Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [10]
Gagarin’s foreman at Lyubertsy, Vladimir Gorinshtein, was a dour, heavy-set man with a drooping moustache and bulging muscles, and a tongue on him as scalding as the molten steel he so loved to work with. ‘Get used to handling fire,’ he would say to his cowering apprentices. ‘Fire is strong, water is stronger than fire, the earth stronger than water, but man is the strongest of all!’4 ‘We were scared,’ Gagarin recalled in a 1961 interview.
His first assignment was to insert hinge-pins into the lids of newly assembled metal flasks. The walrus-faced foreman strode across to inspect the work. By beating his fists against his forehead and swearing mightily, he was able to hint that Gagarin had installed his pins completely the wrong way round. ‘The next day we all made better progress,’ Gagarin recalled. By his own admission, this was typical for him. He had no particular knack for getting things right the first time. He had to work quite hard at his tasks, practising them repeatedly. In a brief interview given many years later, Gorinshtein said:
At first Yura struck me as too small and frail. The only vacancy I had available was in the foundry group, which meant a lot of smoke, dust, heat and heavy lifting. I thought it would be beyond him. I can’t remember why I eventually ignored all these negative points and accepted him. It must have been the determination you could feel in him. Was he special? No, but he was hard-working.5
Gagarin’s year-end report from the foreman was good. In fact, he was one of only four apprentices to be selected for training at a newly built Technical School in Saratov, a city port on the great Volga river. Here he would learn the intimate secrets of Russia’s most important machine: the tractor.
In the spring of 1951 Yuri and his three lucky companions from Lyubertsy were escorted to Saratov by their new teacher, Timofei Nikiforov. Within a few hours of their arrival in the town, Gagarin saw a notice. ‘AeroClub’ it read. ‘Ah, my friends. That would be something. To get in there!’ His companions laughed, but a few days later the club accepted his application to join. To his dismay, Gagarin found that the Technical School kept him relentlessly occupied, and it was several weeks before he could actually go to the club’s airfield on the outskirts of Saratov.
Dmitry Martyanov, the club’s war-veteran chief of training, saw Gagarin for the first time as a young man with a rapturous expression on his face gazing at an old canvas-clad Yak-18 training plane, so he strolled across and offered to take him for a brief trip into the air. They went up to 1,500 metres, crawled through the sky at 100 kmph, and came back down to earth after a few minutes. ‘That first flight filled me with pride, and gave meaning to my whole life,’ Gagarin recalled.
Martyanov said, ‘You handled that very well. One would think you’d done this before.’
‘Oh, I’ve been flying all my life,’ Gagarin replied.6
Apparently Martyanov knew exactly what he meant, and he became a firm friend from that moment.
In the spring of 1955 21-year-old Yuri graduated with an ‘excellent’ grade from Saratov Technical School. By this time his interest in tractors was waning. He had spent the previous summer at the AeroClub learning to fly the Yak-18. After his first solo jaunt, he gave his friend and tutor Martyanov a pack of Troika cigarettes, a sort of traditional pilot’s gift. But it wasn’t all fun and games. He had to attend evening lectures in aviation theory, while keeping awake in the daytime for Technical School. He ploughed through the extra workload, determined not to fail. His reward at the club was to make a hair-raising parachute jump from the wing of a plane. Martyanov also recommended Gagarin for the Pilots’ School at Orenburg, on the Ural River. Of course