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By Root 478 0

obelisk was erected bearing a plaque: ‘Y.A. Gagarin Landed Here.’ No similar marker identified the place where his empty spaceship came down. Gagarin’s ejection at high altitude had caused him and his capsule to drift apart by more than two kilometres by the time they hit the ground. Contemporary documentation blurs the whole issue. Recording the capsule’s landing site would have meant admitting the forbidden secret of the First Cosmonaut’s separate descent under his own parachute. However, the exact site is known – unofficially at least – because a group of children playing in a meadow near the banks of a tributary of the River Volga saw the empty ball come down, alarmingly close to a ditch. It made a dent in the soft ground. Today that hollow looks like a thousand similar indentations in the gentle surrounding grasslands.

Two schoolgirls, Tamara Kuchalayeva and Tatiana Makaricheva, ran over to see this amazing object. ‘We were supposed to be in a lesson at school, but all the boys ran off. They saw a ball flying,’ says Tatiana. ‘It was huge. It fell down, then bounced and fell down again, settling on its side. There was a large hole [in the ground] where it fell for the first time. The boys ran to it and climbed inside. They picked up many small tubes of cosmonauts’ food and brought them back to school, and they told us the ball had landed.’ The two fit, handsome women are mildly surprised that their nostalgic hike across the hillocks and furrows to see the landing place now makes for quite a sturdy walk. ‘Today we come here and are already tired, but at that time you can imagine how fast we children ran!’ says Tamara. ‘We’d heard the radio announcement and we all ran with inspiration.’

Proudly the boys handed out the tubes of space food they had found. ‘Some of us were lucky and got chocolate,’ Tatiana recalls. ‘The others got mashed potatoes. I remember tasting some and spitting it out.’

Tamara says, dismissively, ‘If you offered it to us today, we wouldn’t eat it.’

By now the children (and a good many adults besides) were clambering in and around the ball looking for souvenirs. The military security squad had arrived, though not yet in sufficient numbers. According to Tamara, ‘They tried to scare us off. “Go away, go away!” they said. “It could explode!” Their threats didn’t have the slightest effect on us.’

Actually there were several opportunities for citizens of the Saratov region to collect souvenirs. Gagarin had cut loose from his parachute the moment he landed, because he was slightly worried that the wind might drag him off his feet. That parachute went missing soon afterwards, while the ball’s larger canopy was shredded by souvenir-hunters. The cabin’s heavy hatch came down somewhere, as did a detachable radio transceiver and other items of survival gear, and the second hatch covering the ball’s parachute compartment.

All these components had some interesting adventures before they were recovered. For instance, there was the matter of the raft. If the ball had come down over the sea, Gagarin might have stayed with it until splashdown, because the impact on water would have been less severe than on the ground; but the ball was not guaranteed to stay afloat for an indefinite time, so he would have clambered with all due haste into an inflatable life-raft. In the event, he came down over Russia precisely according to plan, and the raft stayed packed inside his survival pack. Apparently someone removed it without authorization, and a day or so later he took it to the nearby Volga tributary to do some fishing. A large detachment of KGB officers arrived in the district and requested that all stolen equipment from the Vostok be surrendered, including the raft. They threatened the entire population of Smelkovka with detention if the missing equipment was not returned immediately. Tractor driver Lysenko remembers a certain degree of fuss about ‘something being torn, or going missing. Perhaps it’s better not to say . . . Some of our boys, the younger ones, found a boat. The special police came and said, “It belongs