillotine blade powered by a small explosive bolt. If that blade failed, another one further up the cable took over. The flexible wires were so much easier to get rid of than the bulky plugs. Uncharacteristically, the brilliant Korolev did not anticipate this solution, and Vostok’s connector caps were over-elaborate, with drop-away clips, mini explosive bolts and other mechanisms that did not quite work on the day.

Early on the morning of April 14 Gagarin left for Moscow. He climbed the gangway of a large Ilyushin-18 airliner capable of long-distance flights. In a few weeks’ time he would no longer think of this sturdy machine as an IL-18 any more; with weary humour he would be calling it ‘home’.

Much of his time during the flight to Moscow was taken up with journalists’ questions. Messages of congratulation were coming in via the radio in the cockpit, and the aircraft’s crew took turns coming into the passenger cabin for a few words. As the plane approached its destination after four hours’ steady progress, Gagarin took time out to gaze through his window. He saw his old life shooting past him in the sky, and a new and more complex life waiting on the ground:

The Ilyushin touched down at Vnukovo Airport earlier than expected. Gagarin had to stay aboard for a few minutes until the pre-planned schedule of celebratory events was due to start. He felt happy but nervous.

Down on the ground, Valentin, Boris, Zoya and Alexei had met up earlier with Nikita Khrushchev and his wife Nina in Moscow, where they had already caught up with Anna and Valya. Zoya remembers a great deal of kindness from the First Secretary and his wife. ‘He was very simple and down-to-earth with us, and she spent all her time with us. We spent four days in Moscow, and every morning Nina would come round to us and only leave in the afternoon. It was a very liberal situation.’

The first formal event took place at the airport. ‘We stayed in Moscow to have some rest, and then on the fourteenth they took us to Vnukovo to meet Yura. We had just arrived, and we saw a plane with an escort of fighters, and they told us it was Yura’s. But when it landed he didn’t come out for some while, so we started to worry. Nina Khrushcheva said, “Don’t worry, the plane arrived a little earlier than planned, but as soon as the time comes, your Yura will come out.” And truly, in a few minutes he came out.’

They had laid out a long red carpet. (Nina Khrushcheva told Valentin, ‘Usually it’s a blue one.’) Yuri walked down the gangway and onto the carpet, looking every inch the hero in his brand-new Major’s uniform and greatcoat, but Zoya immediately noticed something terrible. ‘I saw something dragging on the ground behind him. It was one of his shoelaces.’ Gagarin noticed it too, and spent the interminable ceremonial walk along the carpet silently praying that he would not trip over and make a fool of himself on this of all occasions. He told Valentin later that he had felt more nervous on the carpet than during the space flight. But he did not trip. Incidentally, the shoelace can be seen in the many commemorative films of the day’s events. The cosmonauts’ official cameraman, Vladimir Suvorov, noted in his diary the endless discussions later about whether or not to edit the film and remove the scenes showing the untied shoelace. Eventually, at Gagarin’s insistence, the shots were preserved as a sign of his ordinary, lovable humanity. The ‘mistake’ turned out to have its own special propaganda value.[9]

A smiling, sure-footed Gagarin reached the flower-decked reception platform in one piece, greeted Nikita Khrushchev and other senior Party officials, then hugged his family. Valya gamely awaited her turn in the queue for a hug and a kiss. Alexei and Anna were dressed in their simple rural clothes, looking almost deliberately dowdy. They would rather have worn something smarter, but Khrushchev was most anxious to display them as humble peasant folk. Anna was in tears of pride, but Gagarin must have known how frightened she had felt over the last day or so. He hugged her, wiped away her tears with a handkerchief and said in a mock-childish voice, ‘Please don’t cry, Mamma. I won’t do it again.’

The ceremony at Vnukovo was quite brief. The more important event of the day was in central Moscow. The Gagarins and the Khrushchevs boarded a black Zil limousine and headed for Red Square. Zoya thought her famous brother looked pretty much the same as usual, if rather tired and pressured.

That day Gagarin was assigned a rare privilege, a personal driver. Fyodor Dyemchuk collected from the authorities a brand-new Volga-21 car, complete with the latest and most fashionable accessory: a third foglamp. From now on, he and the Volga would be assigned permanently to Major Gagarin.

Sergei Korolev was not so well treated. He also met Gagarin at Vnukovo, but the Chief Designer was standing slightly to one side of the main reception group, and Khrushchev made no obvious move to acknowledge the man who, more than any other, had made this triumph possible. Korolev was not granted a bright, new Volga car. He bought an older Chaika limousine from one of the foreign embassies, so that he could at least get himself to Vnukovo in reasonable style, for no one else seemed much concerned to put him on display. He was a State secret. He could not be spoken of, let alone paraded in public. They would not even let him wear his medals. To cap it all, his second-hand Chaika broke down on the way to Moscow when the fan belt snapped, and he was forced to hitch a lift to Red Square in a more modest vehicle. In the long official list of scientists, soldiers, Academicians and politicians attending the celebration to mark man’s first journey into space, Korolev’s name does not appear. His colleague Sergei Belotserkovsky says today, ‘The situation for Korolev was very unfair, and Yura was upset by that. The Nobel Prize Committee asked if they could make an award for the creator of the world’s first satellite and the man who’d sent the first human into space, but the authorities never replied to them. Even today that injustice hasn’t been remedied.’

In Red Square, Gagarin and his family stood alongside Khrushchev and the other Party leaders on the traditional perch of communist power: the reviewing stand atop Lenin’s Mausoleum. Overhead, helicopters flew over the city’s major thoroughfares dropping leaflets. The Red Army clumped and thumped across a cleared area of the square, but the greater allocation of space was given over to an immense cheering crowd. The fac^,ade of the GUM department store was obscured by a huge portrait of Lenin inscribed with the slogan, ‘Forward to the Triumph of Communism!’ Today, at least, that triumph seemed well within the bounds of possibility.

Not that much propaganda work, other than simply stating the facts, needed to be done to boost the day’s glory. The Soviet Union had put a man into space. Nikita Khrushchev’s senior aide and speechwriter Fyodor Burlatsky remembers, ‘I was in tears, and many people in the streets were crying from the shock – a shock of happiness, first of all because a man was flying in heaven, in the realm of God, and most important, because he was a Russian. The mood of celebration was almost entirely spontaneous. Usually in Russia, during Stalin’s time, and even during Khrushchev’s time, these demonstrations of popular feeling were heavily orchestrated, but this one wasn’t. It was natural, straight from the heart of maybe ninety per cent of people in the Soviet Union.’

Titov and several of the other cosmonauts from the first group attended the celebrations in plain clothes. They did not get to stand on top of Lenin’s Mausoleum alongside Gagarin and the top brass, but had to stay at ground level. ‘I saw this sea of people, not a sea but an avalanche of shouting, smiling people. They were lifting children onto their shoulders to let them have a look. Yura was standing on the Mausoleum among the government members,’ says Titov. ‘It was astonishing to see him there. It was only then I realized the importance of the event which had moved all the people. Everyone was glad. The whole world was glad because a man had gone into space. It was extraordinary.’

Gagarin made a speech from the podium: the usual sentiments that one would expect on such as occasion, but delivered with his own particular cheerfulness and sincerity, so that all the platitudes about communism, the Motherland, the Party, seemed for a moment genuinely to come alive. In conclusion Gagarin said, ‘I should like to make a special mention of the fatherly love shown to us, the Soviet people, by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev… You were the first to congratulate me warmly on the success of the flight a few minutes after I landed… Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lead by Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev!’

Lest any of his enemies be waiting in the wings for signs of weakness, Khrushchev flaunted his invincibility, his intimate connectedness with today’s triumph. Gagarin’s speech of gratitude – delivered with tact and sincerity to an immense and exultant crowd – was precisely what the First Secretary wanted to hear. The young cosmonaut became a firm political favourite from that moment. Bursting with pride and happiness and wiping tears of joy from his eyes, Khrushchev repeatedly hugged Gagarin, then made a hefty speech, to which the crowd listened with rapt attention, interrupting him at frequent intervals with long bursts of heartfelt applause.

One has to imagine that on April 14, 1961 the Soviet Union truly believed in itself, in no small part because Khrushchev understood how to win the loyalty of his people with an ebullient brand of showmanship. For now, at least, the blood-soaked struggle of the socialist revolution seemed to have taken flight under his more optimistic style of leadership. Joseph Stalin had instilled obedience on pain of death, but Khrushchev was immeasurably less terrifying in his desire for affection won without duress. On coming to power he had gone so far as to denounce Stalin’s cruelties. This was a tremendous political risk, given that many surviving administrators from the old regime were still pulling the Party strings and did not want to be told that their travails under Stalinism had amounted to a terrible mistake; but today, with Gagarin’s world-shattering achievement under his belt, Khrushchev was unassailable. For now.[10]

Of course the young man who had helped deliver him this wonderful victory would benefit from the First Secretary’s warmest and most personal gratitude in the coming months and years. Unfortunately, winning Khrushchev as a friend also meant gaining his rivals as enemies. When Khrushchev’s deputy Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev congratulated Gagarin at Vnukovo Airport and treated him as a lofty equal atop the Mausoleum in Red Square, he did so with all due comradeship and sincerity, but his body language – preserved in the documentary films of the event – betrays his lack of real warmth. In October 1964 his deference towards the First Cosmonaut would vanish overnight, along with Khrushchev’s hold on power.

In the evening there was a celebratory dinner in the huge Georgyevsky Hall of the Kremlin. It was supposed to have been a luncheon, but the Red Square celebrations had lasted for a good six hours. The crowds’ enthusiasm and proud patience seemed limitless, and Khrushchev had milked the day for all its glory.

At the dinner, a hungry and footsore Valentin tucked into all the food and booze with hearty enthusiasm. ‘There was a huge round table – an entire delicatessen, I would say. Yura was awarded a Golden Star and the Order of Lenin. The last people to congratulate him were the holy fathers. There was one of ours, two Muslims, and a couple of others. One of them asked, “Yuri Alexeyevich, did you see Jesus Christ far up above the earth?” He replied, “Holy father, you’d know better than me whether I’d have seen him up there.”’

Valentin noted to his satisfaction that sensible supplies of good vodka accompanied all the place settings, for the men at least. ‘There was a bottle of Stolichnaya by everyone’s side – not the modern stuff, but the kind you drink and then want to drink more of. There was also cognac, wine, and three glasses. I wasn’t sure which glass to take, so I decided to copy Father. He took the middle one and I did the same. When I’d drunk from the glass, I asked, “How much are non-Party members allowed to drink?” Everyone went quiet. Only then did I realize my mistake. Father replied, “That’s right, Valentin Alexeyevich. These days, Party members get to drink twice as much as non-members!” Everyone started to laugh and the tension disappeared.’

Valentin had another tot to recover from his embarrassment, and kept an amused eye on a group of Muslim delegates from the southern republics. ‘You know, they were especially drunk. They have total abstinence, don’t they? But here the drink was free of charge. They were great fun, and so were the Yugoslavs. The Poles also drank quite well. Some people were carried out by their elbows and put in their cars.’

Unfortunately, getting at the food was more of a problem than obtaining drink. ‘There were no waitresses to serve us. So it was just like communism. You can sniff it and look at it, but you can’t touch it or eat it. Furthermore, Khrushchev was shouting all the time that true universal communism was just on the horizon.’

Indeed, a triumphant Nikita Khrushchev was by now well into one of his noisy table-thumping routines. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov recalls the mood of optimism. ‘He announced that our generation was going to live in true communism. We were all hugging, applauding, screaming “Hooray!” And we really believed him, because at that time the success of our country was obvious to the whole world. It was only much later, when we grew up and learned a little about economic realities, that we realized Khrushchev’s announcement was a little premature.’

By the end of April Gagarin’s arduous routine of foreign travel was under way, with a trip to the ‘democratic’ satellite socialist countries of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, then on to Finland. In June 1961 he arrived back in Moscow for some much-needed leave with Valya and the children, although he took the time to be interviewed by yet more journalists, ferried from place to place as always by his driver Fyodor Dyemchuk. The Indian writer Khwaja Ahmad Abbas observed of Gagarin:

As usual, Gagarin’s charm quickly won the day and Abbas’s approach soon became more complimentary. The journalist may have felt an initial twitch of disappointment, but the First Cosmonaut’s essential normality was the whole point. If Khrushchev and his advisors had wanted a super-hero to represent the Soviet Union in space, they would have chosen another candidate.

The British journalists Wilfred Burchett and Anthony Purdy met Gagarin at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Moscow on June 9, and were instantly impressed by his enthusiasm, his firm handshake and confident responses to their questions. They told him they were writing a book about his exploits, and he flattered them by saying that if their determination as authors was anything to go by, ‘The next person in space should be a writer.’

The conversation soon turned to the exploits of NASA. Gagarin made gentle, but pointed, fun of the Mercury project, which had achieved only its first tentative 15-minute sub-orbital hop on May 5, with astronaut Alan Shepard aboard. Burchett and Purdy suggested that the American capsule incorporated more sophisticated attitude (orientation) controllers, thrusters and navigation systems, so that Shepard could genuinely pilot the machine to a greater extent than a cosmonaut could fly a Vostok. This was quite true, but Gagarin evaded the issue by concentrating on the short duration of the Mercury mission. ‘How much driving can you get done in five minutes?’ he challenged. ‘And what would be the point of manual control? I could have guided Vostok, had I wanted to. There was a dual-control, but the manual option was not necessary or important.’ For a pilot this was like saying that his job – his essential skill – was completely irrelevant, but at the time Gagarin could hardly have said anything different.[12]

The journalists changed tack and suggested that Mercury’s cabin equipment was better than Vostok’s. Again, this was largely true. Gagarin countered, ‘It’s difficult to compare them. Vostok’s cabin is very big, and the thrust of its engines much greater. We went higher and faster for a much longer time.’

Burchett and Purdy asked him which had been the worst moment during his flight? ‘The re-entry,’ he replied without hesitation – then collected his thoughts for a moment and efficiently covered his tracks. ‘But “worst” is a comparative word. There wasn’t really any particular bad moment. Everything worked, everything was organized properly, nothing went wrong. It was a walk, really.’

Not surprisingly, Burchett and Purdy missed the nuance. Phil Clarke, a modern British expert on Russian space history, suggests that if the story of Vostok’s retro-pack separation failure had leaked out in 1961, it would have caused a sensation, but Gagarin remained consistently skilful at listening to his own answers and guarding against errors.

As always, the most sensitive issue was his method of landing. In the wake of his homecoming celebrations in Moscow, Gagarin was pressed for answers by suspicious foreign journalists. On April 17 the London Times correspondent wrote:

The sports official Ivan Borisenko flew to Paris in July 1961 to negotiate far more searching questions thrown at him by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) about the altitude record he was claiming on behalf of Vostok. The IAF Director-General asked Borisenko’s delegation outright, ‘Where was the pilot on return, in relation to the space vehicle?’ Borisenko bluffed shamelessly. ‘Ask the Americans if they believe these records for Gagarin were actually achieved! All the people of the world have already endorsed Gagarin’s flight and have accepted it as fact.’[13]

The wrangling went on for several hours, but eventually the IAF caved in without pressing the Soviets for clearer evidence. From now on Borisenko could wave his newly minted IAF certification in front of sceptics as ‘proof’ that Gagarin had landed in his ship and rightfully claimed the altitude record.

On July 11, 1961 Gagarin and his escorts flew to London on a Tupolev-104 Aeroflot airliner. The left-leaning London newspaper the Daily Mirror heralded his arrival with a glowing tribute, accompanied by a bitter critique of the lacklustre official reception. Today the piece can be read as an eerie portent of things to come, as the Conservative government of the time began to collapse under the pressure of 1960s’ modernity:

Harold Macmillan did eventually meet Gagarin (though not at the airport) and described him as ‘a delightful fellow’. In fact, Gagarin’s visit to Britain had been sponsored largely by the Foundry Workers’ Union rather than the government, but the ordinary citizens of Britain turned out in force to welcome him. The Times reported that he ‘received a welcome that sometimes bordered on hysteria. Cheering crowds lined the route into London all the way from the airport.’ He arrived by motorcade into the vast Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre in West London to address a crowd of students, then gave a press conference in front of 2,000 journalists from Britain and around the world. Quickly the establishment revised its plans for him. He was summoned to the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the Royal Society, and finally to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. Yaroslav Golovanov, the approved journalist ever in attendance, says that an extra day had to be found in Gagarin’s schedule to make room for this meeting, which raises the fascinating possibility that the royal reception was not planned in advance. Rather, it was a hurried response to circumstances. The Times seemed to confirm this on July 12, with its report that ‘Because of the Palace invitation, Major Gagarin will now return home on Saturday, instead of on Friday as originally planned.’

During an informal luncheon encounter on July 15, the Queen was gracious, particularly when Gagarin ran into the perennial problem of an unversed visitor in the Palace at mealtimes: how to handle the vast array of cutlery. Golovanov recalls the scene. ‘He said, “Your Highness, you know this is the first time I’ve had breakfast with the Queen of Great Britain, and it’s very difficult to know which cutlery to use.” He smiled, and the Queen didn’t hold back. She said, “You know, I was born in this palace, but I still get mixed up.” After that, the meeting went very warmly and sincerely.’

The Queen asked Gagarin all kinds of questions – simple human curiosity breaking through the pomp, as always – and at one point he said tactfully, ‘Maybe you have me mixed up with someone else? I’m sure there are many other pilots like me in your own Royal Air Force.’ In all, the First Cosmonaut was turning out to be an extraordinary asset to Soviet diplomacy, but, as he confessed to Golovanov in a quiet moment, the strain of playing the perfect ambassador was beginning to wear him down. ‘A lot of articles are being written about the flight. Everyone is writing about me, and it makes me uncomfortable because they’re making me out to be some kind of superhero. In fact, like everyone else, I’ve made mistakes. I have weaknesses. They shouldn’t idealize people. It’s embarrassing to be made to seem like such a good, sweet little boy. It’s enough to make one sick.’

When he grew weary of the adulation at his news conferences, one of Gagarin’s favourite ploys was to remind his listeners that his Hero of the Soviet Union medal was stamped with the number 11,175. ‘That means 11,174 people accomplished something worthwhile before me. I disagree with any division of people into ordinary mortals or celebrities. I’m still an ordinary mortal. I haven’t changed.’ (Once, in Moscow, he laughed happily when he overheard a woman in the crowd say, ‘Oh, look! He’s cut himself shaving.’)

On August 5 Gagarin’s entourage arrived in Canada, at the invitation of the financier Cyrus Eaton. From Halifax they travelled 200 kilometres to Pugwash, Nova Scotia, where Eaton kept a substantial residence. He and the philosopher Bertrand Russell had convened a famous nuclear disarmament seminar known as the ‘Pugwash Conference’ at this house back in 1957. Not surprisingly, Moscow was delighted to receive an invitation for Gagarin to visit, but Eaton’s star guest quickly became distracted. Late on the evening of August 8 he learned that Gherman Titov had gone into orbit. He asked if he could send a congratulatory telegram, and this was arranged for him by Nikolai Kamanin. Titov heard Gagarin’s message during his sixth orbit, relayed to him by ground controllers. Cyrus Eaton politely eased a foreshortening of the festivities so that Gagarin and his colleagues could set off back to Russia immediately. All of a sudden the Russian delegation felt very cut off from important events at home. Kamanin remarked, ‘While we’re busy making speeches, the Americans are preparing spacecraft. We have to move ahead.’

Gagarin’s tour resumed within three weeks. His arrival in Cuba on August 24 was a politically charged event, an important gesture of Soviet solidarity with Fidel Castro’s two-year-old regime. Gagarin and Kamanin stepped off the plane into sweltering heat, dressed in dazzling white summer uniforms. Seen from their end of the political telescope, the Bay of Pigs had been a triumph, not a defeat. Castro’s aides happily told Gagarin, ‘The “beards” repelled the enemy,’ and Gagarin replied, ‘People who believe deeply in the rightfulness of their cause can never be brought to their knees.’ As so often, he knew exactly what to say without prompting. At a mass public rally he declared, ‘All two hundred and twenty million of us Soviet people are the true and devoted friends of Cuba!’[14]

By 1967, the last year of his life, Gagarin would not be so quick to praise the Soviet regime, or to take its every triumphant proclamation so much on trust.