Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [15]
While Gagarin’s face was open and quite easy to read, Titov’s eyes were hooded and dark, his nose set stern. His mouth often seemed to narrow in disapproval, so that his expression could verge on arrogance. He was quick-tempered and was not afraid to speak his mind. He wore his uniform smartly, and his glossy, brown wavy hair helped create the impression of a bourgeois cavalry officer; as did his personal pride, too much poetry and a suspicion of class (just because he had read a few books and his father was a schoolteacher). Titov was not the sort of man who would easily prosper in an egalitarian workers’ and peasants’ paradise – except for one valuable saving grace. He had proved himself excellent in one of the few realms of Soviet life where individual excellence was encouraged: up in the air, protecting the Motherland in a MiG.
Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was another important figure in Gagarin’s new life as a cosmonaut. Born in May 1934, Leonov was almost exactly the same age, although his well-rounded, happy face and slightly thinning hair gave him a more middle-aged appearance. As a young man he considered becoming an artist, and in 1953 he enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Riga, but almost at once he had a change of heart, applying instead to the Air Force school at Chuguyev. There he became a talented parachutist and qualified as an instructor. His chunky features belied a super-fit condition, and he trained with intense self-discipline as a fencer and runner, almost always finding time in the early morning for a four-kilometre workout. When the space recruiters came to Chuguyev in 1959 he soon got himself a new posting.3
Leonov’s sense of humour was infectious, often mischievous, and as long as he was not thwarted or irritated, he was a genuinely lovable man, although in keeping with all his cosmonaut colleagues he was fiercely determined to succeed in his new profession. When it came to work and training he could be cold-blooded at times, but by and large his humour and professionalism won him many allies. He always retained his fascination for art, taking sketchbooks everywhere he went (including into orbit) and eventually becoming one of the leading Soviet space artists. He became Gagarin’s closest friend from the earliest days of their cosmonaut training. ‘I quickly discovered for myself the kindness of this man’s nature,’ Leonov says today. ‘Yuri liked his friends very much and paid them a lot of attention. He kept in touch with old ones and very easily made new ones. Our relationship was especially warm because we knew each other for a long time and, even when he became famous, it didn’t affect him. He always stayed a very good friend.’
On January 11, 1960, a special cosmonauts’ training centre was inaugurated under the directorship of medical scientist Yevgeny Karpov. His second-in-command, directly responsible for the cosmonauts’ recruitment, training and ‘ideological reliability’, was General Nikolai Kamanin, a tough and highly ambitious combat veteran with no discernible sense of humour. The space historian James Oberg has described him as ‘an ageing war hero and authoritarian space tsar, a martinet’,4 while Yaroslav Golovanov, who was intimately connected with the early Soviet space programme, remembers him as ‘a terrifyingly evil man, a malevolent person, a complete Stalinist bastard’. In time, many of the cosmonauts would come to hate Kamanin, but his strict military discipline, his remorseless attention to detail and his refusal to accept anything but the highest standards from his students would prepare them successfully (in most