Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [13]
Nor was Valya thrilled with her new husband’s first proper posting after he passed out of Orenburg with excellent grades and a Lieutenant’s commission on November 6, 1957. Shortly after graduating, Gagarin was sent to the Nikel airbase on the northernmost tip of Murmansk, 300 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, with an assignment to fly MiG-15 jets on reconnaissance missions. Valya followed him out there and discovered a terrible hinterland of sub-zero temperatures, biting winds and long, pitch-black nights, interspersed by a few hours of gloomy grey daylight. Here, on April 10, 1959, she gave birth to the couple’s first daughter, Lena.
Throughout the long winter months flying conditions at Nikel were awful. Ice menaced the control surfaces of Gagarin’s MiG, and snow blindness was a constant threat, with the sky and the ground merging into a seamless sheet of white with no discernible horizon. The on-board electronic approach and landing systems of a MiG were not particularly sensitive in those days. Snow-blinded pilots had to rely on the bigger ground-control radars to guide them towards the narrow radio beacons on the perimeter of the runway. Even in clear weather there were hazards. One day Gagarin put his plane down on a landing strip covered in black ice, transparent to the naked eye but slippery as oil. He had never practised at Orenburg for these conditions. His plane skidded violently and the landing gear’s tyres burst under the strain of his sudden braking.
Gagarin’s good friend Yuri Dergunov from the Orenburg Pilots’ School had campaigned hard to be assigned the same posting when he qualified. It was a great shock when he crashed and was killed in his first month at Nikel. Valya recalled, ‘For several weeks Yuri walked around in a daze and spent one sleepless night after another. I knew that no relaxing draughts or sleeping pills would help him, and if I offered him medicine it was only to take his mind off his depressing thoughts for a few moments at least.’10
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RECRUITMENT
In October 1959 mysterious recruiting teams arrived without warning at all the major air stations in the Soviet Union, including Nikel. They did not say exactly what they wanted, or which organization they represented. Groups of pilots were selected and summoned into an office, twenty or so at a time, for an informal conversation with some ‘doctors’. A few days later the requested groups became smaller, the many rejects winnowed out through mysterious consultations in the background, until eventually the recruiters were holding private interviews with just one candidate at a time, from a shortlist of perhaps a dozen from any given airbase. These lucky ones were sent to the Bordenko Military Hospital in Moscow for a series of rigorous health checks. In all, nine out of ten candidates failed this stage of the review process, again because of secret decisions taken behind closed doors.
In his published accounts, Gagarin recalled undergoing seven separate eye examinations in the Bordenko hospital, countless interviews with psychologists and a nightmarish mathematical test, during which a soft voice whispered all the solutions to him – the wrong solutions – through a pair of headphones. He had to concentrate on his own thought processes and ignore ‘the obsequious friend’ whispering so helpfully in his ears. The doctors were ‘as stern as State prosecutors. Our hearts were the main object of their examination. They could read our whole life history from them. You couldn’t hide a single thing. They tapped our bodies with hammers, twisted us about on special devices and checked the vestibular organs in our ears. We were tested from head to toe. Complicated instruments detected everything, even the tiniest cracks in our health.’1
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