Starman

by Jamie Doran

  We remember Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin as the first person in history to travel into space, but there is much more to his life than this.

  He was born on March 9, 1934 in the village of Klushino in the Smolensk region, 160 kilometres to the west of Moscow. His father, Alexei Ivanovich, and his mother, Anna Timofeyevna, worked on the local collective farm, he as a storesman, she with the dairy herd. Yuri’s brother Valentin was ten years his senior, and a younger brother, Boris, was born in 1936. Despite hardships, the family was reasonably content, given the inevitable harsh conditions of Stalin’s early collectivization programme and occasional unexplained disappearances among their friends and neighbours.

  Responsibility for minding Boris and Yuri while Anna worked on the collective farm fell to the couple’s only daughter, Zoya. ‘I was seven when Yura was born, but at seven you already know how to be a nanny, so I got used to that. Of course, as a girl I was more responsible for looking after the littlest children, while Valentin helped out with the cattle on the farm.’

  Official Soviet accounts of the Gagarin family as ‘peasants’ do not take into account Anna’s origins in St Petersburg, where her father had worked as an oil-drilling technician, until the 1917 Revolution persuaded him to move his family into the country; nor the fact that she was highly literate, and never went to bed at night without first reading aloud to her children, or helping them to read for themselves.1 As for Alexei, by all accounts he was a loyal husband, a strict but much-loved father and a skilled carpenter and craftsman, although there was a period in the early 1930s when it seemed best not to advertise his talents. Joseph Stalin had a murderous obsession with kulak farmers: anyone who made a reasonable living in agriculture or as a rural tradesman. When the collectivization programme became more firmly established, Alexei was made responsible for the maintenance of farm buildings and facilities, crude though they were.

  At his side, the boy Yuri learned to tell the difference between pine and oak, maple and birch, just by the touch and smell of the wood. Even in the dark he could tell. His first experiences of materials, machinery and the technical possibilities of the world around him were bound up with wood shavings and the smooth feel of a good piece of carving; his early taste for precision, with his father’s chisels, planes and saws.

  Everything changed in the summer of 1941, when German divisions attacked the Soviet Union along a 3,000-kilometre front, making rapid advances against the Red Army. After several weeks of stunned inertia, Stalin’s response was to order his divisions to pull back at each encounter, drawing the Germans so deep into Soviet territory that (like Napoleon before them) they were caught off-guard by the first Russian winter. The brief summer of Nazi success was followed, in essence, by a two-year retreat, with appalling casualties on both sides. The Smolensk region lay directly in the Nazis’ retreating path. Gzhatsk and all its outlying villages, including Klushino, were overrun and occupied.

  At the end of October 1942, German artillery units began to fire on Klushino. ‘The front line was only six kilometres away, and shells were falling into our village every day,’ Valentin recalls. ‘The Germans must have thought the mill was a dangerous landmark, so they blew it up, along with the church. An hour later our own side launched an artillery attack in reply. It was all so pointless, because everybody must have had the same landmarks drawn on their maps.’

  Soon after this barrage, four armoured German columns passed right through the village. There was a terrible battle in the surrounding woodlands, resulting in heavy casualties for both sides, but the Russian troops came off worst, with at least 250 dead or wounded. Two days after the fighting had subsided, the older Gagarin boys, Valentin and Yuri, sneaked into the woods to see what had happened. ‘We saw a Russian colonel, badly wounded but still breathing after lying where he fell for two days and nights,’ Valentin explains. ‘The German officers went to where he was lying, in a bush, and he pretended to be blind. Some high-ranking officers tried to ask him questions, and he replied that he couldn’t hear them very well, and asked them to lean down closer. So they came closer and bent right over him, and then he blew a grenade he’d hidden behind his back. No one survived.’

  Valentin remembers Yuri’s rapid transformation after this from a grinning little imp to a serious-minded boy, going down into the cellar to find bread, potatoes, milk and vegetables, and distributing them to refugees from other districts who were trudging through the village to escape the Germans. ‘He smiled less frequently in those years, even though he was by nature a very happy child. I remember he seldom cried out at pain, or about all the terrible things around us. I think he only cried if his self-respect was hurt . . . Many of the traits of character that suited him in later years as a pilot and cosmonaut all developed around that time, during the war.’

  Now the familiar tragedy of occupation came to Klushino: men in drab uniforms bashing down doors, dragging people away to be shot. If the need arose to preserve ammunition, they gouged at people with their bayonets or herded them into sheds and burned them alive, until the aggressors were broken in turn by their own misery, and ultimately by the cruel Russian winter and the unforgiving vastness of the landscape.

  One particularly nasty piece of work, a red-haired Bavarian called ‘Albert’, collected the German vehicles’ flat batteries in order to replenish them with acid and purified water, and also fixed radios or other pieces of equipment for the big Panzer battle tanks. Albert took an immediate dislike to the Gagarin boys because of their use of broken glass. The village children did what they could, smashing bottles and scattering the bright shards of glass along the roads and dirt tracks, then hiding in the hedges to watch the German supply trucks swerving out of control as their tyres burst. Albert became convinced that Boris was one of these child-saboteurs. He came across the boy playing with Yuri, and sat down on a nearby bench to watch them. After a while he offered Boris some chocolate, putting it on the ground so that when the boy reached for it, he could stamp on his fingers. ‘The skin came right off his fingers, so of course Boris cried out,’ says Valentin. ‘Then the Devil took him – we always called him the Devil – and hanged him by his scarf on the branch of an apple tree. Mother came and found the Devil taking pictures with his camera. It’s difficult to talk about . . .’ Anna scuffled with the German, and at one point he picked up his rifle. For a terrible moment it seemed as if he was ready to shoot, but by some miracle one of his superiors shouted to him to come away. Fortunately, the Devil’s work had been sloppy, and a child’s woollen scarf did not make a very effective noose. Once Albert was safely out of the way, Anna and Alexei released Boris from the apple tree.

  Albert and his fellow soldiers had thrown the Gagarins out of their home, and the family had been forced to dig for themselves a crude shelter in the ground. Here they carried Boris’s limp body, and by sheer force of will and desperation they brought their throttled child back to life. ‘Boris stayed in the dug-out for a week, terrified to go out,’ says Valentin. He also remembers that Albert came across a rare Gagarin family luxury in the house, a wind-up gramophone, and played a particular record time and again, hoping to taunt the Gagarin family as they huddled in their rough shelter. ‘He would open the window of our house and play the military march “Red Army Advance” as loud as he could. Obviously he didn’t know what it was.’

  In the days after the terrifying drama by the apple tree, Yuri began a ceaseless vigil, watching for the times when Albert would leave the house. Whenever it was safe, he crept over to the Germans’ precious pile of tank batteries and dropped handfuls of dry soil into the accumulator caps to ruin them, or muddled up the chemical replenishment stocks, pouring them willy-nilly into the wrong compartments. Albert and his companions would get back to find their batteries looking perfectly normal, and patrolling tank drivers would arrive in the mornings to pick them up. They would shake Albert’s hand, make their Nazi salutes and be on their way, but at evenfall they would return, furious that Albert had given them dead batte
ries. Most of the tank commanders were SS officers, so their displeasure was a very serious business for everyone, German and Russian alike. ‘They were very hard to pacify,’ Valentin recalls drily.

  Humiliated by the anger of the SS officers, Albert went on the rampage, searching the village for Yuri, but he had to hunt on foot because his child-nemesis had shoved potatoes deep into the exhaust pipe of his military car, so that it would not start. The Devil stormed his way into all the dug-outs, threatening to shoot Yuri on sight. Perhaps the German commanders were impatient with Albert’s dead batteries by now, because they called him away from the district before he could finish the boy off once and for all.

  Valentin was placed in a work detail by the Germans, along with eight other lads. ‘The rules were very simple. You started work at eight in the morning, and then you could die, or else you worked until they said to finish. Even if you were halfway through chopping a tree and it was about to fall on your head, you had to stop the instant they told you, or else you’d feel a stick or a rifle butt.’ As the Germans began to dig in for the winter, pretty much trying to survive, like the villagers, occasional confusions developed as to who was the enemy, who the aggressor. There was one particularly large communal dug-out, capable of supporting three or four hundred people, but whether this was a German or a Russian construction nobody could say, since it was built and used by both sides at once. Valentin recalls, ‘Somebody’s aircraft attacked it one morning, dropping a clutch of bombs onto it – a tonne and a half each, the Germans reckoned. No one knew for sure how many were killed.’

  During the spring of 1943, Valentin and Zoya were abducted by SS guards and herded onto a ‘children’s train’ for deportation to Germany. They were taken first to Gdansk, in Poland, where they worked in adjoining labour camps. ‘I had to do the washing for hundreds of Germans each week,’ Zoya says. ‘We lived as best we could, but they were the proprietors and we were the slaves. They could have done anything they liked to us – killed us, or let us live. We were worn down with fear all the time, and we looked like ragged Cinderellas, all skin and bone, with our elbows sticking out. We had no shoes, and occasionally found soldier’s boots that were too big for us . . . The Germans put us in ruined houses after they’d expelled the people already living in them.’ Zoya does not like to dwell on her experiences as a 15-year-old girl hauled away by enemies.

  In the chaos of the Germans’ long retreat from Russia, the SS use of trains for prisoners was considered something of a luxury by the ordinary troops. The ‘children’s trains’ running through Poland were commandeered or otherwise diverted from their original course. Valentin and Zoya escaped their camps and spent two weeks hiding in the woods, waiting for Russian troops to rescue them. ‘When they actually came, we hoped they would let us go home,’ Zoya recalls, ‘but they said we must stay with the Russian army as volunteers.’ Zoya was sent to look after horses in a cavalry brigade and, by a bitter stroke of irony, followed them deep into Germany, where the children’s train was supposed to have taken her in the first place. By now, Valentin was considered old enough for front-line service. He quickly learned how to handle an anti-tank grenade launcher and other heavy weapons.

  Meanwhile, Alexei and Anna Gagarin thought their two eldest children were dead. Alexei, never a very fit man, was ulcerated with grief and hunger, and was seriously injured when the Germans beat him up when he refused to work for them. He spent the rest of the war in a crude hospital, first as a patient, then as an orderly. Anna spent some time there too, with her left leg badly gashed after a German sergeant, ‘Bruno’, had flailed at her with a scythe. Yuri threw clods of earth in Bruno’s eyes to drive him away.

  The Germans were driven out of Klushino at last on March 9, 1944. Alexei, limping but defiant, showed the incoming Russian forces where the fleeing Nazis had buried mines in the surrounding roads and dirt tracks. Anna recovered from her wound, and struggled to look after Boris and Yuri, although there was almost no food of any kind to be had. Only towards the end of 1945 did she discover that Valentin and Zoya were still alive. They came home at last, grown-up now.

  Lydia Obukhova, a writer who came to know the Gagarins well during the 1960s, commented in 1978:

  Valentin was still a boy, and Zoya was a young and charming lass, defenceless in the face of misfortunes that might befall her far from home. Her mother’s grief was boundless, but her husband said to her, ‘Remember, Boris and Yuri still need you.’ You’d have thought the war, the occupation, the fearful Germans billeted in the Gagarins’ home, would have mutilated for ever those children’s personalities, but their mother and father did everything to prevent this. They never showed even a trace of servility to the enemy. It follows that the children showed none either.2

  After the war, the Gagarins moved to nearby Gzhatsk and built a simple new home, using the slats and beams from the wreckage of their old house as raw material. The original house had been very modest anyway, consisting only of a kitchen and two small adjoining rooms. ‘Of course life was hard after the war,’ Zoya explains. ‘Everything from Brest up to Moscow was completely destroyed, all the cattle taken away, the houses in ruins. There were only two houses left in our village.’ The people of Gzhatsk built a school, and a young woman, Yelena Alexandrovna, volunteered to run it, making the best of a blackboard with no chalk and a classroom with no books. Yuri and Boris learned to read from an old Russian military manual left behind by departing troops. For geography they relied on war maps rescued from the burned-out cabins of army trucks and tanks.

  Yelena was not on her own at the school for long. In 1946, Lev Mikhailovich Bespavlov joined the school to teach maths and physics. A new father figure had now arrived in Yuri’s life. Speaking to an Australian journalist in 1961, Yuri described Bespavlov as ‘a wizard, specially when he’d fill up a bottle with water, and seal it, then take it out into the freezing air outside, so that the water would turn to ice and expand, shattering the bottle with a satisfying bang. Bespavlov could float pins on water, and make electricity by combing his hair.’3 Perhaps the greater part of his appeal lay in the faded airman’s tunic he sported, for in the chaos and terror of the war years, Yuri had encountered one thing so wonderful, so magical, that it seemed for a moment to transcend the horror all around – an aircraft; and even when this piece of magic had been dismembered and taken away, its memory remained.

  There had been a dogfight, two Soviet ‘Yak’ fighters, two German Messerschmitts, with the score levelling out at one-all. The stricken Yak came down in a patch of marshland half a kilometre outside the village. One of its landing legs buckled on impact, and the propeller was twisted completely out of shape. The ground was soft, which made for a very poor landing, and although the pilot survived, he grazed his leg quite badly. Immediately, a crowd of villagers ran across to help him. They put a bandage on his injured leg, offered him a drink of milk and fed him some pieces of dried bacon.

  After a while another Russian aircraft, a Polikarpov PO-2, came down safely in an adjacent clover field with firmer ground. Airmen called the PO-2 a ‘cornplanter’, because its lightweight plywood construction enabled it to make landings in rough fields. Today its apparent ‘rescue’ mission was somewhat double-edged; the PO-2 crewman was supposed to check on the health of the downed Yak pilot, then ensure that his fighter did not fall into German hands, if necessary by destroying it.

  Yuri watched all of this, mesmerized. According to Valentin, ‘Some of the older boys in the village were sent into the clover field with whatever dregs of petrol they could scavenge, to refuel the PO-2. The pilot had some bars of chocolate, which he gave to Yuri. He divided them among several other boys, accidentally keeping none for himself, obviously much more interested in the planes.’

  As the light faded, the two pilots were invited to shelter in a dug-out, but chose instead to spend the night huddled near the PO-2 to keep watch over it. They tried to keep guard throughout the night. Inevitably, cold and bruised, they fell asleep and awoke e
arly next morning to find Yuri staring at them. In the light of day, the damaged Yak fighter did not really seem worth guarding any more, so the pilots set fire to it, then struggled back over the fields to the PO-2, the injured pilot leaning on the other’s shoulder for support. They coaxed the ‘cornplanter’ into the sky without too much trouble and flew away, while Yuri watched, fascinated, as a tall column of smoke billowed from the wreck they had left behind.

  Now the boy’s teacher, Lev Bespavlov, carried with him some of that special magic in his uniform, which he had rightfully earned as a gunner and radio operator in the Red Army Air Force. Yuri looked up to him, listened and learned.

  Yelena recalls Yuri being a good pupil: mischievous but honourable. ‘Like all children of that age, he did some naughty things, but if ever we were asking the pupils, “Who did it?”, Yuri would always say, “It was me, I won’t do it again.” And he was very vivid. Recalling those years, I would say he was a very decent and responsive boy. When we learned about his flight into space we immediately remembered his very nice smile. He preserved the same smile for the rest of his life – the same one he had when he was a boy.’ Yelena remembers placing Yuri at the front of the class for a few days, where she could keep an eye on him. ‘He wasn’t really the sort of boy you could take your eye off for too long. Even right under my nose, he managed to find trouble. He pulled all the nails out of the bench at the front, so that when he and the other children sat on it, the whole thing collapsed.’ But Yelena could not stay annoyed for long. She remembers a tiny little girl, Anna, who kept getting trampled or left behind when the other children stampeded about the place. Yuri became quite protective of her; carried Anna’s satchel after school and walked her home, to show the others that she should not be picked on.