Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [17]
The journalist Lydia Obukhova was allowed to witness one of these tests (though she was not permitted to publish what she had seen until some months after Gagarin’s eventual flight in April 1961):
Gagarin joked with himself in the chamber, and would speak through the microphone to whoever was on duty outside, even though he couldn’t expect any answer . . . A few days went by. Outside the chamber, everyone knew that his isolation was to end that day, but Gagarin himself had no inkling of this. He started singing to himself about the few objects in the chamber with him. ‘My electrodes . . . One electrode with a yellow wire . . . Another with a red one.’ The doctor explained, ‘He has run out of stimuli in the chamber, so now he’s looking for new ones, like a nomad in the desert singing about everything he sees.’6
Regardless of the mental torture inflicted by the psychologists, Gagarin never lost sight of the main prize: getting into space. He smiled, he charmed, he played the innocent farmboy to Titov’s stern, poetry-spouting intellectual, but he tolerated all the tests with the same self-discipline and bravery.
When it came to Titov’s turn in the chamber, he was one of the few cosmonauts to think more deeply about what the ordeal was really supposed to prove. It wasn’t just a question of testing the body in various atmospheric pressures, or merely surviving the boredom. There were more subtle tests to pass, he was sure. ‘They tell you there’s no noise in the chamber, but that’s rubbish. The air-conditioning system is working, the ventilator is on. They’re all making noise, and you quickly get used to it. The most important thing is the isolation. Can you spend ten days on your own? . . . There’s nobody looking through the keyhole, but you know you’re being watched.’
The tins of food and the little cooking stove seemed to represent some sort of test. There was water in the chamber for drinking and for personal hygiene, but very little to spare. On the very first day of their sessions, some of the more impetuous cosmonauts had ripped open their food tins with great enthusiasm, eager to relieve the tedium with a snack. They had emptied the tins into the single saucepan provided, warmed the pan on the stove and eaten the food, only to find that there was no obvious means of cleaning the pan afterwards, and they still had many more mealtimes ahead of them. Titov says, ‘I thought I’d be clever about it. I put my tins into a saucepan of water and heated them that way. Then you open the tins, eat the meals and throw the tins away. You don’t have to wash anything afterwards.’ Repeatedly boiled, the few cupfuls of water in Titov’s pan were safe to reheat later. His water lasted, his pan stayed clean and his psychologists were happy. Or at least they were not unhappy, which was the most a cosmonaut could hope for at the end of his time in the chamber.
The doctors disapproved when Titov wanted to read in the chamber, but he got the better of them. He asked whether they could find a copy of Yevgeny Onegin for him to take inside with him. The answer was no, absolutely not. Such a form of entertainment was not allowed. Titov assured them he only wanted the book as a physical talisman, a foolish good-luck charm. ‘I said I already knew it by heart. I wooed them. I persuaded them, and eventually they gave it to me. Of course I didn’t know it!’ So Titov contentedly frittered away his time in the chamber reading his book.
Film footage still survives of other sessions in the chamber, with Titov happily quoting Pushkin poems straight from memory, while the doctors observe him through a thick plate-glass window. He appears supremely confident, beaming with pride at his clever memory, his wide knowledge of literature. Unfortunately