by Jamie Doran
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:
We were escorted towards our landing in Moscow by a squadron of fighter planes. They were lovely MiGs, just like the ones I used to fly. They came in so close to us that I could clearly make out the pilots’ faces. They were smiling broadly, and I smiled back. Then I looked below and gasped. The streets of Moscow were flooded with people. Human rivers seemed to be flowing in from every part of the city, and over them, sail-like red banners waved on their way towards the Kremlin.8
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 he
ro 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.’
