Starman
Page 18
Of course Nikolai Kamanin was severely criticized for his failure of supervision at Foros. At a special meeting in Star City on November 14 he had to explain Titov’s and Gagarin’s behaviour in the best possible light:
Gagarin and Titov described their behaviour in the health resort adequately on the whole. They acknowledged their alcohol abuse, thoughtless attitude to women and other faults. However, probably for Valya’s peace of mind, Gagarin maintained that he did not know the girl was in the room from which he jumped.
Kamanin persuaded the meeting to judge that his adulterous First Cosmonaut had merely been teasing his wife in a childish hide-and-seek game, while his drunken understudy Titov had been led astray by non-cosmonaut companions. Everyone knew that these were white lies, but tidy official versions were agreed, with the help of hand-written notes of apology from the cosmonauts themselves. Kamanin noted, ‘I’m sure Gagarin had a different motive for visiting that room, but I won’t press the matter, in case it causes discord in his family.’
Kamanin was lenient, but during the December resumption of Gagarin’s world tour, he found to his great frustration that the First Cosmonaut’s behaviour still was not improving. On December 14 he wrote in his diary:
He hasn’t given up drinking, even after the Crimean incident. I don’t fancy being a prophet of doom, but it seems to me he’s drinking a good deal. He’s at the top of his glory, bearing a great moral burden, knowing that his every step is being watched. One or two years will pass, the situation will change drastically, and he will become dissatisfied. It’s obvious in his family life even now. He has no respect for his wife, he humiliates her sometimes, and she doesn’t have the advantages of education or the social skills to influence him.
He also observed that ‘Titov, recently returned from his tour of Indonesia, is starting to think no small beer of himself.’ Evidently Kamanin felt that he had another wayward cosmonaut on his hands. But one has to keep in mind that his personal diaries are private expressions of annoyance, as much as accurate historical records. There is scarcely a single person within the Soviet space effort (not even the great Chief Designer) whom he does not criticize at some point – often unfairly – and just as often prior to a complete reversal of opinion a few days later. Even Khrushchev comes in for flak. Perhaps Kamanin’s administrative tensions after the Foros incident can explain an extraordinary outburst of contempt in his diary about the Party Congress – the one at which Gagarin’s muted appearance had caused so much embarrassment. At the Congress Nikita Khrushchev had proposed that Joseph Stalin’s body be removed from the Mausoleum in Red Square. On November 5, 1961 Kamanin raged:
Many people disapprove of this. They speak about it openly in buses, on the metro and on the streets. The destruction of Stalin’s prestige creates many problems. The young are losing their faith in authority . . . Stalin ruled the country for thirty years and turned it into a mighty state. His name can never be eclipsed by the pathetic pretensions of pygmies. Khrushchev is an envious intriguer, a cowardly toady. Everyone knows about his total diplomatic failures with China, Albania, the USA, France, England, and so on.
The irony is that no one in Stalin’s time would have dared put such words on paper, for fear of being found out and shot. It can be assumed that Khrushchev’s officials blamed Kamanin for not keeping his cosmonauts in order, so he vented his feelings in the pages of his diary; but he was not alone in his political opinions. It is hard for Westerners to understand the extent to which Stalin’s memory was revered. Kamanin may have had a variety of reasons for his bitterness in October 1961, but he was broadly correct in his assessment. First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was heading for a fall, and so was Yuri Gagarin.
By December 1961 the world tour had resumed, with Gagarin’s slight scar carefully disguised by make-up. Delhi, Lucknow, Bombay, Calcutta, Colombo, Kabul, Cairo . . . Onwards, ever onwards. During the Ceylon visit, Gagarin carried out fifteen separate speaking engagements in one day. In Cairo a newspaper announced that he was nominated for election to the Supreme Soviet as a representative of the Smolensk region.4
Athens, Nicosia, Tokyo – and a loaded question about toys. A Japanese journalist wanted to know why Gagarin had bought a load of Japanese stuffed toys for his children. Could it be that Russian toys were not available back home? Gagarin replied, ‘I always bring presents back for my daughters. I wanted to surprise them this time with Japanese dolls, but now this story will be all over the newspapers and it’ll take away their surprise. You’ve spoilt a joy for two small girls.’ He made this speech with the most charming smile and the questioner conceded defeat. The other journalists in the room buzzed their approval. Game point to Gagarin.
Valya came along on this leg of the tour, but it was not easy to combine foreign trips with childcare. She preferred to stay at home in Moscow while her husband travelled. She was shy, and found her occasional public appearances very difficult. This was not the life she had expected.
Fyodor Dyemchuk drove Valya around while Gagarin was abroad. He could hardly fail to notice her intense dislike of publicity. If her occasional foreign trips were a strain, then the streets and shops of Moscow were no less of a burden to her. Dyemchuk escorted her during household shopping trips, and Valya would always take her place in the inevitable queues like an ordinary Muscovite, but the other women in the line usually recognized her straight away. ‘She would immediately turn around, get back in the car and say, “Let’s go. They recognized me.” Everyone would tell her to come to the front of the queue, but she would modestly come back to the car and go to a different shop.’
Nikolai Kamanin accompanied Gagarin on several more foreign trips. On December 4, 1961, during the visit to India, he wrote in his diary:
Thousands of people greeted Gagarin warmly. I was reminded of my naïve childhood impressions of Christ meeting his people. He needed a miracle with five thousand loaves and fishes, but our Gagarin satisfies the people’s thirst by his appearance alone. I’m the one writing these words, although I know better than anyone that Gagarin happens to be here only by sheer luck. His place could easily have been occupied by someone else. I remember writing on April 11 [the day before the space flight], ‘Tomorrow Gagarin will become famous worldwide’, but I could never have predicted the scale of his glamour.
By December 9, Gagarin, Valya and the accompanying entourage were in Colombo, Ceylon. Gagarin told Kamanin that he was ‘close to wearing out’. The Soviet ambassador in Colombo insisted on his making as many appearances as possible. Kamanin could not help but note:
They are doing their best to squeeze the maximum possible use out of Gagarin to make the government look good. They have no interest in how all this affects him.
By now Kamanin was growing concerned about Gagarin’s alcohol abuse and Valya’s increasing inability to deal with the stress of public appearances. Kamanin, Golovanov and other close colleagues have a similar view about this. It seems that Gagarin was a sensible drinker, a fun-loving man who could get drunk with the best of them but seldom drank too much when working. Unfortunately the publicity tours placed him in social situations where he was expected to drink each and every time, so as not to snub the endless toasts made in his honour. This, coupled with the emotional strain of his remorseless public schedule, inadvertently led him towards excessive drinking. Gagarin’s personal KGB escorts and speech advisors, Venyamin Russayev and Alexei Belikov, were criticized for allowing this state of affairs to occur, although there was little they could do to prevent it.
Gagarin developed a very good relationship with Russayev, and each man worked behind the scenes to protect the other. Today Russayev says, ‘Yuri was a very pure-hearted man, often taking responsibility for problems caused by others. As for Gherman Titov, problems seemed to slide past him like water off a duck’s back. After his flight he had 20 or more serious disciplinary incidents, car crashes or whatever. People always wanted to connect these problems to Yuri, and at that point I would intervene.’
Russayev tells a touching story. ‘Nikita Sergeyevich Khrush chev could get pretty tipsy on just a couple of glasses of booze, and Yura always protected him from going over the top.’ Although Gagarin quite obviously adored Khrushchev, he kept as far apart from other politicians as he could safely manage without giving offence. Sergei Belotserkovsky came to know Gagarin very well, tutoring him in aerospace studies from 1964 onwards, when Gagarin was trying to get back to serious work. ‘I think his personality began to split. On one side he was the welcome guest of kings, presidents and even the Queen of England, but on the other side he never lost his ties with the ordinary people. I think he began to sense the lower classes’ lack of rights, their hardship, and he saw the corruption of the top layers of society. He saw our drunken leaders dancing on the table and behaving badly, and that can’t have left his honest soul unwounded. I’m talking not just about the external symptoms, but also the internal corruption which was dominant among our top leadership clan.’
Quite unfairly, there was a certain degree of resentment directed at Gagarin because of all the privileges he was assumed to have accumulated under Khrushchev. True, he and the other cosmonauts were given better-than-average living accommodation, but their level of comfort was not significantly better than that of most middle-ranking officers. Titov says, ‘Honestly, we never received special benefits. People were always saying to me, “Show us, point to the place where you’d like your luxury dacha to be, and Khrushchev will build it for you straight away.” I didn’t bother, and neither did Yuri. We were just young men. What were they talking about? What did we want with dachas?’
Russayev confirms this. ‘Yuri was a completely honest guy. He was the first cosmonaut in space, he did so much for his country, and you should see the place that Valya lives in today. Instead of a decent dacha, it’s a hen-house. Yuri worked hard for the good of his native land, not for his own wealth.’5
Inevitably there were darker jealousies working against Gagarin’s peace of mind, and not just about the material fringe benefits that he was assumed to be enjoying. Sergei Belotserkovsky observes, ‘Even Korolev couldn’t have anticipated the avalanche of problems that would hit Gagarin when he had to represent his country abroad. He made many enemies because he behaved with more charm, and could talk more wisely and honestly, than the official Soviet heads of foreign delegations. Superiors never forgive you for something like that.’
Russayev worked hard to protect Gagarin from such dangers. ‘He always said that politics seemed hard and intricate. I told him, “Politics is a dirty business. You should stay out of it. You’ve got your country, your family. Enjoy what you’ve got, and don’t get involved in the politics.”’
Russayev remained with Gagarin until 1964, when Khrushchev’s administration was toppled by Leonid Brezhnev. After that, the KGB’s relationship with all the cosmonauts would become very different. In March 1967 Gagarin would turn to Russayev one last time for some much-needed political guidance. By then it would be too late in the day for both of them.
10
BACK TO WORK
To their mutual surprise, Russian and American space medical experts had discovered by 1963 that the hardships of flight into space amounted to no more than a collection of minor irritations: nausea, vertigo, a heavy feeling in the head, a dryness in the throat. All these symptoms were uncomfortable, but any conventionally fit human could survive a trip into orbit. From now on the emphasis was on training not just the right bodies, but the right minds and intellects for working aboard an ever more complex succession of spacecraft. Korolev, Kamanin and other senior figures in the Soviet manned rocket programme re-examined the personal files of sixteen promising cosmonaut candidates previously rejected by the medical boards in 1959. They decided to give them another chance, because their engineering and academic skills were now regarded as more important than extreme physical fitness. By May 1964 this fresh cosmonaut squad had been supplemented with ten non-pilot technical specialists from within the space community itself. They were, in fact, talented engineers from within Korolev’s OKB-1 design bureau. Meanwhile most of Gagarin’s old friends and colleagues from the original 1959 group of twenty, including Gherman Titov, Alexei Leonov, Vladimir Komarov and Andrian Nikolayev, were studying very hard to maintain their superiority over the twenty-six newcomers.1
On December 21, 1963 Colonel Gagarin was appointed Deputy Director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre, reporting directly to Nikolai Kamanin. To a large extent this new job was a means of promoting him without putting him in harm’s way. During the last three years he had fallen behind in every aspect of space training, and he had not been allowed to fly jet fighters because of the risks involved. Unlike a normal combat pilot, he was not expendable, but had to be preserved in one piece as a diplomatic and social symbol; even if he had been able to return to space-flight status at a moment’s notice, the qualities that had made him so ideal for Vostok were no longer so important. It was not enough just to be a fit young pilot with the right attitude and background. If Yuri wanted to board a spacecraft again he would have to study orbital mechanics, flight systems, computer control and space navigation, then convince his superiors to put him back on the ‘active’ flight list. Korolev certainly wanted him back in the fold, but he had long ago warned his favourite ‘little eagle’ that he would have to get back into academic training as soon as possible.
As far back as June 1962 the Chief Designer had lost patience with the endless foreign trips and had complained, ‘We’re losing Gagarin and Titov as far as space is concerned.’ He criticized Kamanin for failing to look after them properly. As so often, Kamanin deflected his own faults onto others, noting in his diary, ‘Looking into his complaints, one can see Korolev’s bitterness at having to keep his name under cover.’2
Korolev was already thinking beyond Voskhod, with plans for an ambitious new spacecraft capable of extraordinary feats: changing its orbit on command, adjusting its pitch and yaw attitude with millimetre accuracy and, most startling of all, making a rendezvous with another craft and docking with it to form a larger aggregate assembly. The new spacecraft was to be called ‘Soyuz’, meaning ‘Union’. Of course this was a direct response to America’s Apollo ship. In fact, Soyuz’s general layout, with a rear equipment section, a re-entry capsule in the middle, and a dropaway docking compartment at the front, seemed suspiciously similar to an early proposal for Apollo drawn up by the General Electric Company in a failed bid to win a NASA contract.
Soyuz was a key element in future lunar plans, but it would not be ready for another two years at least. In the meantime, Konstantin Feoktistov, one of Korolev’s most trusted engineers and a close colleague of Oleg Ivanovsky, was developing Voskhod as fast as was humanly possible, so that Korolev could fulfil his private ‘deal’ with Khrushchev. Feoktistov was also training to fly in Voskhod as the first specialist engineer-cosmonaut, along with the nine other engineers from OKB-1 who had passed the (by now much simpler) medical qualifications. Either this was Feoktistov’s way of showing faith in his own work or it was Korolev’s gesture of thanks for developing Voskhod so quickly. Feoktistov was the only person within OKB-1 who never gave ground to the Chief Designer on technical matters. In their stubborn fearlessness, the two men were remarkably alike – the world having already done its worst to them. While Korolev c
ame come close to death in a Siberian prison camp, Feoktistov fought for the Red Army and was captured by the Nazis. After a brutal interrogation, they lined him up against a ditch and opened fire. He fell onto a pile of dead bodies and hid under them until nightfall, until he could limp away. The Voskhod capsule cannot have held many terrors for him.3
As Feoktistov and other highly skilled and experienced men like him began to rise in the cosmonaut hierarchy, so the chances were lessened for Gagarin to catch up with his studies and earn another flight into space.
In between his foreign trips, Gagarin had attended cosmonaut lectures as often as possible, but on many occasions he took his seat in the classroom only to be called away at short notice for some diplomatic function or other. When Khrushchev’s administration ran into trouble from 1963, Gagarin managed to extend his academic work because he was not required to be quite so much in the limelight. In March 1964 he came to the Zhukovsky Academy in Moscow, a renowned school covering all aspects of aviation and aerodynamics, housed in the elegant Petrovsky Palace on Leningradsky Prospekt. Catherine the Great built Petrovsky Palace as a rest-stop for royal travellers, and Napoleon sheltered within its crenellated walls during the fire of Moscow in 1812. Now it was a necessary stop for cosmonauts on their way up into space. A special course had been established for the new science of space flight: the ‘Pilot-Engineer-Cosmonaut Diploma’. Candidates would have to study all aspects of space and contribute a thesis in a chosen field of specialization, which they would then defend before their tutors in written and oral sessions at the end of the course. The cosmonauts were becoming more like their American counterparts, who also undertook diploma work to qualify themselves for space flight. (In a notable thesis, NASA recruit Buzz Aldrin outlined the mathematics for orbital rendezvous, thus earning himself a secure ranking in the astronaut corps.)