Starman

by Jamie Doran

  With every intention of making his mark at Zhukovsky, Gagarin selected for his thesis nothing less than the holy grail of manned space flight: a practical design for a reusable winged space plane. Alexei Leonov, who studied with him for several months, recalls, ‘He was very strict with himself. I was always amazed how conscientious he was about his studies, how thoroughly and painstakingly he prepared his work, and how hard he tried to keep up with the others. Somebody who was full of airs and graces wouldn’t have put himself through all that.’

  Obviously a spaceship with wings could come home in an orderly fashion, landing at an airbase instead of falling down into a ploughed field or splashing into the sea. The wings would slow and control the final descent, so that the ship could touch down softly on wheels. Unlike the clumsy space capsules, a winged craft could be refurbished for another flight. The difficulty was to balance the aerodynamic usefulness of wings with the need for bulky re-entry heat-shielding. NASA had already started work on so-called ‘lifting bodies’, experimental craft that were neither capsules nor aircraft but something in between. They were dropped at great altitude from beneath the wings of B-52 bombers, and most of them landed successfully. However, it was impossible to send them into space because the addition of rocket engines and fuel tanks would have made them too heavy; and there was the intractable problem of the heat-shielding. At that time no sufficiently strong and lightweight material seemed capable of protecting the lifting body’s stubby wings against melting away during re-entry. The ‘ablative’ heat-shielding of conventional capsules was thick and heavy, and it burned away irretrievably, leaving terrible scars on the capsule’s flanks. The bulky resins and fibres used for the shields were completely unsuitable for wings.

  In all, the spaceplane presented the most complex technical challenge. Even the current NASA space shuttle is a flawed design, consisting as it does of heavy components and throwaway tanks, with clumsy ceramic tiles to protect it against the heat. The search is still on for a genuinely efficient design. For Gagarin to research into these issues in the mid-1960s was proof of his great seriousness in attempting to re-qualify for space flight. Today few people remember his engineering skills; only his simple farmboy’s smile. His painstaking and disciplined diploma work at the Zhukovsky Academy has been entirely forgotten except by his closest colleagues – in particular Sergei Belotserkovsky, the Deputy Director at Zhukovsky and the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the cosmonauts’ academic skills in space flight and orbital dynamics (while Kamanin and the specialists at Star City taught them how to operate the hardware).

  One of Gagarin’s most significant achievements was to understand that, for safety reasons, his spaceplane had to be capable of an unpowered landing. Some of his tutors insisted that this was not technically possible. Gagarin argued that the spaceplane was useless if it could not make a ‘deadstick’ descent. After all, how could the crew get back if their engines failed? Just as for the Vostok capsules, a small braking motor should be enough to nudge the spaceplane out of orbit, he insisted; after that, it should be capable of reaching the ground without engines. His first solution was to bring the plane down by parachute, but of course that idea missed the point. Eventually he decided that it should glide to its landing. NASA’s modern shuttles do precisely that, with no use of engines during their final approaches.

  In some crucial aspects, Gagarin’s thinking on the spaceplane concept outstripped that of his tutors; but on matters of strict aerodynamic science they pushed him hard. How would his spaceplane react to tail winds, head winds and cross winds? What about sudden, brief gusts? Had he calculated the drastic change of airflow as the ship neared the ground? Time and again Gagarin ran complicated mathematical simulations on primitive analogue computers (alongside his friend and collaborator Andrian Nikolayev), attempting to mate the airflow numbers to his ideal design. He revelled in the cut-and-thrust arguments with his tutors and collaborators, constantly striving to improve his ideas.4

  Gagarin’s spaceplane work was considered top-secret – in fact, all of the diploma work conducted at Zhukovsky was highly classified. Just as for Korolev, Belotserkovsky’s identity was a secret and he was never acknowledged in public. He was not even allowed to take snapshots of his favourite pupils, in case Western spies should identify them. Even so, he used a hidden camera to obtain his keepsakes. ‘We hid all the films in a safe, and developed them a long time later. I don’t think we did anything wrong. Thanks to our unofficial action, we have an important and historical collection of photographs today.’

  Gagarin became so absorbed in his work that he spent long periods staying at the Academy’s hostel, instead of with Valya and the children. But the pursuit of academic excellence was not the only thing keeping him away from home.

  Gagarin also spent a good deal of time at the Yunost Hotel, just outside the western perimeter of Moscow’s Garden Ring road. The Yunost was associated with the official communist youth movement, ‘Komsomol’. Gagarin was always welcome there, and room 709 on the seventh floor was kept in reserve for him, funded on a semi-permanent retainer by the Komsomol. On frequent occasions, banquets and receptions would be held at the Yunost for Komsomol delegations visiting Moscow from other republics in the Union, and Gagarin would be expected to attend and give rousing speeches. Often the parties would drag on until the early hours of the morning, at which point it seemed best for Gagarin to sleep at the Yunost, instead of struggling home through the freezing Moscow nights. In the relative informality and privacy of the hotel, he could relax and entertain his friends. An excellent billiards player, he seldom lost, except on one notorious occasion when he surrendered a game to ‘Nona’, a young chess champion noted for her attractive appearance. Gagarin’s male companions could not understand how he could bear the humiliation of losing to a girl, but he had another game in mind.

  Gagarin was a fit and handsome young man, who also happened to be the most famous and desired star in the world, with the possible exception of the ‘fab four’ young lads of the Beatles pop group; but it would be a mistake to think of him as a heartless womanizer. He was neither more nor less a sexual adventurer than any other superstar might have been in his circumstances. By all accounts, he loved Valya and was utterly devoted to his two little children. But Valya was not content for her husband to take his wedding vows casually. A single act of adultery was sufficient to upset her, let alone the ‘several’ that must certainly have occurred throughout the couple’s married life.

  On one occasion Valya decided to visit her errant partner at the Yunost Hotel. Gagarin’s favourite barber at the Yunost, Igor Khoklov, blames lax security at the front desk for what happened next. ‘It was a different era in those days. Any woman would have jumped on Gagarin, walked with him, slept with him, even. He had a few opportunities at the Yunost. After a party when he was tipsy, a leading sportswoman, a ski champion, took an interest in him. He didn’t seduce her, she seduced him, but around six o’clock his wife arrived. Perhaps she’d had some kind of premonition? I would say the military police [at the front desk] were at fault, because they could easily have telephoned up to Yura’s room to warn him, but they didn’t. And she created an uproar, she really tore Gagarin apart. The other girl just picked up her clothes and ran. I’d say that sportswoman really cost Gagarin dear.’

  For Valya, this must have seemed all too familiar – the bang on the door, the arguments, the wounds to her husband’s face (this time caused by her own nails, rather than by a jump from a balcony). Next morning Khoklov had to disguise the scratches on Gagarin’s cheeks prior to a meeting with Khrushchev. Khoklov recalls, ‘I did his make-up. I was licking his wounds, so to speak. He was the kind of a man who had a taste for women, but I wouldn’t say he was throwing himself around left and right. Valentina loved her husband very much, but because of all the things that had happened, she was very jealous. Plus the fact that she caught him.’

  Gherman Titov says, ‘It was very difficult for Yura’s wife
to get used to the fact that he didn’t really belong to her any more.’

  One of the restraining influences on Gagarin’s behaviour after Foros was the bodyguard assigned to him, on Khrushchev’s orders – a tall, sour-faced man nicknamed the ‘polecat’, who immediately dampened the mood of any room he walked into, although he was apparently very nice, once one got to know him. By 1962 Gagarin had persuaded Khrushchev to withdraw the guard, but he had merely replaced him with three rather poorly disguised undercover followers. Khoklov says, ‘If Gagarin liked a woman he couldn’t go with her. You can’t put the bodyguards in the same bed. If you want a drink, it’s just the same. You have to buy a drink for the bodyguards.’

  The other major factor was sheer pressure of work, not only at Zhukovsky but also at Star City, and during official ceremonial and propaganda functions. These were reduced in the Brezhnev era but by no means eliminated. Khoklov recalls Gagarin arriving for a haircut one day and commenting about a drunken tramp lying on the street outside, who had soiled his trousers. Exasperated by his relentless schedule, Gagarin joked bitterly, ‘That’s an intelligent fellow over there. He finds an opportunity to rest and do all the other stuff at the same time.’

  Igor Khoklov was often despatched to the Kremlin to cut Khrushchev’s hair. The wily old barber retains an unflattering memory of the endless KGB staffers and secret policemen he encountered in those days. ‘I was in the room with Khrushchev and his special bodyguard, who kept his hand in his pocket where he hid his gun. I was thinking, “Who’s faster, you with your gun or me with my razor?” A senior manager then came in, a good bloke, Armenian I think. He saw the guard and said, “We trust the barber. With Igor here, a guard isn’t needed.” So the guard had to go and wait outside the door.’

  And it wasn’t Igor the barber, but Khrushchev’s closest political colleagues who eventually cut his throat.

  Khrushchev demonstrated that the Soviet Union was a modern technological nation, a powerful player on the world stage, with its missiles, space rockets, satellites, computers, jet planes, aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons. His weak spot – as for so many Russian leaders before or since – was providing the people back home with the most basic necessity of life: food. In the autumn of 1963 he was forced into an embarrassing series of emergency measures, buying wheat from America to make up for the poor harvests yielded by his over-ambitious and under-planned ‘Virgin Lands’ grain-planting programme.

  In a similar manner to President Kennedy in the US, Khrushchev looked to the glamour of space to divert attention from his failures. On October 12, 1964, Korolev made good on his promise, successfully launching Voskhod I with three crewmen aboard. Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov were denied ejection seats in the cramped cabin, and there was not even room for them to wear spacesuits. Instead, they had to make do with simple cotton coveralls. However, the Voskhod incorporated some useful improvements on the old Vostok design. There was a back-up retro-rocket pod at the front of the craft, just in case the primary unit failed, and the re-entry capsule had a slightly flattened underside with a cluster of small rockets to soften its impact with the ground, thereby allowing the crew to stay aboard all the way to touchdown. Soviet spokesmen proudly heralded this new ‘soft-landing’ concept, obviously forgetting all the stories they had told about Gagarin’s very different homecoming technique in 1961.

  Voskhod I flew too late to benefit Khrushchev. The capsule came home on October 13, and on the very next day the First Secretary was deposed. In fact, he was called away from his retreat at Foros even as the flight was in progress. In Moscow a special meeting of the Politburo informed him, much to his surprise, that he had just resigned due to age and increasing ill-health. Khrushchev’s deputy Leonid Brezhnev took advantage of the unresolved grain crisis to take over as First Secretary. Khrushchev’s faithful aide Fyodor Burlatsky says today, ‘Never mind the coup which happened recently during Gorbachev’s time. This was a real coup, prepared by the KGB and Brezhnev against Khrushchev and against anti-Stalinism.’

  Almost immediately Gagarin’s status was affected. His foreign trips were curtailed and his lines of communication with the Kremlin severed. Brezhnev did not care to be reminded of his predecessor’s space triumphs. Burlatsky, who knew Gagarin very well, noticed an immediate change in the young cosmonaut’s mood. ‘I’m sure that he became unhappy. It wasn’t because he disliked Brezhnev. No, quite the opposite, it was because Brezhnev regarded him as a representative around the world for Khrushchev. Immediately Gagarin lost his status, his position. I had the feeling he didn’t know what to do with himself. Politically he represented the hand of peace extended from the Soviet Union to the West, but Brezhnev started up the arms race again, and he didn’t need people like Gagarin.’ Burlatsky stresses the perpetual truism of political life in Russia. ‘It’s not so important who’s who, but who belongs to whom. Gagarin belonged to Khrushchev, and that was enough to finish his career in Brezhnev’s time.’

  Burlatsky is not alone in his opinion that the new hard-line regime ‘affected Gagarin’s life in such a way that he lost everything, and he had to try and find himself again in some kind of new experience. Drink, perhaps. He was devastated. One day he was a representative of his country, and the next, a simple pilot without any position. Somebody once wrote, “The greatest unhappiness is to have known happiness before.” Brezhnev and his Politburo friends took that happiness away, and they were guilty of everything that happened to Gagarin afterwards.’

  Gagarin’s personal driver Fyodor Dyemchuk sums up the political fall-out for the First Cosmonaut in the most straightforward way. He remembers that in the Khrushchev days Gagarin’s frequent trips to the Kremlin were happy affairs, often accompanied by laughter and drink. In Brezhnev’s time the trips became far less frequent, ‘and Gagarin would come out looking sad and sit quietly in the car. I wouldn’t ask him what was wrong. I didn’t need to. I could see he was busy with his thoughts.’

  Gagarin’s greatest initial shock was that he was no longer able to work behind the scenes on behalf of the many people who came to him with pleas for help. He was hardly a saint, but he was without doubt an essentially good-natured man, a product of his decent upbringing in Gzhatsk and Klushino. The virtues of social and personal responsibility that he had learned during the war years stayed with him throughout his life. Among those former colleagues who hint today at Gagarin’s moments of caprice, his occasional misbehaviour and thoughtlessness, none of them denies his warm and generous behaviour towards friends and strangers alike when they were in trouble. In fact, by 1964 all the cosmonauts who had completed missions were well known, and their influence stretched a long way in higher quarters.

  At Star City a special Correspondence Department was established ten days after Gagarin’s flight to deal with the immense quantities of mail coming in from all over the Union, and many foreign countries besides. Over time the department was expanded to deal with other cosmonauts’ correspondence, with seven secretaries on permanent duty (at least two of whom were answerable to the KGB). Sergei Yegupov headed the operation with two principal aims in mind: first, to help Gagarin with his workload; second, to keep an eye on any sensitive matters that might crop up. His duties are more politically relaxed now, and the world’s fascination with cosmonauts has faded, but he still runs the department. ‘Most often the letters were addressed to “Gagarin, Moscow”, or “Gagarin, the Kremlin”. In the end it was decided to give him a special post code, “Moscow 705”. Over the years, I think we must have received at least a million letters.’

  Most of the letters – but by no means all of them – expressed joy, wonder, admiration and pride at Gagarin’s achievement. Yegupov does not like to acknowledge that some of these letters must have been ‘difficult’ in some way. ‘We still keep the entire archive at Star City, and everybody can get access to them. You will see, there are no bad letters anywhere in the correspondence.’ It seems reasonable to assume that some of them must have be
en weeded out, but a great many distressing pleas for help still remain. ‘About ten or fifteen per cent of the correspondence contained various requests from ordinary citizens asking for better housing, the installation of water supply points, an increase in pension payments, and applications for kindergartens – incidentally, that was a pretty complicated issue in those days.’

  The most sensitive letters came from prisoners asking for their cases to be reviewed. Fyodor Dyemchuk remembers a particular incident involving a young man harshly sentenced for a first offence. ‘Gagarin said, “What shall I do? I have to help, because if we save this boy it’ll be so much easier and simpler. If he goes to prison he’ll simply be lost for ever into the crime system, and he’ll never make it to become a man.” He went everywhere and visited everybody’s offices. He really pushed, and I think he got some positive results.’

  One can only imagine Gagarin’s anxiety when faced with requests like these:

  Esteemed Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin,

  A First Class Navigator who served with the Air Force for nineteen years requests you to receive him. The life of my son depends on this . . .

  Yuri Alexeyevich, Hero of the Soviet Union,

  My daughter has been refused entry to the university because of my Jewish background. Please can you . . .

  Dear Comrade Gagarin,