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In recent times, a sort of Russian ‘Roswell’ legend has attached itself to this incident. An unacknowledged cosmonaut went up before Yuri Gagarin and was killed during the return phase . . . History was not best served when a pro-communist British newspaper, the Daily Worker, published a story just two days before Gagarin’s flight, written (or, rather, concocted) by its Moscow correspondent Dennis Ogden. A renowned test pilot had been injured in a car crash, but Ogden decided that the man was a cosmonaut who had come down to earth badly in a spaceship called ‘Rossiya’. As recently as 1979, experts at the British Interplanetary Society took some of these rumours seriously:

Some controversy surrounds the name of the first man in space. Edouard Bobrovsky, a French broadcaster who visited Moscow in April 1961, revealed that according to reliable sources, Sergei Ilyushin, son of the famous Russian plane designer and a dare-devil pilot, used his influence to go into space himself, three or four weeks before Gagarin. After his return to earth the recovery team found him badly shaken. Sergei Ilyushin has been in a coma ever since.10

Actually Sergei was the famous aircraft designer, and his son’s name was Vladimir; nor does Bobrovsky sound entirely like a citizen of France. It made no difference to all these rumours that Korolev’s launch technicians had daubed maket (meaning ‘dummy’) in thick black paint all over Ivan’s face and across the back of his suit, before strapping him into Vostok’s ball and sending him off; nor that his soup recipes, beamed back from space, were so obviously the product of a tape-recorder, rather than a live human being. Ivan’s choice of subject matter was the cause of heated debate before his flight, as Oleg Ivanovsky recalls. ‘We needed to check the radio’s ability to convey human speech from space, so we decided to put a tape together. Then the security officials said, “No, because if the Western listeners hear a human voice, they’ll think we are secretly flying a real cosmonaut on a spying mission.” Remember, this was only a few months [eleven months] after the Gary Powers business. So we thought we’d record a song instead, but the security people said, “What, have you gone mad? The West will think the cosmonaut has lost his mind, and instead of carrying out his mission he’s singing songs!” Then it was decided to record a choir, because nobody would ever think we’d launched an entire choir into space, and in the end that’s what we did, along with the recipes.’

A less realistic dummy had preceded Ivan on March 9. With these two tests successfully completed, Korolev decided that Vostok was finally ready for a real pilot. He had no choice but to take some risks. NASA’s Mercury programme was about to send an American into space. They, too, were prepared to fly brave military volunteers atop missiles with a less-than-perfect launch history, just so long as they could beat the Soviets.

Incidentally, Mazzhorin and his guidance experts had access to many of the documents openly published by NASA, but they also received secret Intelligence reports about forthcoming launch preparations at Cape Canaveral, including the engineering delays and unmanned test failures that dogged the early phases of the Mercury project. This helps to explain why so many Soviet space successes pipped their US equivalents to the post by just weeks, or even days on some occasions. ‘I remember once I got this three-page document, data about various secret orbits that the American satellites were following, and I said, “What do I need this for? This is just Newton’s Laws of Gravitation.” But I reckon our spies had to get those numbers from somewhere. Of course the Americans knew what we were doing, but they stayed silent because we stayed silent. Each side was pretending not to know the other’s business. It wasn’t a very adult game to play, but it led to great technical progress on both sides and a global space industry with benefits for everybody.’

Quite apart from these complex games of international strategy, the