Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [41]
Titov mimed his way through the fake State Committee. There was a moment of purest idiocy, a farce within a farce: halfway through Gagarin’s carefully pre-rehearsed ‘spontaneous’ acceptance speech, Suvorov ran out of film. Korolev tapped his glass with a spoon and called the room to silence, as though he had some crucial announcement to make. ‘The cameraman needs to reload, so we’ll pause for a moment.’ Everybody laughed, then sat fidgeting while Suvurov reloaded. Then the First Cosmonaut repeated his earlier performance word-for-word. Meanwhile, Suvorov was struck by Gagarin’s youthfulness. ‘He was a small, sturdy man, but how young he looked! Like a boy, with a fascinating smile and very kind eyes.’4
Next morning there was the more relaxed celebration in the summerhouse, where Titov kept his emotions firmly under control. ‘I was upset, of course, but everything went by the script, as they say.’ Now he can only wonder if things might have gone differently that day. For he was absolutely convinced that it was going to be him.
Of course the selection of the First Cosmonaut was helped along at the highest levels. Fyodor Burlatsky, Khrushchev’s trusted advisor and speechwriter, knows exactly why Gagarin was favoured over Titov. ‘Gagarin and Khrushchev were alike in many ways. They had the same kind of Russian character. Titov was more reserved, his smile wasn’t so open, he had less charm. It wasn’t just Khrushchev who chose Gagarin. It was fate.’
Khrushchev and Gagarin were both peasant farmers’ sons, while Titov was middle-class. If Gagarin could reach the greatest heights, then Khrushchev’s rise to power from similarly humble origins was validated. Wasn’t that the truth? The real reason why they chose a simple farmboy against a properly educated and serious man? After a stiff jolt of vodka to ease the memory and blunt the sharpness of his pride, Titov can now admit, ‘I wanted to be the first one. Why not? Many years have passed, and I would like to say they made the right choice. Not because of the government, but because Yura turned out to be the man that everyone loved. Me, they couldn’t love. I’m not lovable. They loved Yura. When I visited his mum and dad in the Smolensk region after he was dead, then I realized it. I’m telling you, they were right to choose Yura.’
Gagarin’s old academic tutor Sergei Belotserkovsky suggests that another cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, came close to being assigned the first flight, ‘but a distant member of his family was subject to official repression at the time’. Belotserkovsky attributes Gagarin’s eventual selection to a lucky error. ‘I was surprised when I found out that Yura’s brother and sister had been captured by the Germans. Normally it’s a black spot in a person’s biography to have lived in occupied territories. Either the vetting authorities missed that, or they didn’t take it into consideration. If you like, it was a mistake, but a very useful one. If we could have made more mistakes like that when selecting people for important positions, our country woudn’t have had so many problems. Leaders with an informal attitude to the rules, like Korolev for instance, usually turn out to have the higher standards of morality.’
At 5.00 in the morning of April 11, the doors of the main assembly shed rolled open and the R-7, with Vostok on its nose, trundled into the pre-dawn chill, supported horizontally on a hydraulic platform mounted on a railcar. Korolev paced along the track just ahead, escorting his rocket-child like an anxious parent. The railcar moved