by Jamie Doran
Bykovsky and Tereshkova’s double-flight was the last mission for Vostok in its current configuration. By the summer of 1963 there was no longer any need for the Soviets to compete with America’s Mercury. After launching Gordon Cooper for a 34-hour mission on May 15, 1963, NASA decided that the programme had nothing else to prove. What more could these simple one-man capsules possibly accomplish?
In fact, NASA was planning to use a new missile, the ‘Titan’, developed by the US Air Force and reluctantly hired out on licence. Titan’s fuel tank and outer skin were one and the same component, which saved weight. On the launch pad, the rocket was so flimsy that it could only stand upright if it was pressurized with inert gas, but it was so powerful in relation to its weight that it could carry a payload much heavier than the Mercury capsule.
NASA knew that its three-man Apollo moonship and its huge Saturn V rocket were years away from a first flight. So far they had only designers’ mock-ups, not real hardware, to play with. Meanwhile, an interim vehicle was developed: a cross between the simplicity of Mercury and the complexity of the emerging Apollo. ‘Gemini’ was a two-man capsule designed to mate with the Titan missile. It incorporated ejection seats and hatches that could be opened in orbit to allow for spacewalks. The design was familiar to Korolev from NASA’s open literature.
By 1963 the Gemini capsules were under construction at the McDonnell Douglas plant in California, but none of them had actually flown yet. Korolev was anxious to start work on a successor to Vostok, a larger capsule to match or even surpass NASA’s new design. If he could launch what appeared to be a multi-man craft before the first Gemini was launched, then he would gain political support for building a genuinely more powerful competitor. Certainly Khrushchev wanted him to conjure up a three-man mission as soon as possible, to trump Gemini and embarrass the Apollo effort, although the extent to which he supported the taking of risks with cosmonauts’ lives to achieve this goal cannot be judged today. Khrushchev is often blamed for pushing Korolev into hazardous decisions, but he could not possibly have decided all the technical details. He must have trusted the Chief Designer’s judgement as to whether or not a particular space project was safe.
Korolev took a risk. He decided to adapt the current Vostok hardware to carry two cosmonauts in the same ball – and even three, if they gave up their spacesuits. This new seating arrangement was purely cosmetic; it did not make the Vostok any better, just more cramped and significantly more dangerous. The bulky ejection seats had to be sacrificed in order to make room for the extra men, and if anything went wrong on the launch pad, there was no chance of escape. The new scheme was called ‘Voskhod’ (‘Sunrise’).
Despite its dangers, Voskhod would eventually prove capable of maintaining the Soviet lead, thereby adding impetus to Apollo, and also to Korolev’s ambitious plans for his own moon shot. Vasily Mishin, his eventual successor at OKB-1, insists that the Chief Designer made a man-to-man deal with Khrushchev. Korolev would develop a multi-crew programme at very short notice in return for Khrushchev’s approval for a giant new rocket, the N-1, a superbooster almost the equivalent of NASA’s Saturn V.
By 1964 the space effort was securely established on both sides of the superpower divide. In August the Politburo approved development of the N-1, as well as two competing projects generated by Korolev’s rivals in other sectors of the Soviet space industry. Ultimately this confusion, and Korolev’s early death in 1966, would doom the Soviet moon programme to failure, but in the summer of 1964 almost all the cosmonauts were gearing up for ever more elaborate flights, with real hopes of planting their feet in lunar soil. To his dismay, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin found that he was no longer qualified to join in the fun.
It was not merely that his public duties were taking him away from his real work at Star City. Back in 1961 he had done something very foolish, only a few months after his historic flight, when he took a holiday and fell from grace.
9
THE FOROS INCIDENT
Crimea is almost an island. It juts out into the Black Sea, connected to the Ukraine by two peninsulas as delicate as veins. The northernmost territories of the island are pleasant but dull. The south is a different matter. There are beautiful mountains, sun-dappled forests, sheltered beaches speckled with palms. The weather is still fine in October, and the almond trees are back in bloom by February.
The surrounding Black Sea has never been quite so private a lake as Moscow might have liked. The southern half belongs to an old enemy, Turkey. Russia bears a grudge: at Balaclava in the Crimea, Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade charged into the Valley of Death, cannons to the left of them, cannons to the right of them . . . but Russia eventually lost that war, in part because of the Turkish contribution. From Sevastopol, the Black Sea Fleet’s rusting hulks still maintain a wary watch on Turkey and its NATO allies.
At the Crimean port of Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt made their uneasy wartime accommodation with good old ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin; and in Foros, just along the coast to the west of Yalta, Nikita Khrushchev kept his dacha. Modern leaders still spend their summers here, though they can never be sure what their enemies might be planning while they are relaxing the best part of a thousand kilometres from the Kremlin. In August 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev was caught napping at his dacha high up on the cliffs, from where his view of the horizon obviously was not quite clear enough.
In its 1960s heyday, the Kissely dacha at Foros was a luxury sanatorium complex designed to accommodate only the most privileged group bookings. Warm seas, fresh meat and fruit, fine wines, perhaps a certain freedom from everyday restraints: all of these pleasures were available, and more. It was not expected that officials would record too closely how the guests at Foros enjoyed themselves.
The first cosmonauts and their associates also came to Foros for their holidays, with their wives and families in tow.
Call her ‘Anna’; perhaps there were two Annas. Anna Rumanseyeva, a young nurse, was on duty at the Kissely Sanatorium on September 14, 1961, when Gagarin and his cosmonaut comrades came to stay. She speaks with intimate knowledge of another nurse called Anna, also working at Foros when Gagarin came to stay. Maybe the two Annas are one and the same person? It is not important. Today Anna Rumanseyeva is a married woman, a respectable grandmother and professional medical practitioner.
‘There are some people in life, especially men, who are constantly looking for adventure,’ she says. ‘I would say, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was this kind of person. There was a small episode, a jump from a terrace – we can tell a short version of the story, yes? – I don’t think he wanted to hide anything from his wife, Valentina. No, he was simply showing off, being childish, just to say to her, “You were mistaken, thinking I was in there, doing something wrong.”’
The longer version of Anna’s story is more revealing.
There were twenty-eight people in the group. Yuri and Valentina arrived at the sanatorium with their second daughter Galya, nine months old and still in need of her mother’s constant attention. Gherman Titov was there; Alexei Leonov; the journalist Yaroslav Golovanov; a large crowd of cosmonauts; some technical people; even the dreaded Nikolai Kamanin, sharing a friendly drink with the boys, taking a rest from being (as Golovanov puts it) a ‘complete Stalinist bastard’.
Kamanin noticed that Yuri and Valya were not getting along. He was rude, distracted and paid her very little attention. She would sit sulking in the car while her husband strode off to see the sights or meet with local Crimean dignitaries for a drink. Sometimes he behaved so unpleasantly that Valya burst into tears. Kamanin and his wife Maria were shocked and surprised at Gagarin’s behaviour. A few days into the vacation, Kamanin took him aside. As he noted in his ever-vigilant diary, ‘I said to him, “This is the first time I’ve ever felt ashamed for you. You’ve offended Valya deeply.” Gagarin admitted he was at fault and promised to mend his ways.’1
Titov’s behaviour at Foros was hardly any better. The discipline so much admired by Kamanin in the l
ead-up to the first Vostok flight seemed largely to have evaporated by now. Kamanin felt the need to warn both his prime cosmonauts that they were ‘slipping onto a dangerous path’.
Gagarin’s conduct did not improve, and he seemed desperate for distraction. In the second week he took some of his companions out to sea in a small motor boat. The Foros staff pleaded with him: it was against the rules, he did not know the local conditions, the wind was offshore, the weather could be difficult, he should not go. But he went anyway, taking the boat far from shore and driving it recklessly, making tight turns to splash his passengers with spray. The swell picked up, just as he had been warned.2 The boat was carried over the horizon and out of sight of the shore, and a larger motorboat had to be sent out to make a rescue. When they hauled him back ashore, Gagarin went to the medical station for assistance. In the rough conditions he had turned the boat’s steering wheel so hard that his hands were bloodied and cracked. But the pain, and the unpleasantness of his foolish adventure, did not entirely divert his attention from the pretty blonde-haired nurse who attended to his blisters. ‘Yuri Alexeyevich was a very nice person, merry and cheerful,’ Anna admits. He asked whether she worked there? ‘Yes,’ she said.
The next day Titov, Kamanin and ten others of the group packed their kit bags for departure first thing the following morning. Of course, on their last day of freedom from care they celebrated hard. ‘Then, in the evening, they celebrated some more,’ Anna recalls drily. Kamanin described quiet games of cards and chess in his diary entry for that day, but this well-behaved tableau seems improbable, given the general pace of drinking and rowdiness established over the preceding fortnight.
The journalist Golovanov’s version of events on October 3 is that ‘Gagarin was a guest of the sailors in the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. I was with him and Gherman Titov. Then we returned to Foros, and the next day we set off to the local Pioneers [the Russian equivalent of boy scouts] near Yalta. Then we visited the vineyards at Massandra. Basically we came back from there quite warmed up. Yuri decided to visit a lady friend. But we have to say something about his good character . . .’ Golovanov re-directs the thrust of his story for a moment. ‘You know, his wife Valentina was quite a complicated woman. She protected Yuri from every kind of temptation which came as a result of his position . . . Anyway, Valentina discovered that the First Cosmonaut had disappeared, and she decided to find out where he was, and he showed the true colours of goodness and of a gentleman. He showed genuine nobility and jumped out of a window on the second floor.’
Anna Rumanseyeva recalls, ‘To avoid watching them playing and joking at the party, “Anna” had to leave the building. She said she went into a room and sat on a sofa. Yuri Alexeyevich – I don’t know what was on his mind. He was drunk. Perhaps he wanted to talk? I don’t think he had any other thoughts. Anyway he went into the room. He closed the door but didn’t lock it with a key. Valentina Ivanovna went into the room immediately after him. The door opens . . . Perhaps he wanted to say that she was mistaken, or perhaps he wanted to hide? I don’t know.’
After the incident Nikolai Kamanin interrogated various members of the sanatorium staff, including Anna, and decided on his own version of events:
Nurse Anna told me she had just gone up to her room to have a little rest at the end of her shift. She was lying on the bed fully dressed, reading a book, when Gagarin came into the room, locked the door behind him and tried to kiss her, saying, ‘What, are you going to cry for help?’ There was a knock on the door at that moment, and Gagarin jumped from the balcony.
Perhaps there was an unpleasant discussion between Yuri and Valentina, or perhaps she burst into the room and found no sign of him, just a breathless and dishevelled Anna. Perhaps Valentina demanded to know where her husband was, so that Anna had to tell her he was hiding on the balcony. Anna’s accounts of the scene are many and varied – necessary interpretations rather than outright falsehoods – but of course both women leaned over the balcony’s edge to take a look, as they had to, and saw Gagarin sprawled on the ground, motionless. ‘At that time, there were wild grapes growing on the balconies,’ Anna Rumanseyeva explains. ‘They may have caught him as he jumped. He hit a kerbstone with his forehead. It was not a good landing. On his return from space he landed successfully. Here, unsuccessfully . . . I learned this from “Anna”. Her name was also Anna. She told me.’
Nikolai Kamanin’s first reference to the incident in his diary is brief and to the point:
Under alcoholic intoxication, Gagarin jumped out of a window. It caused serious trauma to his face and a scar above his eyebrow. An operation was performed by naval doctors. He stayed in hospital for more than a month and missed the Communist Party Congress.3
Kamanin was among the first to reach Gagarin where he had fallen. He was not best pleased at the cosmonaut’s condition. There was so much blood that he imagined for a moment that Gagarin must have shot himself. Meanwhile Valya had run downstairs to see what had happened. She screamed at Kamanin, ‘Don’t just stand there! Help him! He’s dying!’
Immediately, doctors from a field station at Sevastopol were summoned. Meanwhile, the Foros medical personnel provided some basic first-aid; they checked for feeling in Gagarin’s limbs, then decided it was safe to put him on a folding cot, which someone brought to the scene from indoors. Then they took him inside, where the doctors applied local anaesthetic to his brow. Some of the bone in his forehead was chipped. When the Sevastopol surgeons arrived, they cleared out the fragments, effected temporary repairs and stitched the wound. Gagarin held someone’s hand throughout. He made no sound whatsoever, but his nails left livid marks, so tight was his grip.
The enormity of Gagarin’s blunder seemed to catch up with him. He looked up at the nurse Anna for a moment and she remembers him asking her just one question. ‘Will I fly again?’
She said, ‘We’ll see.’
Anna Rumanseyeva was grateful that Gagarin took the trouble even now, in his pain and discomfort, to protect ‘Anna’ from the authorities. ‘He asked for one of the sanatorium directors, and he said, “Of course you know it wasn’t her fault.” And it was so. She was moved to a different building, but she continued to work in the sanatorium.’
A special private medical facility was established in the main wing of the sanatorium. Anna and another nurse alternated their duty rota, keeping Gagarin under permanent observation, while Valentina spent many hours at his bedside. All things considered, she was remarkably friendly towards Anna. ‘She recalled how they lived before Yuri went into space. She explained how he studied hard, and she did regret that life sometimes.’
At the scene of Gagarin’s accident, the doctors feared that he might have sustained concussion injuries. Afterwards, Yuri insisted that he had never actually lost consciousness, but a strict regime of bedrest was ordered nevertheless. After three days of inertia, he was propped up on his pillows, complaining to Anna, ‘I’m fed up. I want to do something. Anna, please close the door. I want to do some hand-stands.’
‘Yuri Alexeyevich! If the doctors find out, I’ll lose my job!’
‘Don’t worry. I’m feeling healthy. I just want to do something.’ He stood on his hands, larking about and feeling fine, but bored to hell. Anna persuaded him to get back into bed. He said, ‘People will talk about this for the next hundred years. One day, when you’re a grandmother, you can tell your grandchildren how you once took care of Yuri Gagarin.’
But he knew he had done a foolish thing in jumping from the window. Perhaps this adventure was unlucky for him. Behind the jokey smile and his irrepressible self-confidence, Gagarin brooded about his future.
Nikolai Kamanin was also concerned. He was responsible for maintaining discipline among the cosmonauts. In his diary he noted:
This incident could bring a lot of trouble to me and others responsible for Gagarin. It could have had a very gloomy outcome. Gagarin was a hair’s breadth from a very nonsensical and silly death.
Three days la
ter a Chaika limousine arrived to take Gagarin to the Party Congress. He was carried on a stretcher, although he was up and about by now, and found the whole process absurd, laughing out loud. They took him to Sevastopol and put him on an aircraft to Moscow. On arrival he was not permitted to speak for too long at the Congress, or to mingle afterwards with the other delegates. The official records tell of his fully active participation, despite Kamanin’s conviction in his diary entry that Gagarin was in no fit state to attend and did not take part. Golovanov explains, ‘Actually he did turn up, but only on the fifth or sixth day after the opening of the session, and the photographer kept taking pictures of his profile so that the wound on his brow wouldn’t be seen.’ Meanwhile the newspapers put out a story to deter the curious. ‘I remember they said Yuri was holding his baby daughter when he tripped, and so that the baby didn’t get hurt, he sacrificed himself and hurt his brow. That’s how they explained the wound.’ In another version for Izvestia, Gagarin dived into the Black Sea to save his baby girl from drowning and banged his head on some rocks.
The doctors who had treated Gagarin were awarded commendations and promotions. Nikita Khrushchev was annoyed that his favourite cosmonaut could not give a proper performance at the Party Congress, but more than that, he was concerned for his young friend’s safety. The moral aspects of the drama at Foros did not seem to concern him particularly. Khrushchev’s advisor, Fyodor Burlatsky, says, ‘In spite of the Party morality, which was supposed to be very strong, everybody thought it was a funny story. Khrushchev laughed. Maybe his wife didn’t . . . But I think there were some Generals, high-level military people, who didn’t have such easy relations with Gagarin. I think they were jealous because he was so close to Khrushchev.’ These resentful rivals did not find the story quite so amusing, Burlatsky suggests. They noted Gagarin’s behaviour with distaste, and remembered it.