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Then, prior to coming home the next day, Belyayev saw that the ship’s attitude was incorrect for the braking burn, and he shut down the automatic guidance systems before they could make matters any worse. With help from Korolev and ground control, he and Leonov had to ignite the braking motors manually on the next orbit, displacing their eventual landing site by 2,000 kilometres. The capsule descended onto snow-covered wilderness near Perm, alongside the very northernmost reaches of the Volga. It smashed into a dense cluster of fir trees and was wedged several metres off the ground between two sturdy trunks. Meanwhile the recovery teams were 2,000 kilometres away, in the zone where they had expected the capsule to come down. The cosmonauts had to spend a restless, frozen night waiting to be picked up. They pushed open the capsule’s hatch but dared not climb down from their precarious perch, because a pack of wolves was howling somewhere very nearby in the darkness.5

These difficulties were not mentioned in the Soviet press reports, and the mission was a great propaganda triumph all around the world, particularly after Yuri Mazzhorin had responded to a stern phone call from Alexei Kosygin’s office. ‘They said that not a single word about the landing in Perm should appear in the media. I had

no idea what that region looked like, but I had to go to all the television stations and make sure you couldn’t identify Perm in any of their news footage.’ Subterfuge aside, the fact remains that Alexei Leonov walked in space well ahead of his American rivals. The London Evening Standard ran an article about the US astronauts Young and Grissom, gearing up for the first Gemini shot, with the headline ‘follow that cab!’, while The Times described Leonov’s adventure as ‘a fantastic moment in history’. Once again NASA had been trumped. Leonov’s spacewalking rival, Ed White, did not get his own chance to catch up until the second Gemini mission on June 3, nearly three months after Voskhod II’s flight.

An accomplished artist, Leonov set about designing a commemorative postage stamp showing his spacewalk, and spent hours happily chatting with Gagarin about the differences each man had observed in the curvature of the earth. ‘My view was much steeper, much rounder than Gagarin had reported, and it worried me, but then we realized that Voskhod’s maximum orbital altitude was 500 kilometres, and Vostok’s 250 kilometres, so I was much higher. You see, everything has a sensible physical explanation.’ It was the infernal rules of secrecy that made no sense. Leonov’s innocent stamp designs had to be vetted by the KGB propaganda experts. ‘Everything was so secret – they were all civil servants, you see. I drew a completely different spacecraft that wasn’t anything like [the one that had really flown] and then they were satisfied.’

In the wake of this more-or-less successful mission, Voskhod III was scheduled to coincide with the Party Congress of March 1966. Cosmonauts Georgi Shonin and Boris Volynov began training for an ambitious rendezvous with an unmanned target vehicle. Even the journalist Yaroslav Golovanov was recruited for forthcoming Voskhod missions, along with two other writers, after Korolev had expressed frustration at the cosmonauts’ rather prosaic descriptions of space flight.

On January 14, 1966 Korolev was in the Kremlin Hospital for a supposedly routine intestinal operation. Weakened by years of ill-health and overwork, and by the great damage inflicted during his imprisonment in a Siberian labour camp from 1938 to 1940, his body was far more fragile than the doctors had suspected. Internal bleeding proved difficult to control, and two huge tumours had developed in his abdomen. After a lengthy and fraught operation, Korolev’s heart gave out and he died.

Gagarin was furious that the privileged and well-rewarded doctors had not been able to save his mentor and friend. Sergei Belotserkovsky remembers him raging, ‘How can they treat someone so respected in such a mediocre and irresponsible way!’ In fact, Yuri had always