by Jamie Doran
Citizen Danilchenko asks you to consider helping to obtain a reservation for his daughter at an invalid’s residential home, since she is mentally unwell . . .
Yegupov pulls out other typical examples from the archive. ‘Here’s a letter asking for better housing for the Kurdyumov family, nine people living in a single room, sixteen metres square, in an old house with damp running down the walls. Here’s another request for better housing from citizen Morazova, and meanwhile she has a child with an inborn heart deficiency; or this one, where prisoner Yakutin says he was wrongly convicted, and requests the verdict to be cancelled.’ Somehow Gagarin managed to answer almost all the letters, showing great concern, and even folding a particularly heart-breaking example into his wallet as a spur to his conscience. He was, however, entirely unmoved by some of the pleas he received:
Dear Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin,
Please allow me to congratulate you on your great feat. Please allow me also to ask a great favour on behalf of the distilling firm of Richter & Co., and that is to be so kind as to allow us to use your well-known and respected name for a new product, ‘Astronaut Gagarin Vodka’.
‘Why did you have to show me this?’ he complained to Yegupov. ‘I’ve wasted three minutes on reading it.’ Then he spent a good half-hour phrasing a careful and warm reply to a 15-year-old boy from Canada who had politely written in for career advice.
As often as not, people would actually accost the First Cosmonaut in person with their pleas for help. Alexei Leonov says that whenever Gagarin visited his family in Gzhatsk, he would find various local dignitaries waiting for him in his parents’ house with requests for political favours. ‘He did a lot for his old neighbours and the people of Smolensk. Gzhatsk was originally an old-fashioned merchants’ town, but after 1961 it started to bloom, and it turned into a modern, highly developed city.’ Gagarin’s name and reputation stimulated a drastic change of fortune for the entire region.
But there was one notable occasion when Gagarin refused point-blank to help. A mother wrote to him saying that her son was in trouble for cutting down a fir tree in a forbidden area at Christmas time. Gagarin looked into the business, found out that it had probably been more than one tree and that the young man was selling them off for profit. He recommended the man be sacked from his job. According to his driver, Gagarin became pretty angry and said, ‘What happens if everyone goes and cuts down “just one” fir tree? Where are we going to live then? Any day now, we won’t have anything left.’
Leonov puts this (and other similar incidents) down to Gagarin’s perceptions of the earth from space. ‘After his flight he was always saying how special the world is, and how we had to be very careful not to break it.’ This is a common enough truism by modern standards, taught to all of us in school, but what must it have been like for the very first man in space to discover it for himself? In April 1961 Gagarin was the only human being among three billion who had actually seen the world as a tiny blue ball drifting through the infinite cosmic darkness.
So the tree-cutter lost his job at Gagarin’s specific request, but more often he was inclined to help his petitioners by appealing to higher authorities. ‘You could hardly find a single man who wouldn’t assist him if he asked for it. Who could refuse him?’ says Yegupov.
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev could.
In his first months in office, Brezhnev was preoccupied with achieving dominance over his co-conspirator Alexei Kosygin. Brezhnev’s attitude towards Korolev was similar to Khruschev’s: an insistence on orbital ‘firsts’, accompanied by a hazy lack of interest in the exact technical details. However, the scheduled mission of Voskhod II did interest Brezhnev, because it promised a major new triumph: the first spacewalk, enabled by a flexible airlock attached to the re-entry ball’s flank. Korolev was just as keen to try out this new concept. In 1962 he prepared Leonov, who was one of the prime candidates for the first walk, with a suitable pep-talk. ‘He told me that any sailor has to learn to swim, and each cosmonaut has to know how to swim and do construction work outside his vehicle.’
On February 23, 1965, Korolev launched an unmanned test vehicle with the new airlock attached. The mission ended badly when the capsule broke up during re-entry, as a result of poor command signalling from the ground. A few days later, an air-drop of the capsule from a plane also failed because the parachute did not open. Oleg Ivanovsky remembers Korolev saying in disgust, ‘I’m sick of flying under rags.’ He hated parachutes and always wished that he could design a rigid rotor system, or some other aerodynamic device to replace them. Perhaps it was a mercy that he never lived to see a much more terrible parachute failure in April 1967: a failure that might easily have claimed the life of Yuri Gagarin . . .
The Voskhod II mission took off on March 18, 1965 with wonderful timing, ahead of NASA’s first Gemini mission by just six days. This time there were only two crewmen in the cabin, to make room for their bulky spacesuits. Pavel Belyayev remained inside, while his co-pilot Alexei Leonov squeezed into the flexible airlock and pushed himself out of the capsule. For ten minutes he enjoyed the exhilarating sensation of spacewalking, and then began to pull himself back into the ship – only to discover that his suit, at full pressure, had ballooned outwards, so that he could no longer fit into the airlock. Extremely exhausted by his efforts, Leonov had to let some of the air out of his suit to collapse it, so that he could squeeze back aboard.
Then, prior to coming home the next day, Belyayev saw that the ship’s attitude was incorrect for the braking burn, and he shut down the automatic guidance systems before they could make matters any worse. With help from Korolev and ground control, he and Leonov had to ignite the braking motors manually on the next orbit, displacing their eventual landing site by 2,000 kilometres. The capsule descended onto snow-covered wilderness near Perm, alongside the very northernmost reaches of the Volga. It smashed into a dense cluster of fir trees and was wedged several metres off the ground between two sturdy trunks. Meanwhile the recovery teams were 2,000 kilometres away, in the zone where they had expected the capsule to come down. The cosmonauts had to spend a restless, frozen night waiting to be picked up. They pushed open the capsule’s hatch but dared not climb down from their precarious perch, because a pack of wolves was howling somewhere very nearby in the darkness.5
These difficulties were not mentioned in the Soviet press reports, and the mission was a great propaganda triumph all around the world, particularly after Yuri Mazzhorin had responded to a stern phone call from Alexei Kosygin’s office. ‘They said that not a single word about the landing in Perm should appear in the media. I had
no idea what that region looked like, but I had to go to all the television stations and make sure you couldn’t identify Perm in any of their news footage.’ Subterfuge aside, the fact remains that Alexei Leonov walked in space well ahead of his American rivals. The London Evening Standard ran an article about the US astronauts Young and Grissom, gearing up for the first Gemini shot, with the headline ‘follow that cab!’, while The Times described Leonov’s adventure as ‘a fantastic moment in history’. Once again NASA had been trumped. Leonov’s spacewalking rival, Ed White, did not get his own chance to catch up until the second Gemini mission on June 3, nearly three months after Voskhod II’s flight.
An accomplished artist, Leonov set about designing a commemorative postage stamp showing his spacewalk, and spent hours happily chatting with Gagarin about the differences each man had observed in the curvature of the earth. ‘My view was much steeper, much rounder than Gagarin had reported, and it worried me, but then we realized that Voskhod’s maximum orbital altitude was 500 kilometres, and Vostok’s 250 kilometres, so I was much higher. You see, everything has a sensible physical explanation.’ It was the infernal rules of secrecy that made no sense. Leonov’s innocent stamp designs had to be vetted by the KGB propaganda experts. ‘Everything was so secret – they were all civil servants, you see. I drew a completely different spacecraft that wasn’t anything like [the one tha
t had really flown] and then they were satisfied.’
In the wake of this more-or-less successful mission, Voskhod III was scheduled to coincide with the Party Congress of March 1966. Cosmonauts Georgi Shonin and Boris Volynov began training for an ambitious rendezvous with an unmanned target vehicle. Even the journalist Yaroslav Golovanov was recruited for forthcoming Voskhod missions, along with two other writers, after Korolev had expressed frustration at the cosmonauts’ rather prosaic descriptions of space flight.
On January 14, 1966 Korolev was in the Kremlin Hospital for a supposedly routine intestinal operation. Weakened by years of ill-health and overwork, and by the great damage inflicted during his imprisonment in a Siberian labour camp from 1938 to 1940, his body was far more fragile than the doctors had suspected. Internal bleeding proved difficult to control, and two huge tumours had developed in his abdomen. After a lengthy and fraught operation, Korolev’s heart gave out and he died.
Gagarin was furious that the privileged and well-rewarded doctors had not been able to save his mentor and friend. Sergei Belotserkovsky remembers him raging, ‘How can they treat someone so respected in such a mediocre and irresponsible way!’ In fact, Yuri had always said that he did not trust the Kremlin’s special hospital for the élite. In June 1964 Valentina Tereshkova had been assigned a room there so that she could give birth to her baby (seven months after her marriage to Andrian Nikolayev). Gagarin’s barber friend Igor Khoklov remembers his carefully reasoned distrust. ‘He said, “None of those old bosses in the Politburo are capable of fathering babies any more. The Kremlin hospital delivers maybe one or two a month. We must send Valentina to an ordinary people’s hospital where they deliver babies on a conveyor belt, and have the experience to know what they’re doing.” He had a very good relationship with Tereshkova, by the way.’ Gagarin’s wishes were granted and the Kremlin hospital lost its star female guest. Now, in the bleak and bitter-cold January of 1966, Gagarin was deeply distressed by Korolev’s death, and angry.
Throughout all his years working to give the Soviets a lead in space, Korolev had never discussed his arrest, torture, beatings and imprisonment under the old Stalinist regime. People thought of him as a burly man, built like a bear, but the truth was that his body was made rigid by countless ancient injuries. He could not turn his neck, but had to swivel his upper torso to look people in the eye; nor could he open his jaws wide enough to laugh out loud.
Two days before he was scheduled for surgery he was resting at his home in the Ostankino district of Moscow. Gagarin and Leonov came to visit him with several other colleagues, and at the end of the evening, just as most of the visitors were putting on their greatcoats to leave, Korolev said to his two favourite cosmonauts, ‘Don’t go just yet. I want to talk.’ So his wife Nina fetched some more food and drink, and for four hours, well into the early hours of the morning, Korolev told the story of his early life – a story that Leonov has never forgotten. ‘He told us how he was arrested, taken away and beaten. When he asked for a glass of water, they smashed him in the face with the water jug . . . They demanded a list of so-called traitors and saboteurs [in the early rocket programme] and he could only reply that he had no such list.’ Korolev described how he saw, through puffy eyes, that his captors had pushed a piece of paper between his bruised fingers for him to sign; how they beat him again, and sentenced him to ten years’ hard labour in Siberia. ‘Yuri and I were both struck by the unexpected parts of his story,’ says Leonov.
From a living death in Siberia, Korolev was recalled to Moscow when an old ally of his, the renowned aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, requested him for war work. He would be assigned to a less harsh special prison facility for engineers, which included design offices and better living conditions.6 In fact, Tupolev was himself a prisoner. But no special arrangements were made to transport Korolev to Moscow, and he had to improvise. Cold beyond endurance and hallucinating with hunger, he found a hot loaf of bread on the ground one day, apparently dropped from a passing truck. ‘It seemed like a miracle,’ he told Gagarin and Leonov. He worked as a labourer and shoe repairer to earn his passage back to Moscow by boat and rail. His teeth were now loose and bleeding, because he had not eaten fresh fruit or vegetables in a year. Trudging along a dirt track one day, he collapsed. An old man rubbed herbs on his gums and propped his body to face the feeble sun, but he collapsed again. As Leonov vividly recalls, ‘He told us he could see something fluttering. It was a butterfly, something to remind him of life.’
It seems that after so many years’ silence the ailing Chief Designer now wanted to unburden himself to his two favourite young friends. The two cosmonauts were deeply affected by what they heard. Leonov says, ‘This was the first time that Korolev had ever talked about his imprisonment in the Gulag, since these stories are usually kept secret . . . We began to realize there was something wrong with our country . . . On our way home, Yuri couldn’t stop questioning: how could it be that such unique people like Korolev had been subjected to repression? It was so obvious that Korolev was a national treasure.’
After the funeral Gagarin insisted on spending the night at Korolev’s house. According to Yaroslav Golovanov, ‘Gagarin said, “I won’t feel right until I’ve taken Korolev’s ashes to the moon.” At the crematorium he asked cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov to scatter some of Korolev’s ashes on the next space flight, during the descent, although, according to Orthodox custom, you must not divide a person’s ashes.’ It is not clear whether any ashes were actually taken into space, but Golovanov insists that several handfuls went missing from the crematorium. ‘Komarov did scatter some of them after Korolev’s death. Gagarin and Leonov also had some ashes.’
Korolev’s death marked a turning point for Gagarin. He became totally recommitted to flying in space, and even to flying to the moon. His self-discipline returned, and he worked on his diploma with passionate energy. He impressed Kamanin, who allowed him to train as back-up for the first Soyuz mission. All being well, the back-up position would automatically entitle Gagarin to the second Soyuz flight. But this put him in direct conflict with another cosmonaut, who believed that the assignment belonged to him, not to Gagarin. The noted space historian James Oberg says, ‘This tension between Gagarin and one or two of the cosmonauts isn’t written about very much, perhaps because people don’t like to talk about it. Basically Gagarin pulled rank.’7
11
FALLING TO EARTH
Most of the cosmonauts got on well with Gagarin, appreciated his humour and generosity of spirit, enjoyed drinking and partying with him and deferred to him as the undisputed leader of their cause. Many were anxious to see him back in space, but one cosmonaut in particular felt differently.
Georgi Timofeyevich Beregovoi, born in April 1921, was one of the oldest cosmonauts, recruited in 1963 when the list of ‘near-misses’ among the original 1959 candidates was re-evaluated. Among all the cosmonauts, only he and Pavel Belyayev (Leonov’s commander on the Voskhod II mission) could claim the greatest distinction for a pilot: experience in real aerial combat. Beregovoi flew 185 missions against the Germans during the war, and was awarded the much-prized title Hero of the Soviet Union. During the 1950s he served as a test pilot, so when he signed up for cosmonaut training he believed he was well qualified. In 1964, quite soon after his selection, he gained a back-up posting for the planned Voskhod III mission and trained with every confidence that he would fly whatever mission came next. Nikolai Kamanin felt at ease with a fellow war veteran. He sponsored Beregovoi’s recruitment and gave him every chance to succeed.
After Korolev’s death, his deputy Vasily Mishin took over the administration of OKB-1. He was good-natured and eager, but he lacked the political influence and raw cunning of his predecessor.1 One way and another, the Voskhod III schedule slipped so badly that it had to be cancelled. Mishin decided to focus OKB-1’s energies on Soyuz and on the further, very troubled development of the large moon booster, the N-1.
Beregovoi now expected his back-up sta
tus to be shuffled smoothly along to the next mission, the first manned test of the new Soyuz configuration. At this point Gagarin stepped in and claimed that posting for himself, making every possible use of his rank as Deputy Director of Cosmonaut Training to do so. Beregovoi made his annoyance crystal-clear to anyone who would listen, and eventually stormed into Gagarin’s office at Star City for a direct confrontation. Gagarin’s driver Fyodor Dyemchuk walked into the office at the wrong moment and overheard the row. ‘The other man was the superior in years, but he hadn’t flown into space yet. He made indecent remarks about Gagarin, and said he was too young to be a proper Hero of the Soviet Union and he’d become conceited. He called Gagarin an upstart, and Gagarin replied, “While I’m in charge, you’ll never fly in space.” They argued for quite a while.’
There seems to have been some fault on both sides. Beregovoi was not automatically entitled to a Soyuz mission, despite what he may have thought. His training on the very different Voskhod hardware was completely inappropriate for the new ship, and he had no right to take out his run of bad luck on Gagarin, just because the Voskhod series had been brought to a close before he could fly. Judging from the fact that he rose to become Head of Star City in 1972, Beregovoi was an ambitious man.
After this row Dyemchuk reported fearfully to his master that some other cosmonauts and senior staff in the Star City compound had asked to use Gagarin’s official car, and Dyemchuk, as a humble driver, had not been able to refuse them. ‘He hit the car with his fist and said, “We have one commander here, and he’s the only person who can order the car!” Apart from him, no one could reserve it. He showed his emotions and a small dent was left in the bonnet.’ Dyemchuk is convinced that this outburst was entirely out of character for Gagarin, the result of stress rather than vanity.
