Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [116]
Prior to this book, all previous publications on Gagarin were KGB-sanctioned, and these were plagiarised by international journalists, producing a glossed and unreliable version of the truth about his mission (although our bibliography does list some fine exceptions – and no doubt we, too, have made errors). Never before had anyone been allowed to speak truthfully about the lethal failings and appalling risks involved in the early Soviet space programme, and nor had they been able to talk intimately and in detail about Gagarin’s life, including his own failings, largely brought on by alcohol abuse and the stresses of international fame. The KGB media minders were unimaginative and obsessed with secrecy. They failed to understand that what makes us human makes us great. In fairness, NASA’s media spinners in the age of Apollo blundered into precisely the same errors. By the time they had blitzed the world with inhuman facts, figures and ‘launch data,’ even the conquest of the moon seemed dull. But it’s always been easier to dig up and revive the more humanistic details of Apollo and its astronauts than to reveal the hidden stories of the Soviet rocketeers.
To the cosmonauts, engineers, KGB agents, family members and everyone else who spoke with us during that short window of expressive freedom, we offer our deepest thanks. This story could never have been told without them – and as, one by one, they slip away, their individual contributions to this story can never be told again. Those who yet live do so in a society which has, perhaps foolishly, welcomed a return to ‘order’ under a new security apparatus, with strange and unsettling 21st century ambitions. Once again, voices are being silenced.
Of all the lost interviewees whom we mourn, none do we miss more than the charismatic and enigmatic Gherman Titov. He was the ‘nearly man’ who accepted, many years after the fact, that the choice of Gagarin as first man in space was the correct one. Many a half-bottle of vodka was shared in Baikonur and our Moscow apartment, while Titov regaled us with numerous anecdotes of times shared with his erstwhile cosmonaut colleague. Rivalry there may have been, but a true love and admiration for Gagarin, coupled with an almost searingly honest analysis of his own story, makes Gherman almost as great a presence in this book as Gagarin himself.
As for Yuri: he will always retain his rightful place in history, regardless of anything we have written. He may only be as popular as Captain Kirk for now, but his true importance in the story of our species is still evolving. Probably it will be best appreciated by men and women not yet born: the people of a space-faring civilisation, scattered far and wide among the infinite opportunities of the cosmos.
Jamie Doran & Piers Bizony, November 2010
CHAPTER REFERENCES AND NOTES
1: Farmboy
1 TASS, Soviet Man in Space, Moscow: TASS/Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, p. 7. See also: Burchett, Wilfred & Purdy, Anthony, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, London: Anthony Gibbs & Phillips, 1961, pp. 87–99.
2 Quoted in Golovanov, Yaroslav, Our Gagarin, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978, p. 37.
3 Burchett & Purdy, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, p. 89.
4 Ibid., p. 90.
5 Golovanov, Our Gagarin, p. 42.
6 Burchett & Purdy, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, p. 91.
7 Golovanov, Our Gagarin, p. 43.
8 Burchett & Purdy, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, pp. 92–3
9 Golovanov, Our Gagarin, pp. 263–4.
10 Ibid., p. 265.
2: Recruitment
1 Gagarin, The Road to the Stars, quoted in Golovanov, Our Gagarin, pp. 53–4.
2 Hooper, Gordon R., The Soviet Cosmonaut Team, Lowestoft: second edition, GRH Publications, 1990, Vol.