Jamie Doran - Starman - The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin

Titov mimed his way through the fake State Committee. There was a moment of purest idiocy, a farce within a farce: halfway through Gagarin’s carefully pre-rehearsed ‘spontaneous’ acceptance speech, Suvorov ran out of film. Korolev tapped his glass with a spoon and called the room to silence, as though he had some crucial announcement to make. ‘The cameraman needs to reload, so we’ll pause for a moment.’ Everybody laughed, then sat fidgeting while Suvurov reloaded. Then the First Cosmonaut repeated his earlier performance word-for-word. Meanwhile, Suvorov was struck by Gagarin’s youthfulness. ‘He was a small, sturdy man, but how young he looked! Like a boy, with a fascinating smile and very kind eyes.’ [4] Suvorov & Sabelnikov, The First Manned Spaceflight , p. 58.

Next morning there was the more relaxed celebration in the summerhouse, where Titov kept his emotions firmly under control. ‘I was upset, of course, but everything went by the script, as they say.’ Now he can only wonder if things might have gone differently that day. For he was absolutely convinced that it was going to be him.

Of course the selection of the First Cosmonaut was helped along at the highest levels. Fyodor Burlatsky, Khrushchev’s trusted advisor and speechwriter, knows exactly why Gagarin was favoured over Titov. ‘Gagarin and Khrushchev were alike in many ways. They had the same kind of Russian character. Titov was more reserved, his smile wasn’t so open, he had less charm. It wasn’t just Khrushchev who chose Gagarin. It was fate.’

Khrushchev and Gagarin were both peasant farmers’ sons, while Titov was middle-class. If Gagarin could reach the greatest heights, then Khrushchev’s rise to power from similarly humble origins was validated. Wasn’t that the truth? The real reason why they chose a simple farmboy against a properly educated and serious man? After a stiff jolt of vodka to ease the memory and blunt the sharpness of his pride, Titov can now admit, ‘I wanted to be the first one. Why not? Many years have passed, and I would like to say they made the right choice. Not because of the government, but because Yura turned out to be the man that everyone loved. Me, they couldn’t love. I’m not lovable. They loved Yura. When I visited his mum and dad in the Smolensk region after he was dead, then I realized it. I’m telling you, they were right to choose Yura.’

Gagarin’s old academic tutor Sergei Belotserkovsky suggests that another cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, came close to being assigned the first flight, ‘but a distant member of his family was subject to official repression at the time’. Belotserkovsky attributes Gagarin’s eventual selection to a lucky error. ‘I was surprised when I found out that Yura’s brother and sister had been captured by the Germans. Normally it’s a black spot in a person’s biography to have lived in occupied territories. Either the vetting authorities missed that, or they didn’t take it into consideration. If you like, it was a mistake, but a very useful one. If we could have made more mistakes like that when selecting people for important positions, our country woudn’t have had so many problems. Leaders with an informal attitude to the rules, like Korolev for instance, usually turn out to have the higher standards of morality.’

At 5.00 in the morning of April 11, the doors of the main assembly shed rolled open and the R-7, with Vostok on its nose, trundled into the pre-dawn chill, supported horizontally on a hydraulic platform mounted on a railcar. Korolev paced along the track just ahead, escorting his rocket-child like an anxious parent. The railcar moved at slower than walking pace, so that the rocket would not suffer any vibration damage. All the way to the launch pad four kilometres distant, Korolev never left its side. As Titov explains, ‘The rocket was the Chief Designer’s baby, if you like. That’s why he walked along with it all the way, like a pedestrian. These transports to the pad are very slow. At a time like that, speed is always associated with problems. Vostok rockets are quite delicate as well as powerful – especially that first one.’

At one o’ clock that afternoon, Korolev escorted Gagarin and Titov to the top of the gantry for a final rehearsal of boarding procedures alongside the now-vertical rocket. All of a sudden Korolev became weak with exhaustion, and had to be helped down from the gantry and back to his cottage on the outskirts of the launch complex to get some rest. In time, Gagarin would discover that the Chief Designer’s stocky, rugged appearance disguised a very fragile man. [5] Harvey, The New Russian Space Programme , p. 54.

Meanwhile, at an Army barracks on the outskirts of Saratov, General Andrei Stuchenko was awoken in the pre-dawn darkness by a telephone call from someone very senior and very frightening at the Kremlin. ‘A man is shortly to fly into space. The cosmonaut will land in your district. You are to organize his safe recovery and reception. You answer for this with your head.’ [6] Golovanov, Our Gagarin , p. 124. Stuchenko promised he would comply. He grabbed a map of his region, divided it into grids and spent the day deploying his troops as fast as he could, to watch for something amazing – a boy falling out of the sky.

The evening before the flight, Titov and Gagarin settled down in a cottage a few kilometres from the pad. Nikolai Kamanin visited them briefly, and (as his diary records) Gagarin took him aside for a few moments, whispering tensely, ‘You know, I’m probably not quite right in the head.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘The flight’s tomorrow morning, and I’m not the slightest bit worried. Not the tiniest bit, d’you see? Is that normal?’

‘It’s excellent, Yura. I’m very glad for you. Good night!’

Of course Korolev came along for a few minutes to settle his cosmonauts for the night. ‘I don’t know what all this fuss is about,’ he teased. ‘Five years from now, the unions’ll be subsidizing holidays in space.’ Everybody laughed. Korolev calmly looked at his watch and said good night. This was the signal for the cosmonauts to bed down.

Vladimir Yazdovsky, the senior Director of Medical Preparations, had spent the day in their bunk room, organizing a little treat for the doctors. He had inserted strain gauges into the mattresses to register whether the cosmonauts tossed and turned in their sleep. Wires trailed from the bunks and through a suspiciously fresh hole in the wall to a clutch of batteries outside the cottage. A data cable ran off for a few hundred metres to another building, where the doctors had set up their knobs and dials. Of course this experiment was supposed to be a secret, but as Yuri and Gherman understood from bitter experience, the doctors were sure to demand entertainment of some kind, whatever the time of day. (‘There’s nobody looking through the keyhole, but you know you’re being watched.’) History records that both men slept perfectly well. Common sense tells us otherwise. Gagarin eventually admitted to Korolev that he did not sleep a wink. It was not just the impending flight preying on his mind. He wanted to concentrate on lying still, so that the doctors would declare him well-rested and fit for duty in the morning. No doubt his highly disciplined understudy Titov employed a similar trick, with the result that both men were less refreshed next morning than they would have been if the doctors had left them alone. Before going to bed Gagarin confided to Kamanin that he had always considered Titov’s chances to be exactly the same as his own. He knew that the merest hint of upset in their last night’s ‘sleep’ could still make a difference. Months later, he joked to Korolev that the only reason he had gone into space on the morning of April 12 was because Titov turned over in his cot the night before. [7] Interview with Gagarin’s hairdresser Igor Khoklov.