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By Root 472 0

Gagarin and his recruiters is not on record. However, one of his fellow pilots at the Nikel airbase, Georgi Shonin, was assigned for cosmonaut training soon after Gagarin, and his experience of the selection process must have been pretty similar. ‘At first we talked about the usual boring things. How did I like the Air Force? Did I like flying? What did I do in my free time? What did I like to read? And so on. A couple of days later a second round of talks began. This time far fewer of us had been called for. The talks now became more specific.’ Shonin went to Moscow without really knowing why, then came back to Nikel utterly punctured, probed, exhausted, but apparently listed fit by the doctors for whatever new job awaited him. The recruiters sat him down one last time. ‘They asked me, “How would you feel about flying in more modern planes?” And the answer dawned on me.’ At that time some air regiments were switching over to new high-performance fighters and Shonin assumed that the Nikel squadron was about to become one of the lucky ones. But no, the recruiters were not interested in anything so banal as putting him in a new kind of MiG. ‘They asked me, “What if it was a question of flying something completely new?” I immediately cooled off, because I knew a lot of pilots were being transferred to helicopter units.’ Shonin regarded helicopters as complex but unappealing machines with no speed, no style and, above all, no status. ‘I’m a fighter pilot,’ he pleaded. ‘I specially chose a flying school where I’d train for combat jets, and now you want me –’

One of the recruiters interrupted him. ‘No, you don’t understand. What we’re talking about are long-distance flights on rockets. Flights all the way round the earth.’

‘My mouth dropped open in surprise,’ Shonin remembers. But he took the job. Gagarin was recruited ahead of him by several weeks, and although no record exists to prove it, he and Valya must have welcomed a chance to escape from Murmansk with honour intact. He explained to her that he had been selected as a test pilot for new types of aircraft and was to be stationed just outside Moscow. They left Nikel on March 8, 1960, gladly giving away their standard-issue furniture to other families on the base.

On starting his new job, 26-year-old Gagarin found himself in a group of just twenty ‘cosmonauts’ finally selected out of an initial candidate list of 2,200 from all over the Soviet Union. This first squad would become very tight-knit, despite the obvious (if unspoken) rivalry to gain actual space flights. Gagarin’s relationship with fellow recruit Gherman Stepanovich Titov would develop into something much more complicated – an unspoken contest to win the first human flight into space.

To the other cosmonauts, Gagarin came across as an easy-going fellow. By contrast, Gherman Titov seemed proud and aloof, even to his friends, and sometimes rather strange, too. He loved to spout reams of poetry or quote fragments of stories and novels, not just the modern approved works, but real literature from the old Tsarist days. His father, Stepan Pavlovich, was a teacher and had named him Gherman after a character in a story by Alexander Pushkin, ‘The Queen of Spades’.2

Titov’s was an intensely self-possessed character. In 1950, at the age of fourteen, he crashed his bicycle and broke his wrist, but instead of running home and pleading for comfort, he pretended that nothing had happened. He nursed his pain in secret, unwilling to admit any weakness because he had already signed up for elementary training in aviation school at the next available opportunity, and he did not want his accident to spoil his chances of selection. When he finally received his papers as a cadet in 1953, he worried that the military medics might investigate his bones and call his bluff. They did not; instead, he called theirs. He took to performing early-morning exercises on a set of parallel bars, until his flawed wrist appeared as good as the other. He trained at the Volgograd Air Station for two years, graduating with distinction, and in 1959