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When Gagarin and his nineteen colleagues arrived for training, few suitable facilities existed to prepare them for space. Karpov and Kamanin were allocated a large swathe of birch and pine woodland forty kilometres north-east of Moscow, and in March 1960 they began construction of a secret base called Zvyozdny Gorodok, or ‘Star City’. A huge square compound was cleared in the middle of the site, thoroughly screened from any nearby roads by the surrounding woodlands. A simple hostel was built; some standard-issue barracks; and a number of low buildings to house the training facilities, some of which – as the cosmonauts would discover to their cost – were designed to inflict stress, trauma, loneliness and exhaustion. In time, Star City would grow to the size of a small town, with its own private community of bars, hotels, sports clubs and administration centres. A short distance to the south, a large and sprawling Air Force base at Chkalovksy provided convenient landing strips for jet trainers and cargo planes, as well as accommodation for the cosmonauts and their young families.

Despite the size of the Star City construction zone, few people outside the space effort knew very much about it. The road that passes Chkalovsky skirts the dense pine forest that so effectively conceals the complex. On the right-hand side a small guardpost protects an innocent gap in the mask of trees. In 1960 the turn-off road might easily have been mistaken for a loggers’ track or an old farm route, except for the guardhouse and the solid tarmac surface capable of taking heavy trucks.

When Gagarin and his colleagues were recruited, the facilities at Star City were not yet operational. The cosmonauts’ early training consisted mainly of academic and physical work in various Moscow scientific and medical institutions, in particular at the Zhukovsky Academy of Aeronautical Sciences on Leningradsky Prospekt. The least popular venue was the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems near Petrovsky Park, headed by Oleg Gazenko, where all the cosmonauts underwent a bewildering array of medical, physical and psychological tests. One of the procedures they all had to face here was the ‘isolation chamber’, a large sealed tank capped by an airlock and containing the barest of living accommodations. The doctors would seal their victims inside, then raise or lower the interior air pressure according to their scientific whims. Then they would provide a miserable set of tasks: maths sums, intelligence tests, physical exercises, and so forth. What the inhabitants of the chamber were not allowed to do was pass the time by somehow enjoying themselves. No chatter was permitted; no books, no magazines; no contact with the outside world, except for the most minimal dialogue with the technicians monitoring the chamber. A session might last anything from one to ten days, although the victim was never warned in advance how long it might be. The purpose of this ordeal was to determine if a man could survive the boredom and loneliness of life in a spaceship, perhaps held in orbit above the earth for many days during some unfortunate delay in the re-entry sequence. That was the official explanation for the chamber. For a cosmonaut the choice was perfectly simple: take the chamber with a smile or you did not get to fly in space.

Gagarin survived several sessions without major incident, although he did confess afterwards that he found the experience ‘uncanny, unnerving’. The psychologists told him to describe his thoughts and emotions at certain regular intervals timed by a clock inside the chamber. When he talked, his listeners did not always reply. He could not be sure whether they were ignoring him deliberately, or whether they had simply gone away to find some breakfast. Or maybe supper . . . Gagarin’s clock gave no reliable clues to ‘outside’ time; nor could he count on dawn or dusk to guide his pattern of existence, because the chamber had no windows. The interior electric lighting came on when he tried to sleep or switched off