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

Of course this book is as much about the early Soviet manned space programme as it is about Gagarin himself, for the two stories – personal and technological – are intimately connected. Several Western experts in space history advised us about the engineering and administrative aspects of our narrative. Phillip Clark, Rex Hall, Brian Harvey and Gordon Hooper were endlessly patient with our questions. Douglas Millard at the National Museum of Science and Technology (London) provided many books and documents, while James Oberg and James Harford gave us advice on key issues and David Baker provided some excellent photographs. Andy Aldrin, John Logsdon and Peter Almquist outlined a particularly important aspect – the shocked American reaction to the first Soviet space triumphs. It is sobering to be reminded just how many exceptionally brilliant scientists and engineers were trained and employed within the Soviet regime.

Here, then, is the story of a moment that can never be repeated: the moment when one of our kind first ventured off the planet and into the cosmos. Many have followed, but only one man was first. Yuri Gagarin was no superman; he was mortal and flawed, just like the rest of us; yet he deserves his status in history: not just for the mere fact of being first into space, but also because he lived his life with decency, bravery and honour.

This is the story of a young man who became famous in 1961, even though the world knew almost nothing about him. The great achievement of his life, celebrated to this day, took him less than two hours to complete, yet required bravery and commitment over a period of years. A triumphant superstar at the age of twenty-seven, he was tired, frightened and haunted by the time of his thirty-third birthday. In that last year of his short life he battled with his country’s government to try and save a colleague destined for almost certain death; he met State security agents in darkened stairwells, avoiding hidden microphones, and passed on documents so sensitive that people could lose their jobs just for glancing at them. This man put his own life at risk, first for his country, then for his friends. Even his childhood required bravery, in the face of terrifying events that few of us could hope to survive.

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] TASS, Soviet Man in Space , Moscow: TASS/Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, p. 7. See also: Burchett, Wilfred & Purdy, Anthony, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin , London: Anthony Gibbs & Phillips, 1961, pp. 87–99. 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.