Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [57]
The official reception party arrived with terrifying speed, as if out of nowhere. General Stuchenko (his head still at risk) had been monitoring the skies all morning with close-range radar. Gagarin and his re-entry capsule were located long before they hit the ground, and Stuchenko disbursed his forces accordingly. ‘The military came by plane. Some of them were even landing by parachute,’ Lysenko recalls. ‘It was a complete invasion force. They didn’t allow us to get too close. They’re very strange people, you know.’
Lysenko may not be a sophisticated man – he’s just a simple tractor driver – but his grasp of the geopolitical significance of what he saw that day makes for a fine summary. ‘The Soviet Union announced a spaceship, the first in the world, with Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin. The whole country was rejoicing. You know, it was a shame to the foreign countries. America is a mighty country, but they didn’t quite make it to be first. As they say, “It’s important who crosses the bog first.” That’s how I understand it.’
Lysenko and his friends were not the only people to see the cosmonaut come down, as Gagarin’s sanctioned account of his landing makes clear:
Stepping onto firm ground again, I caught sight of a woman and a little girl standing near a dappled calf and looking curiously at me. I was still in my bright-orange spacesuit, and they were a bit frightened by its strangeness. ‘I’m a friend, comrades! A friend!’ I shouted, taking off my helmet and feeling a slight shiver of nervousness. ‘Can it be that you have come from outer space?’ the woman asked. ‘As a matter of fact, I have!’ I replied.1
A slight shiver of nervousness. Everyone in the Soviet Union knew about the American spy Gary Powers, who had been shot down over Russian territory the previous May. Maybe this orange-clad pilot was yet another foreign spy parachuting from his stricken aircraft? A number of Western aerospace historians believe that some of the farm workers came at Gagarin with raised pitchforks, only standing down their weapons when they caught sight of the big red letters ‘CCCP’ emblazoned on the upper front of his white space helmet. Today the Soviet space journalist Yaroslav Golovanov is prepared to admit that ‘when they saw Gagarin’s orange protective suit, the women became frightened, because there was all this business about Powers only a year before. They said, “Where are you going? Where are you off to?” They thought maybe he was a spy.’
TASS radio announcements of the flight had been broadcast well in time for Gagarin’s actual descent. In all likelihood the farm workers greeted him with nervousness at first, but not with outright hostility. It may be that some of them had left their houses early that morning to go to work in the fields and may not have heard the radio bulletins about the space flight . . .
So who exactly had the opportunity to greet the cosmonaut first? Was it Lysenko and his pals, or the woman and child whom Gagarin spoke of? ‘Oh, I forgot about that,’ says Lysenko. ‘Yes, when we went to where he landed, Takhtarova, the local forest warden’s wife, was weeding potatoes with her grand-daughter. They had a small piece of cultivated land nearby. When he landed, we were not there. She was scared, and wanted to run away. Then he saw us.’
Later that day a simple signpost was erected at this site, more or less where Gagarin’s feet had touched the ground:
DO NOT REMOVE!
12.04.1961
10.55 MOSCOW TIME
Two days later a more permanent stone