Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [111]
Koloshov’s charge of recklessness on Serugin’s part seems unjust, but today Leonov is not concerned with the MiG pilot’s ungenerous testimony, because he is still convinced that this pilot and his subsonic MiG-15 were utterly irrelevant and had nothing to do with Gagarin’s death. ‘No MiG-15 could have made the supersonic bang that I heard that morning.’ Leonov and Belotserkovsky still assert that a supersonic Sukhoi SU-11, never firmly identified in the confused radar data, was the true culprit – in the air, at least.
Leonov is generous towards the SU-11’s pilot, whoever he may have been. ‘If he’d been identified at the time, he’d have been torn to pieces by an angry crowd. On the one hand, they should have released this information; but on the other, if we think about it wisely, perhaps not. It wouldn’t remedy anything.’ It was not so much a single pilot but ‘the whole system that allowed for Gagarin’s death. The entire system. You can’t take the entire system to court. You can judge it morally, but you can’t punish it.’
The ‘system’ did not want to be judged or punished. In all, the commission’s report accumulated twenty-nine thick volumes of technical data, but the mere appearance of fact-gathering was not the same as making a fair analysis of the causes. The 1968 commission report’s central judgement was deliberately vague and simplistic: ‘an aggregate of causes’. The main thesis – the grazing impact with a weather balloon – suited everyone because it was the most innocent. No one was to blame – at least, no one on the ground.
One of the commission’s hardest-working investigators, Igor Rubstov, supported Leonov’s and Belotserkovsky’s theory that a supersonic aircraft had come close to colliding with Gagarin’s and Serugin’s MiG. As the commission moved ever further away from this difficult territory, Rubstov gathered all his courage and went to the KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka to argue his case. ‘I can’t say I felt too confident in that particular building.’ He met Colonel Dugin of the KGB, who demanded to know why he was insisting on the collision theory. Rubstov bluffed in classic Russian style. ‘I said that if the commission failed to investigate [the near-collision scenario], people might think there was something to hide. It was better to investigate it properly to demonstrate that it was not the true version of events.’ Colonel Drugin was unimpressed. On his desk there was a slim folder, which he now opened. It turned out to be Rubstov’s personal file. ‘You don’t honour discipline very much, do you?’ the Colonel said.
Rubstov knew that he was referring to an incident during the war, when an aviation unit at Stalingrad had retreated, quite justifiably, to a safer position under intense German attack. For twenty years and more, no particular inference had been drawn from this event. Drugin now implied that he could use this ancient story as proof of Rubstov’s cowardice, simply because he had been a member of the retreating unit. Drugin did not have to make this threat in so many words. He merely opened the personal file at the relevant page so that Rubstov could catch a glimpse of its contents, then asked him to reconsider his ideas about the near-collision scenario. ‘Later on, this version was not confirmed,’ Rubstov forlornly admits.
Leonov and his closest colleagues wanted to learn the truth about the crash. It took them the best part of two decades, but in 1986 Belotserkovsky lobbied successfully for a new commission of inquiry. He gained access to the secret investigation documents and original supporting materials, including unedited voice tapes of the air-to-ground dialogue. Meanwhile Leonov was amazed to find that documents supposedly written by him in 1968 as part of the original commission