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A smiling, sure-footed Gagarin reached the flower-decked reception platform in one piece, greeted Nikita Khrushchev and other senior Party officials, then hugged his family. Valya gamely awaited her turn in the queue for a hug and a kiss. Alexei and Anna were dressed in their simple rural clothes, looking almost deliberately dowdy. They would rather have worn something smarter, but Khrushchev was most anxious to display them as humble peasant folk. Anna was in tears of pride, but Gagarin must have known how frightened she had felt over the last day or so. He hugged her, wiped away her tears with a handkerchief and said in a mock-childish voice, ‘Please don’t cry, Mamma. I won’t do it again.’

The ceremony at Vnukovo was quite brief. The more important event of the day was in central Moscow. The Gagarins and the Khrushchevs boarded a black Zil limousine and headed for Red Square. Zoya thought her famous brother looked pretty much the same as usual, if rather tired and pressured.

That day Gagarin was assigned a rare privilege, a personal driver. Fyodor Dyemchuk collected from the authorities a brand-new Volga-21 car, complete with the latest and most fashionable accessory: a third foglamp. From now on, he and the Volga would be assigned permanently to Major Gagarin.

Sergei Korolev was not so well treated. He also met Gagarin at Vnukovo, but the Chief Designer was standing slightly to one side of the main reception group, and Khrushchev made no obvious move to acknowledge the man who, more than any other, had made this triumph possible. Korolev was not granted a bright, new Volga car. He bought an older Chaika limousine from one of the foreign embassies, so that he could at least get himself to Vnukovo in reasonable style, for no one else seemed much concerned to put him on display. He was a State secret. He could not be spoken of, let alone paraded in public. They would not even let him wear his medals. To cap it all, his second-hand Chaika broke down on the way to Moscow when the fan belt snapped, and he was forced to hitch a lift to Red Square in a more modest vehicle. In the long official list of scientists, soldiers, Academicians and politicians attending the celebration to mark man’s first journey into space, Korolev’s name does not appear. His colleague Sergei Belotserkovsky says today, ‘The situation for Korolev was very unfair, and Yura was upset by that. The Nobel Prize Committee asked if they could make an award for the creator of the world’s first satellite and the man who’d sent the first human into space, but the authorities never replied to them. Even today that injustice hasn’t been remedied.’

In Red Square, Gagarin and his family stood alongside Khrushchev and the other Party leaders on the traditional perch of communist power: the reviewing stand atop Lenin’s Mausoleum. Overhead, helicopters flew over the city’s major thoroughfares dropping leaflets. The Red Army clumped and thumped across a cleared area of the square, but the greater allocation of space was given over to an immense cheering crowd. The fac^,ade of the GUM department store was obscured by a huge portrait of Lenin inscribed with the slogan, ‘Forward to the Triumph of Communism!’ Today, at least, that triumph seemed well within the bounds of possibility.

Not that much propaganda work, other than simply stating the facts, needed to be done to boost the day’s glory. The Soviet Union had put a man into space. Nikita Khrushchev’s senior aide and speechwriter Fyodor Burlatsky remembers, ‘I was in tears, and many people in the streets were crying from the shock – a shock of happiness, first of all because a man was flying in heaven, in the realm of God, and most important, because he was a Russian. The mood of celebration was almost entirely spontaneous. Usually in Russia, during Stalin’s time, and even during Khrushchev’s time, these demonstrations of popular feeling were heavily orchestrated, but this one wasn’t. It was natural, straight from the heart of maybe ninety per cent of people in the Soviet Union.