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

After the war, the Gagarins moved to nearby Gzhatsk and built a simple new home, using the slats and beams from the wreckage of their old house as raw material. The original house had been very modest anyway, consisting only of a kitchen and two small adjoining rooms. ‘Of course life was hard after the war,’ Zoya explains. ‘Everything from Brest up to Moscow was completely destroyed, all the cattle taken away, the houses in ruins. There were only two houses left in our village.’ The people of Gzhatsk built a school, and a young woman, Yelena Alexandrovna, volunteered to run it, making the best of a blackboard with no chalk and a classroom with no books. Yuri and Boris learned to read from an old Russian military manual left behind by departing troops. For geography they relied on war maps rescued from the burned-out cabins of army trucks and tanks.

Yelena was not on her own at the school for long. In 1946, Lev Mikhailovich Bespavlov joined the school to teach maths and physics. A new father figure had now arrived in Yuri’s life. Speaking to an Australian journalist in 1961, Yuri described Bespavlov as ‘a wizard, specially when he’d fill up a bottle with water, and seal it, then take it out into the freezing air outside, so that the water would turn to ice and expand, shattering the bottle with a satisfying bang. Bespavlov could float pins on water, and make electricity by combing his hair.’ [3] Burchett & Purdy, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin , p. 89. Perhaps the greater part of his appeal lay in the faded airman’s tunic he sported, for in the chaos and terror of the war years, Yuri had encountered one thing so wonderful, so magical, that it seemed for a moment to transcend the horror all around – an aircraft; and even when this piece of magic had been dismembered and taken away, its memory remained.

There had been a dogfight, two Soviet ‘Yak’ fighters, two German Messerschmitts, with the score levelling out at one-all. The stricken Yak came down in a patch of marshland half a kilometre outside the village. One of its landing legs buckled on impact, and the propeller was twisted completely out of shape. The ground was soft, which made for a very poor landing, and although the pilot survived, he grazed his leg quite badly. Immediately, a crowd of villagers ran across to help him. They put a bandage on his injured leg, offered him a drink of milk and fed him some pieces of dried bacon.

After a while another Russian aircraft, a Polikarpov PO-2, came down safely in an adjacent clover field with firmer ground. Airmen called the PO-2 a ‘cornplanter’, because its lightweight plywood construction enabled it to make landings in rough fields. Today its apparent ‘rescue’ mission was somewhat double-edged; the PO-2 crewman was supposed to check on the health of the downed Yak pilot, then ensure that his fighter did not fall into German hands, if necessary by destroying it.

Yuri watched all of this, mesmerized. According to Valentin, ‘Some of the older boys in the village were sent into the clover field with whatever dregs of petrol they could scavenge, to refuel the PO-2. The pilot had some bars of chocolate, which he gave to Yuri. He divided them among several other boys, accidentally keeping none for himself, obviously much more interested in the planes.’

As the light faded, the two pilots were invited to shelter in a dug-out, but chose instead to spend the night huddled near the PO-2 to keep watch over it. They tried to keep guard throughout the night. Inevitably, cold and bruised, they fell asleep and awoke early next morning to find Yuri staring at them. In the light of day, the damaged Yak fighter did not really seem worth guarding any more, so the pilots set fire to it, then struggled back over the fields to the PO-2, the injured pilot leaning on the other’s shoulder for support. They coaxed the ‘cornplanter’ into the sky without too much trouble and flew away, while Yuri watched, fascinated, as a tall column of smoke billowed from the wreck they had left behind.

Now the boy’s teacher, Lev Bespavlov, carried with him some of that special magic in his uniform, which he had rightfully earned as a gunner and radio operator in the Red Army Air Force. Yuri looked up to him, listened and learned.

Yelena recalls Yuri being a good pupil: mischievous but honourable. ‘Like all children of that age, he did some naughty things, but if ever we were asking the pupils, “Who did it?”, Yuri would always say, “It was me, I won’t do it again.” And he was very vivid. Recalling those years, I would say he was a very decent and responsive boy. When we learned about his flight into space we immediately remembered his very nice smile. He preserved the same smile for the rest of his life – the same one he had when he was a boy.’ Yelena remembers placing Yuri at the front of the class for a few days, where she could keep an eye on him. ‘He wasn’t really the sort of boy you could take your eye off for too long. Even right under my nose, he managed to find trouble. He pulled all the nails out of the bench at the front, so that when he and the other children sat on it, the whole thing collapsed.’ But Yelena could not stay annoyed for long. She remembers a tiny little girl, Anna, who kept getting trampled or left behind when the other children stampeded about the place. Yuri became quite protective of her; carried Anna’s satchel after school and walked her home, to show the others that she should not be picked on.

Unfortunately, he did not shine at music. ‘He participated in all the amateur talent activities. The instruments for the orchestra were a present from the collective farm. Yura played trumpet. He was always proudly walking in the front.’ The Gagarin family had to survive, rather than enjoy, these atonal outbursts, as Zoya remembers. ‘He brought his trumpet home and started to practise. Father got fed up. It was a sunny spring day, and Father sent him outside, saying he had a headache because of the noise. So he practised outside. We had a cow, and she started to moo. It was a concert for free. Everyone was laughing.’ Zoya fondly recalls her younger brother as ‘a real live wire. He was always leading games, the instigator rather than the follower. He was very much alive.’

Yuri’s favourite subjects at school were maths and physics, and he was also keenly involved in a model aeroplane group, much to Yelena’s inconvenience. ‘Once they launched one of his planes from a window and it fell on a passer-by. He was exasperated, and came into the school to complain. Everyone went very quiet, until Yuri stood up and apologized. So he probably had this urge to fly.’

Valentin remembers his pesky brother at six years old, demanding that he and his father build him miniature gliders, or wooden propeller toys powered by rubber bands. Little Yurochka would insist, ‘I want to be a hero for my country, flying a plane!’ Until the war, at least, planes were seldom seen in the skies above Klushino. Fleeting glimpses of such craft must have made a powerful impression on the boy.

When Yuri was sixteen he became anxious to get away from home and earn some kind of living. ‘He saw that life was very hard for our parents, and he wanted to get a profession as soon as possible, so that he wasn’t a burden on their shoulders,’ says Zoya. ‘Personally, I didn’t want him to go, but he said he wanted to carry on studying, and our mother said she wanted him to study, too.’ Yuri expressed his enthusiasm for the College of Physical Culture in Leningrad. He was a fit young man, not very tall, but agile and coordinated. He thought he might train as a gymnast or sportsman. Valentin remembers their father’s objection to this plan. ‘He said it was not a job. Even though it might be physically hard work, it was a silly thing to do. But the physics teacher, Bespavlov, insisted that our parents let Yuri go.’ Alexei hoped that one day his three sons would join him as carpenters, but such a plan was not really practical.