Starman

by Jamie Doran

  Belotserkovsky discovered that all the radar operators were hopelessly confused at the time of the crash. ‘First of all, I noticed that the tapes of the conversation between the flight controller and Gagarin’s plane contain a curious moment. The thing is, the controller was still calling out Gagarin’s call sign, six-two-five, after his plane had already crashed. The controller’s voice was perfectly calm. He wasn’t nervous. But from minute forty-two of the tape, he did show some nervousness. That was about twelve minutes after the crash.’ Belotserkovsky was suspicious about the long delay in the controller’s reactions. Even allowing for the sluggish response of the radar equipment, the MiG-15’s blip must have dropped off the screens eventually, as the actual aircraft plunged towards the ground, but it took a full twelve minutes for the controllers to realize that anything was wrong. This may explain the ten-minute discrepancy in the timing of the crash that Bykovsky describes, with some discomfort, in his interview.

  Belotserkovsky found many other flaws in the ground-control procedures, and in the original commission’s fudged report. The standard practice back in 1968 was to make photographic records of traffic-control radar screens at set intervals. An automatic system of cameras was built into the consoles to do this, but on March 27 the cameras at Chkalovsky were not working, so the controllers resorted to a crude back-up recording system. They placed pre-cut sheets of tracing paper across their radar screens and marked the positions of the various targets at intervals. Belotserkovsky found the old and faded sheets tucked discreetly into a folder marked ‘secondary material’, as if to disguise their importance. ‘There was a whole spectrum of conditions that we did not manage to cover while working on the original commission. We agreed that two particular lines of evidence, the voice tapes and the tracing-paper sheets, showed that the traffic controller was talking to a different plane, which he mistook for Gagarin’s. Most likely, Gagarin’s plane got so close to the other plane that they appeared for a moment on the radar screen as a single target. When Gagarin’s plane went into a spin, the other one was still on the screen.’

  In the poor weather, and with no warnings from ground controllers, the crew of the other jet may not even have been aware of the near-miss. But some retired Sukhoi SU-11 veteran out there may well be keeping his head down today.

  Gagarin’s death was shameful not just because of the loss of a national hero in muddled circumstances, but because of the dangerous flaws revealed in the Soviet military technology of his time. Obviously their radar systems were not capable of simultaneous mapping of aircraft heights and positions, nor of positively identifying one target from another. The implications of this were highly alarming. In theory, a foreign jet simulating approximately the usual routines and flight patterns of Soviet aircraft could have flown close to an airbase, or some other military target, without clearly being identified as a potential enemy. In all likelihood Gary Power’s U-2 spy craft, shot down in May 1960, was identified as hostile only because its flight path was noticeably different from the expected routes of other Soviet aircraft that day.

  EPILOGUE

  There have always been rumours that Yuri Gagarin was murdered by Leonid Brezhnev’s administration. Journalists, friends and relatives still talk of dark plots, although their anger is more metaphorical than literal. There is no real evidence to suggest that Gagarin’s crash was anything other than an accident. Incompetence and poor administration at many levels certainly contributed to his death, but deliberate malice seems unlikely. The real crime, at least as far as Gagarin’s family was concerned, was that the authorities told them so little of the truth. ‘My parents weren’t sure what to believe,’ says Valentin. ‘We thought Yura’s death was ordered by Brezhnev. When Yura was at official visits with him, nobody paid any attention to Brezhnev, and he hated it when people didn’t listen to him. Brezhnev wanted people to pay attention to him, and nobody else . . . There are no accidents in life, only causes that lead to accidents. I don’t believe in coincidences, either. It was a set-up, right to the last minute.’

  The last time Valentin saw his brother was on February 25, 1968, a few days after Yuri had received his diploma. Some journalists spoiled the mood that evening when they arrived, uninvited, at Gagarin’s Moscow apartment. ‘They rang the bell, I opened the door a little bit, and they pushed their way in,’ says Valentin. ‘What the hell could I do? Yura said they were parasites, and he couldn’t even relax at home. They started to take pictures, and one correspondent noticed Yura’s new Japanese camera, and said, “I will give you my camera, you give me yours, and I’ll pay the difference.” Yura turned to Valya and said, ‘Let’s give him the money instead, so he won’t ask that question again.” The journalist was very ashamed after that.’

  Gagarin’s sister Zoya also tells a bitter story. ‘The last time we saw Yura was at his graduation on February 18, where he received his diploma papers from the Zhukovsky Academy, along with Gherman Stepanovich Titov. Yura was very happy to receive the diploma after so much hard work. After that, we only heard about his death five weeks later on the radio. We weren’t given any advice, we weren’t warned in advance. We weren’t told anything at all. I felt very sick, and so did Mamma. The doctors had to give us endless injections to calm us down . . . There was never any precise official information about the cause of Yura’s death, just guesses and rumours, all the worst things you could posibly think of. Someone helped him to die, that’s my feeling.’

  Zoya recalls the funeral arrangements with a grimace of discomfort. ‘We sat for two days in the House of the Soviet Army, and the endless funeral music banged away in our heads. We thought we’d go insane. People were walking, walking, walking through to say goodbye. They came from everywhere, an endless procession of them. There were such long queues, the guards had to block the entrance for a while. It was terrible.’

  As was the custom, Gagarin’s mother wanted to see her son for one last time before committing his body to the crematorium’s flames. Valentin describes the worst moment. ‘We wanted to open the coffin, but the head of the funeral team wouldn’t allow it. Mamma and Zoya started to argue with him, and everybody was shouting. Finally he let them do whatever they wanted. They pulled off the red velvet drape and opened the coffin, and inside there were human remains in a plastic bag. It was just about possible to recognize some of them. Yura’s nose was in place, but his cheek was torn off. Somebody told me later that Serugin in his coffin looked just as bad. Well, we looked, and then we closed the coffin. The music started to play, and the coffin moved slowly into the furnace. The next day, at the official funeral, Yura’s ashes were put into the Kremlin wall. And that was it.’

  Zoya says that her mother Anna took her son’s death very hard, and a peculiar cruelty of history prevented her from finding any peace. ‘Usually people have a chance to bury their loved ones, and then they calm down as time passes, but every day Mamma was reminded of it, because Yura was so famous. People were always turning up from all over the Soviet Union to pay their respects and see our family home. Mamma lived until she was eighty, and I often wonder how she got through it. She suffered more than the rest of us, I’m sure.’

  Many of Gagarin’s friends and colleagues visited his parents in Gzhatsk to express their sympathy. Sergei Belotserkovsky recalls, ‘During my last meeting with Gagarin’s mother, when we were alone, she asked me all of a sudden, “Was Yura killed?” I was stunned. “What makes you think so?” I asked, and she said that Yuri had told her once, “Mother, I’m very afraid.” She said she hadn’t understood what he’d meant by that, but it troubled her.’

  Belotserkovsky offers his own interpretation. ‘I don’t think Gagarin feared for his life. It was a different kind of fear – the fear we all shared in those days, our fear of society, and of the world in which we lived. Letters – dreadful letters – were pouring into Gagarin’s office. All the distresses and problems in society impinged on him. He carried an immense load on his shoulders . . . One could sense his anxiety and tensio
n. He was an emotional person, and he felt upset when he couldn’t help . . . He didn’t fit into the lifestyle of the Party élite and the higher levels in the Brezhnev system. He was alien to them, so they rejected him. There were attempts to tame him, to buy him off, but he wouldn’t succumb. He was too honest, too self-willed and independent.’

  Belotserkovsky, Leonov, Titov and others were welcome at the family house, but other less familiar visitors inadvertently added to the family’s emotional turmoil. From the moment of Gagarin’s space flight in 1961 to his death in 1968, his father Alexei and younger brother Boris were approached almost every day by people wanting them to pass on their requests to the First Cosmonaut; or by people simply seeking the thrill of meeting any available members of this famous family. After Gagarin’s death, the strangers still came; and over time both Alexei and Boris became inadvertent alcoholics, because they could not politely refuse the many drinks offered to them. This pressure to entertain visitors and accept their well-meant gifts of vodka and brandy had fatal repercussions: in 1976 Boris hanged himself, almost as if he were allowing Albert to complete his sadistic wartime work, while Alexei’s weak health rapidly deteriorated.

  Gagarin’s wife Valentina successfully raised their two fine daughters, who now enjoy rewarding lives. Valentina still lives within the perimeter of Star City, in a very modest house, and almost never speaks to journalists. Many space veterans regard her humble accommodation as a national disgrace, but she prefers not to draw attention to herself. Golovanov points out, ‘She changed very little, despite the lavish attention paid to her by Nikita Khrushchev, who awarded her the Order of Lenin after Gagarin’s space flight. Never in her life did she wear it, or any of the awards and medals given to her . . . She was an honest person inside, and so was Gagarin. Despite his fame, he never forgot that he was at the top of a huge pyramid of engineers and constructors who prepared him for his flight.’

  This apt metaphor of a pyramid helps illustrate that Gagarin’s life was full of contradictions. He was an ambitious and competitive individual, acutely aware that the central achievement of his life was based on the efforts of many others who were not even permitted to reveal their names, let alone share in his public glory. He was a peasant boy at ease with complex engineering equations; a programmed technician who could think for himself; a loyal member of a conformist society who rebelled against the system. He was impetuous, occasionally thoughtless, yet highly disciplined in his work and responsible towards others, often at great risk to himself. He knew little of politics, while displaying a remarkable knack for diplomacy, both at home and abroad. He was an adulterer who never really betrayed his wife and family. As all these conflicting elements of his life intermingle, the story that emerges is one of an essentially decent and brave man giving his best in extraordinary circumstances. He was a hero, in the best and most honest sense of the word.

  AFTERWORD

  On the morning of April 12th, 1981, engineers, technicians and politicians held their breath as a great new adventure unfolded before their eyes. The risks were immense. Success would deliver glory for all concerned. Failure would bring national grief and global humiliation. Thousands of spectators gathered on the Florida coastline to witness not just the launch of the space shuttle Columbia, but the birth of a new era in rocket travel. As former NASA chief Daniel Goldin describes such moments in space affairs: ‘your breathing slows, your heartbeat becomes noticeable, and an uncomfortable muscle tension fills your body.’

  As the shuttle programme closes down after 30 years, the jury is undecided on its legacy. NASA’s flagship was an adaptable and powerful machine that made possible our first permanent human settlement in orbit. It was also dangerously temperamental and alarmingly expensive to operate. Even so, its thunderous first ascent to orbit in 1981 was a moment of tremendous pride for America on that balmy morning at the Kennedy launch centre.

  Exactly twenty years prior to that day, Soviet technicians, engineers and (while there were no politicians present) a good scattering of KGB chiefs felt ‘their breathing slow, their hearts thump, their muscles tighten’ as they watched events from a concrete bunker in Baikonur on the remote steppes of Kazakhstan. A young man sat in what might well be described as a tin can atop a volatile bomb, waiting to be shot into space – and he was laughing and joking with the men who turned the final bolts on his capsule and sealed him into place, before abandoning him to eternal fame or a sudden violent death. Yuri Gagarin’s destiny was decided by new and revolutionary pumps, pipes and turbines built by a society that was undergoing a similarly dangerous technocratic experiment on a far vaster scale.

  A Space Foundation survey undertaken in 2010 ranked Gagarin joint sixth ‘most popular space hero of all time.’ Joint, that is, with Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. If Gagarin were alive today, we can be certain he would have been laughing once again – and this time at the very top of the heroic space pyramid. We all admire the Apollo lunar astronauts for their bravery and undoubted professional brilliance, and do not begrudge them the adoration that they enjoy in retirement. Quite rightly, they are revered as heroes; but Gagarin’s charm, wit and approachability would have assured him a place in the hearts of this modern generation, too. A place that no one else in all human history can ever occupy. Number One. The First Man in Space.

  It is a genuine honour that our book has been republished some 13 years after it first hit the bookshelves. We had timed the first publication in 1998 to mark the 30th anniversary of Gagarin’s wasteful and untimely death in a plane accident (for that’s what it was, despite the whining of the conspiracy theorists). To be able to transmit his story to the public once again, and this time to mark the half-century since human beings first broke through the Earth’s atmosphere and entered the cosmos, is to recognise one of the most important moments in human development. As mentioned in the very first pages of this book, nothing could lend greater validity to that moment than Neil Armstrong’s own thoughts on the matter. ‘It was Yuri Gagarin who called on all of us to follow the stars’.

  The unique nature of this book, and the reasons why it is such an important document, are all attributable to those extraordinary people who agreed to speak with us back in the late 1990s. Our narrative is a record gleaned almost entirely from those who were at the scene: a first-hand account from men and women at the sharp end of the Soviet space programme, whose voices had been for so long silenced by fear of a visit from the foot soldiers of the Lubyanka.

  We were fortunate to be in Russia at a time of unprecedented freedom, largely because the old security apparatus collapsed in disarray upon the dissolution of the USSR. It was a chaotic time, of that there can be no doubt, with mafia-style gangs overshadowing every business, large and small, and many aspects of Russia’s shape-shifting politics, too. Boris Yeltsin issued bizarre political decrees and underwent quintuple heart bypasses between bouts of heavy drinking, while the value of the ruble sank below the cost of the paper it was printed on. Yet for us western observers, this was an extraordinary window of opportunity. Freedom of speech really did emerge, at least for a while. People who had worked on top-secret Soviet projects could speak openly for the first time.

  Prior to this book, all previous publications on Gagarin were KGB-sanctioned, and these were plagiarised by international journalists, producing a glossed and unreliable version of the truth about his mission (although our bibliography does list some fine exceptions – and no doubt we, too, have made errors). Never before had anyone been allowed to speak truthfully about the lethal failings and appalling risks involved in the early Soviet space programme, and nor had they been able to talk intimately and in detail about Gagarin’s life, including his own failings, largely brought on by alcohol abuse and the stresses of international fame. The KGB media minders were unimaginative and obsessed with secrecy. They failed to understand that what makes us human makes us great. In fairness, NASA’s media spinners in the age of Apollo blundered into precisely the same erro
rs. By the time they had blitzed the world with inhuman facts, figures and ‘launch data,’ even the conquest of the moon seemed dull. But it’s always been easier to dig up and revive the more humanistic details of Apollo and its astronauts than to reveal the hidden stories of the Soviet rocketeers.

  To the cosmonauts, engineers, KGB agents, family members and everyone else who spoke with us during that short window of expressive freedom, we offer our deepest thanks. This story could never have been told without them – and as, one by one, they slip away, their individual contributions to this story can never be told again. Those who yet live do so in a society which has, perhaps foolishly, welcomed a return to ‘order’ under a new security apparatus, with strange and unsettling 21st century ambitions. Once again, voices are being silenced.

  Of all the lost interviewees whom we mourn, none do we miss more than the charismatic and enigmatic Gherman Titov. He was the ‘nearly man’ who accepted, many years after the fact, that the choice of Gagarin as first man in space was the correct one. Many a half-bottle of vodka was shared in Baikonur and our Moscow apartment, while Titov regaled us with numerous anecdotes of times shared with his erstwhile cosmonaut colleague. Rivalry there may have been, but a true love and admiration for Gagarin, coupled with an almost searingly honest analysis of his own story, makes Gherman almost as great a presence in this book as Gagarin himself.