Public Loneliness: Yuri Gagarin's Circumlunar Flight

by Brennan, Gerald

  As deputy chief of cosmonaut training, I had to do my share of hammering. But usually the discipline fell to Kamanin. And while Nelyubov got the worst of it, none of us has entirely avoided our time beneath the hammer.

  During one of my goodwill trips to Paris, back in 1965 or so, I’d been given a beautiful sports car, a red Matra. It was an exquisite ride, a jet on wheels, and I enjoyed it immensely.

  On one boring day back at the training center, Blondie and I started talking about it over lunch. He wanted to see what it could do, so I took him for a ride. When the guard opened the gate, we tore off, ripping down the back roads, raising rooster tails of dust. As usual for us, we got into a heated discussion; we were headed down the road at a good 160 kilometers an hour, and I took my hands from the wheel to make an emphatic point. And his eyes—oh, the look in his eyes! It was a couple seconds before he realized I was steering with my knees. I pointed—got you!—and put my hands back on the wheel.

  It was a while before I could talk, I was laughing so hard. When we finally stopped at the next crossroads, I told him: “You should see your face! You went white!”

  He shook his head, chuckling now at last. “And you were red, you were laughing so hard.”

  “Better red than dead,” I said: a little slogan, something I had heard a while before.

  We were still laughing on the way back through the gate at Star City. The guard saluted but did not make eye contact with me. When we made it back to the office, I found out why.

  “Yuri, your car is…attracting attention,” Kamanin said.

  “Attention from whom. The guards?”

  “I ordered them to keep an eye out. I got a phone call last week about it from Suslov. From Suslov!” (He was agitated—Suslov was and is, of course, a Politburo member; this was not long after Khruschev’s fall, and everyone knew Suslov had Brezhnev’s ear.) “There were photographs of you in the Western papers.”

  “He shouldn’t have been reading them,” I pointed out.

  Kamanin glared.

  “It’s the only way I get to fly these days,” I added.

  “Yuri, you know how these things appear. Word gets around. We all know we’re in a…privileged place. But only by virtue of the great things we’re doing. So we don’t want to be flashy about it.”

  “Suslov…” I seethed. “They’re bureaucrats. We, you and I, have risked our lives for the state.”

  “For the state, or for yourself?” he asked. “Look, Yuri, you’re a good party member, by and large. You need to be a little less flashy. The car’s…bright. Very noticeable.”

  “We’re living simply here. They offered to build us dachas. Brezhnev himself offered dachas for the whole communist corps. I turned him down so we could live communally, in apartments.”

  “A dacha is quiet and out of the way, at least. This…”

  “Are you ordering me to get rid of it? It might be bad for morale…if we don’t get to do anything extra, what are we risking our lives for?”

  “You don’t have to get rid of it. Just…paint it, perhaps.”

  “So you’re saying my car’s too red. It’s too red, so it isn’t red enough. And if it was less red, then it would be more red.”

  “If it was less red, you would look more red,” Kamanin pointed out.

  “Very well, I’ll have it painted black. I’m sorry if I put you in a bad spot.”

  “I knew you’d understand,” Kamanin said, at last.

  This was but one episode in an ongoing conversation of sorts between us—a discussion that had started when I’d made my flight. We were both Heroes of the Soviet Union. (He was, in fact, the very first, while my medal was stamped with the rather humbling number 11575, a simple reminder of how many had done so much for the state during the Great Patriotic War.) He, too, had been famous—a daring Arctic air rescue, a truly brave feat of aviation at a time before the war when the Soviet Union desperately needed its heroes, its Kamanins and Stakhanovs.

  And it occurred to me afterwards that the state really didn’t know what to do with me. Khrushchev had fallen, and I was associated with Khrushchev, but they could not get rid of all of yesterday’s heroes. I’d been put on a lot of posters. The imagery of my flight had become central to the state’s sense of self: the imagery of progress, of undeniable accomplishment.

  Surely you have seen these images! (I, myself, did not see them until later.) The tremendous concrete basin, like something from Stalin’s wet dreams. The steel support arms falling away and the R-7 rising, standing steady on a pillar of fire. The massive concrete pit now filling with flame. The shot down at the rocket’s shadow moving away from the launch pad. A dark dart, a shadow ship sailing smoothly across the steppe, with a heatwave wake trailing behind. Then from orbit: a blurry television image. My black-and-white eyes. Smile hidden by the spacesuit’s neck ring.

  And of course, the reception in Moscow. My flapping shoelace as I walked across the tarmac to report to Khrushchev. Then, the motorcade. Me riding up front with Khrushchev, and Korolev a few cars behind us, unheralded and anonymous. The solid red mass of Lenin’s tomb. Then: standing up there. Smiling and waving. Innocent. Everyone has seen these things, and so have I. But to them they are real, and to me they are just shadows of what I saw.

  As I said before, there were posters in the crowd, gigantic posters of Lenin, and posters of me, just as large.

  Image is, of course, important, but only to a point. When you look at a poster, do you stop and think what it conceals? For surely a poster’s a way of saying: “Look at this! Don’t look at whatever’s behind this, look at this!” Does it matter what’s behind it? Perhaps. If the poster’s attached to a cement wall, the poster’s incidental, and you can replace it as needed. But if the backing is rotting, worm-eaten wood, the poster may be the only thing holding it together. At some point, that’s a lot to ask of a poster.

  And some said I didn’t deserve the attention, that I, after all, hadn’t done anything to compare with the heroes of the Great Patriotic War. (Surely this is one of the defining facts of 20th century life—if you were an adult in the second half of the century, you must hear endlessly from those who were adults in the first half about how good you have it, how you don’t know what it’s like to endure hardship. As if my family didn’t endure the German occupation! As if I didn’t see my own brother hung before my eyes to within an inch of his life!)

  These were all just whispers. But I knew I would be a fool if I didn’t at least pay attention to them. Especially after that talk with Kamanin. I sent the car to the garage to be painted, and soon it was October, and it seemed wise to leave it inside all winter and let the various storms blow over.

  Soon afterwards, in early 1966, there was a retrospective on state television on the fifth anniversary of my flight, April 12th, which is now of course called Cosmonautics Day. Valya insisted I watch it at home with the girls, and I couldn’t help but notice everything had been edited, shortened, changed. Virtually every shot of Khrushchev had been taken out; it was as if I’d gone into space of my own accord, a spontaneous ascension into the heavens, the glorification of one man as representative of the people. No mention of Khrushchev at all.

  He is not dead, of course. Such things happened under Stalin; people were erased from the official photographs as they fell out of favor, and it always meant they were dead. (Such things have even happened recently! Bondarenko, for instance, was removed from some photographs after his death, which has helped feed the absurd rumors about lost cosmonauts. I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to tell you about Bondarenko. Suffice it to say it was a tragic story, an absurd little catastrophe that did not bring credit to anyone involved.) Khrushchev has been edited out, but he is simply on house arrest. So the state is not so cruel any more. But clearly even Khrushchev is dispensable.

  And despite all the attention I’ve gotten, I know that everyone is, in the end, dispensable. Even me. Even you. If you drop dead tomorrow, those around you may mourn, but they w
ill get along without you.

  But I’d already made up my mind, after that talk with Kamanin, that I wouldn’t give them reason to carry on without me. As much as I hate to say it, it was an incentive: to cut back on the drinking, to get my head down and work, to find a way back up here.

  •••

  In the night, time passes strangely.

  With the interior lights off and the shades in place, the only light is the soft glow of the panel, the pushbuttons and the gauges and the voltmeter.

  Before East-1, one of the automated test flights had oriented itself improperly before it fired its retrorockets. It was supposed to turn itself so the engine was facing in the direction of the orbital sunrise, just as my flight would do some months later. But it did the opposite, and instead of causing the orbit to decay, the retrorocket pushed it into a higher orbit. It did not fall back to earth until 1965.

  If I miss the atmosphere, I will end up in an elliptical orbit. We may exhaust the reentry thrusters to try and lower the low point of the orbit. There is no clear place where the atmosphere ends and space begins, but if we bring the low point low enough, atmospheric drag will eventually bring me down.

  I wonder, briefly, how long my ordeal will last. Then I remind myself: it is pointless to speculate on such matters.

  I find myself thinking of Maresyev flying over a sea of trees, the undulating green of a vast forest. Then shot down, stranded in those woods, hobbling on shattered feet for 18 days until he reached Soviet lines. (And afterwards, of course, learning to dance on wooden feet so he could convince the doctors he was fit enough to fly.)

  I think, too, of the old man in Hemingway’s book, far out in the blue sea, battling the giant fish, hands cut and bleeding, and no one there to help him. I reread it recently and now various phrases are floating through my mind. One about how the old man took his suffering as it came. And the old man’s assessment of the fish: his fight has no panic in it. And another about the old man, when he was in the midst of his ordeal: he tried not to think, but only to endure.

  •••

  On January 12, 1966, Blondie and I went to Sergei Pavlovich’s house to celebrate his fifty-ninth birthday.

  We came bearing a bronze statue, a heavy sculpture of a man ascending towards the heavens. Every member of the cosmonaut corps had signed it, and there was a plaque at its base that said: TO THE STARS.

  It was quite a task wrestling that statue out of my car and up to his apartment—it weighed 50 kilograms! The walks were icy, and we were slipping and sliding and swearing; Blondie even tore a button from his overcoat.

  But at last, upstairs, we presented it to him, and there were tears in his eyes, and we knew our efforts had been worthwhile. Few men truly get to know that their life’s work has made a difference; we wanted to make sure he knew that we knew that he was the one truly indispensable man in all of this, in all of our lives and careers and explorations.

  His apartment filled up—engineers, cosmonauts, family, servants. I remember meat and cabbage pies, and cognac. We drank many toasts, and we ate so much that it did not matter how much we drank.

  And when at last everyone had gone, all the servants had retired and Korolev’s wife had gone to bed, and we were finally going to leave, Korolev motioned for us to stay.

  And he started to talk. He spoke with the looseness and freedom that, in our country, only comes late at night among close friends when one is drunk.

  “You men have been chosen by the state to receive tremendous things.” His voice was strangely serious. “All the honors and accolades that the country can offer. But the state only gives what it has the power to take away.”

  Blondie and I glanced over at one another. Neither of us said anything.

  “I’m sure you see me as a good Soviet man. A perfect member of the state. Humble and anonymous, content only to build the rockets and let the state have the glory. I suppose that’s how I want to be seen.”

  He motioned for a cigarette. He did not normally smoke. I provided him with one and lit it, and he kept on: “In 1938, the NKVD came in the night to get me. They were rounding up a lot of people in those days, but it was the sort of thing people only talked about in whispers. They came for me in the night and did not even give me a chance to bid my family goodbye.”

  “Before I knew it, I was in some dank holding cell in some subterranean jail. They saw to it that I did not sleep. Periodically they took me in for questioning. I lost all track of time. They tortured me. At one point, they smashed a pitcher of water against my head and broke my jaw. And I did not even know why I had been arrested until they brought me in for my so-called ‘trial.’”

  “When it was time for the ‘trial,’ I felt a little better, for I knew the men running it. There was a troika of judges, led by a party official named Voroshikov, whom I’d met socially on several occasions. But that day there was a deadness in his eyes; it was as if he’d never met me. He handed me a paper alleging that I had funneled funds from an agricultural institute to set up a new design bureau for rocketry. He asked me if it was true, and I said, ‘No.’ Then one of the other judges said, ‘All these bastards say they’re innocent. Give him ten years.’”

  “From there I was shipped to Kolyma, to the gold mines. A long journey by train, east across the country in boxcars, shitting and pissing in pots. Then by boat across the sea of Oshkosh, north to this godforsaken spot of far Siberia. It was awful work, exhausting work. Clearing trees and mining. Watching one’s fellow prisoners get thinner and thinner and thinner, and realizing it was happening to you, too, that the skin was drawing tighter over your bones, and the shape of your skeleton was becoming evident.”

  “I was there for a year. And I would have died, had I spent another year there. The fact that I lived is somewhat providential. I am not a religious man, but there were several unlikely factors which saved my life.”

  “First, it became apparent to those in power that they should not be sending talented people to slave away doing manual labor in gold mines when they could instead make us slave away doing engineering work for the aircraft industry. So I was recalled to Moscow.”

  “Of course, the camps were a great distance from the port—far off in the back country. So I had to hitch a ride by truck back to Magadan. The driver only took me when I gave him my boots in exchange for his worn-out shoes. We got back to Magadan in the afternoon, and it turned out that the last ship of the season had sailed that morning. I later found out that that ship had sunk with all hands. Again, fate had spared me. Or God. Whatever you prefer.”

  Blondie and I sat there, rapt. Time and tiredness melted away. All that remained was the story.

  Korolev continued: “Of course, I was on my own for food and shelter. The truck driver had gone, and I certainly wasn’t about to go back to the mines. I stumbled about on the outskirts of town; I was hungry and out of my mind and nearing collapse. And I found a loaf of bread by the side of the road. A fresh, pure, new loaf of bread. I wolfed it down and gained strength to go on and eventually snuck in to another camp, into a worker’s barracks. And I told them about the bread, and they laughed. They thought it was impossible. In that part of the country, bread was more precious than gold. Nobody would have just dropped a loaf by the side of the road.”

  “In the springtime I finally caught a ship to Vladivostok. Conditions at the worker’s barracks were better than the mines, but it still had been a miserable winter. I was famished, gaunt and skeletal, and my teeth were falling out from scurvy. The authorities put me on a train back to Moscow, but I was taken off halfway because it was feared I might die. And it just so happened that there was a healer in that town, a wild man who lived in a cave on a hillside. Some old lady summoned him, and he rubbed herbs on my gums and fed me broth, and in a week I had my strength back.”

  “I spent the rest of the war in a compound near Moscow, working on projects for the state and for various bureaus. We were still prisoners, but at least we were well-fed, and working wi
th our minds, rather than our bodies. And the war ended, and they needed people with knowledge of rocketry to go to Germany and figure out what the Germans had done with the A-4. And I went, and I made myself useful. So the next thing I know, I was made a colonel. My past was forgiven.”

  “Because of my accomplishments in that field, I became valuable to the state. I was not officially rehabilitated until 1957, but I was at least valuable. I could not help but sense that I had been saved by divine providence, though, saved for a purpose, saved to help accomplish this grand goal, of sending man into the heavens. All that Tsiolkovsky dreamed about and wrote about and researched, I was to bring to fruition.”

  “But of course, the state kept me anonymous. The Chief Designer. And they did not let any of us publish under our own names, nor did they praise us publicly. I’m told that the Nobel Prize committee even asked Khrushchev for my name; they wanted to give me the Nobel Prize for physics. And Nikita Sergeyevich told them that it was an accomplishment of the whole people. They have circulated their reasons for all of this, all those paranoid Stalinist fantasies about foreign agents and saboteurs waiting to assassinate us should our names be publicly known. But other names have been known. Kurchatov was the father of the atomic bomb, and everyone knew who he was before he died. So I cannot help but think that, in my case, there is another reason: the state cannot afford to admit to mistakes. If there is officially no God, then the state must appear to be infallible. Otherwise people will look elsewhere for their peace of mind.”

  Blondie and I looked at one another. Neither of us had heard any of this. What was I feeling? Anger? Frustration? Sadness? Perhaps many things at once. But one also must grow numb. There were many things we could have said, but we became aware of our tiredness, of the lateness of the hour. We left in a somber mood.