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

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’s diaries.

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 later 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.