by Jamie Doran
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:
At first Yura struck me as too small and frail. The only vacancy I had available was in the foundry group, which meant a lot of smoke, dust, heat and heavy lifting. I thought it would be beyond him. I can’t remember why I eventually ignored all these negative points and accepted him. It must have been the determination you could feel in him. Was he special? No, but he was hard-working.5
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:
On overnight stays at the Saratov airfield, Yuri would zealously ensure that our camp tent was kept perfectly tidy. He couldn’t bear untidy or slovenly people. At first he’d appeal to their consciences in a friendly way, but if that didn’t work he would demand in stronger terms.7
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.
Gagar
in’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
2
RECRUITMENT
In October 1959 mysterious recruiting teams arrived without warning at all the major air stations in the Soviet Union, including Nikel. They did not say exactly what they wanted, or which organization they represented. Groups of pilots were selected and summoned into an office, twenty or so at a time, for an informal conversation with some ‘doctors’. A few days later the requested groups became smaller, the many rejects winnowed out through mysterious consultations in the background, until eventually the recruiters were holding private interviews with just one candidate at a time, from a shortlist of perhaps a dozen from any given airbase. These lucky ones were sent to the Bordenko Military Hospital in Moscow for a series of rigorous health checks. In all, nine out of ten candidates failed this stage of the review process, again because of secret decisions taken behind closed doors.
In his published accounts, Gagarin recalled undergoing seven separate eye examinations in the Bordenko hospital, countless interviews with psychologists and a nightmarish mathematical test, during which a soft voice whispered all the solutions to him – the wrong solutions – through a pair of headphones. He had to concentrate on his own thought processes and ignore ‘the obsequious friend’ whispering so helpfully in his ears. The doctors were ‘as stern as State prosecutors. Our hearts were the main object of their examination. They could read our whole life history from them. You couldn’t hide a single thing. They tapped our bodies with hammers, twisted us about on special devices and checked the vestibular organs in our ears. We were tested from head to toe. Complicated instruments detected everything, even the tiniest cracks in our health.’1
