Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [0]
The Truth behind the Legend of
Yuri Gagarin
JAMIE DORAN AND PIERS BIZONY
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
1 FARMBOY
2 RECRUITMENT
3 THE CHIEF DESIGNER
4 PREPARATION
5 PRE-FLIGHT
6 108 MINUTES
7 COMING HOME
8 THE SPACE RACE
9 THE FOROS INCIDENT
10 BACK TO WORK
11 FALLING TO EARTH
12 WRECKAGE
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
CHAPTER REFERENCES AND NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PLATE SECTION
COPYRIGHT PAGE
Dedicated to the memory of
Olga Alexandrei and Igor Nosov
FOREWORD
The Soviet period of history is, for some, a time best forgotten. The massacres of the Purges, the horrors of the Gulags and forced labour, the fictitious Five Year Plans and the Orwellian lack of personal freedom hardly make for happy memories. The other side of the coin, however, is that many of humankind’s greatest achievements came from a nation that had to be almost entirely rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War. Twenty-seven million Russians died fighting the Nazis, and the entire infrastructure of their nation was disrupted – but after barely a decade, the Soviet Union was a global superpower, with new world-beating technology capable of reaching into space.
Yet, for all but a very few elderly die-hards, there are no great heroes from the Soviet era. Indeed, to be a hero at all under communism was itself an anomaly, for no individual could be greater than the collective whole. No, there were no great heroes . . . except for one.
At a giant crossroads on Moscow’s Leninsky Prospekt a 30-metre-high steel statue of him dominates the skyline, while ninety-six kilometres to the north-east another memorial marks the spot where, just a few days after his thirty-fourth birthday, he died in a terrible accident that gouged a huge crater in the frost-hardened earth. Three decades after this catastrophe, fresh bouquets of flowers at the site confirm the continuing love of ordinary citizens for this man. Young or old, privileged or poor, most Russians still smile with pride at the merest mention of his name. They recall with genuine affection a peasant boy with a winning smile, who stunned the entire world with his achievement. Russians don’t hesitate to remind us Westerners, ‘He was the first, you know.’
The first man in space: Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin.
My fascination with Gagarin was sparked three years ago, when I was completing a major television documentary series on the Soviet nuclear-weapons programme. It became clear to me that the story of The Red Bomb would not be complete without a description of the rockets that were built to carry them out into space, even as they threatened us with destruction here on earth.
After completion of The Red Bomb, I seriously considered producing a major multi-part series on the Soviet space programme, but it was a daunting task. Where to start? How to focus this enormous subject into a cohesive analysis?
A close friend in Moscow, one of my contacts within the KGB, solved the problem for me. One day he saw a Russian television programme making the silly and utterly unsubstantiated claim that Gagarin was still alive, having escaped from a mental institution where he had been incarcerated for the last thirty years. Even the KGB would not have been capable of ‘disappearing’ Russia’s greatest hero. My contact urged me to make a serious documentary film that told the truth. At that moment it occurred to me that Gagarin’s name was world-famous, yet nobody knew the first thing about him, or about the remarkable people who launched him into space aboard a converted nuclear missile. My next project was assured, in my own mind at least; and, as it happened, the BBC and other major broadcasters around the world shared my enthusiasm to reveal the unknown Yuri Gagarin.
Researching The Red Bomb took me and my production team into some very murky areas. For some reason I imagined that finding out about Gagarin would be slightly easier than unveiling the secrets of the ultra-secure Soviet nuclear-weapons programme. I was wrong. This time it was not so much the paranoid